At the farm, Ethan resumed his usual days with one additional complication. Lily wanted to know whether Ms. Hayes would come back. She asked at breakfast, while feeding Biscuit, and halfway through a spelling assignment. Ethan said he doubted it. Lily looked disappointed and announced that Victoria had smiled more when the goat ate her jacket than she had in the magazine photograph.
"Some people have serious jobs," Ethan explained.
"Does that mean they aren't allowed to smile?"
"No, sweetheart. It means sometimes they forget."
Lily considered this and returned to her spelling words. Ethan tried to do the same with his hay invoices. But whenever he walked past the repaired gate, he remembered Victoria holding up the heavy rail in shoes that had no business near mud, and he found himself wondering whether she had ruined them. It irritated him that the question mattered at all.
On Friday, an envelope arrived at the farm. He opened it at the kitchen table after Lily went upstairs to wash her hands. Inside was a brief note, written in neat handwriting on plain white stationery, and a receipt from a local hardware store. Victoria apologized for the awkward circumstances of their meeting, said she hoped the gate had survived the week, and explained that she had paid for nothing on his property. The receipt showed a personal purchase: one replacement hinge, left at the store under his name, because she had seen that the original was beyond saving.
At the bottom she had written, "There are no conditions attached, and you are entirely free to tell me this is none of my business. It probably isn't. — Victoria"
Ethan read it twice. Then, against his better judgment, he smiled. He put the note beside the bills instead of throwing it away. That evening, he found himself making a second cup of coffee after Lily fell asleep, sitting at the kitchen table, and thinking for the first time in months about something that wasn't a payment he owed or a task he had failed to finish.
The following Monday, Ethan drove into Cedar Ridge for a new hinge and a bag of feed. He found the replacement waiting behind the counter exactly as Victoria had promised. June Ellis, who had run Ellis Farm Supply since the days when most people still paid for goods with handwritten checks, studied him over her reading glasses while he signed the receipt.
"Fancy friend you've made," she said.
"She's not a friend."
"Interesting. Most strangers don't buy somebody else's hinges."
"It was twelve dollars, June."
"And yet you're blushing over twelve dollars. Must be a record." She turned away before he could reply, pretending to search for a box of fencing staples. June was sixty-three, wiry, and in possession of more information about Cedar Ridge than the town website, county archive, and local paper combined. Ethan had known her too long to believe there was any point arguing.
He paid for the feed on his account, though it added another line to a balance he disliked seeing. June caught his expression and lowered her voice. "A supplier's supposed to help people get to harvest. I know you pay me when you can. I'm not worried about you skipping town."