Page 29 of Mud & Moxie
***
Later that afternoon, Matthew corners me outside the barn. His arms are crossed, face thunderous. “You’ve got to fix this.”
I rub the back of my neck. “She won’t listen to me now.”
“Then make her. Find the words you should’ve said last night. Because if you let her walk away for good, you’re not just losing her—you’re losing this farm. And maybe me too.”
His voice breaks on the last part, and I see it then—the fear beneath the fury. He’s not just protecting his sister. He’s protecting what’s left of us, of the family Ray tried to stitch together.
I swallow hard, resolve forming like steel in my chest. If silence was my prison, then words will have to be my way out.
***
13
Late Night Letters
MADISON
Matthew’s spare room is the kind of quiet you can hear. Rain needles the roof; the old fridge downstairs hums like it has opinions. Every time I close my eyes, the night at the farmhouse replays in jump cuts: my voice going sharp, Dylan going still, that horrible moment where I chose distance because staying felt like drowning.
Matthew knocked once after I shut the door. He didn’t come in. He just set a mug on the floorboards and went away, a big man trying to make himself smaller. The mug is chamomile tea with too much honey and it tastes like being forgiven in advance.
I sip it and look at the things he left on the dresser without making a production out of it: a stack of blank stationery, a heavy black pen with a nick in the cap, and a small metal toolbox that used to live under Ray’s workbench. The toolbox lid is dented from a lifetime of catching the wrong end of a wrench. Someone’s taped an old label on it in jagged block letters: RAY—SAVE.
I flip the latch. Inside is the neat chaos of a man who never wanted to waste anything—pencils sharpened down to stubborn nubs, a coil of twine, a baggie of mismatched screws, and a folded photo of the farmhouse taken on a winter afternoon when the sky was the exact color of a promise you haven’t made yet.
The pen is heavy in my hand. I sit at the little desk by the window and write like it’s a necessary chore, like feeding the sourdough starter or turning the compost—the kind of tending that looks like nothing until it’s everything.
To Future Us (and Ray, if you’re eavesdropping),
Tonight I left when I wanted to stay. It felt like a betrayal of everything I’ve been saying I’m brave enough to want, which is the worst kind of betrayal—self-canceling. I’m sorry. I am trying to make good choices without making them out of fear.
This is what I want if we’re lucky enough to build it: a farmhouse with the porch light always on and a table that warms from the inside out. I want seasonal suppers where the menu is whatever the land says yes to that week. I want one scholarship a year for a local kid who thinks agriculture is a calling and not a box to check. I want to make a sanctuary for small lives with soft noses and louder needs—goats with escape plans, hens with opinions, calves who get more than a number.
I want us to tell the truth about money and feelings. If a sponsor wants our story, they get our terms. If a post needs to be written, it gets written with dignity or it doesn’t go up. No more mortgaging private grief to pay public bills. This place will not be a content farm. It’s a farm.
I want to keep the parts of me I brought here—the girl who can spin a brand from dust and hustle a spreadsheet until it changes its mind—but I want to be the woman who knows when to close the app and pick up a shovel. I want to be brave enough to be ordinary when ordinary is what a life needs.
If there is an “us” inside this, I want an “us” that argues hard and chooses together. An “us” that doesn’t win at the other person’s expense. An “us” that remembers to laugh when the goats jailbreak, and to stand hand-in-hand when the cottonwoods are the only witnesses.
Legacy is not a plaque; it’s the way a place breathes because you were gentle with it. Let ours be something the soil recognizes.
—M
The letters look too neat. I smudge one on purpose with the side of my hand, then breathe easier at the imperfection. I fold the paper three times, small enough to tuck where I won’t accidentally see it and decide to be brave at the wrong moment.
I put the letter into the toolbox under the coil of twine, then close the lid and slide it back on the dresser. The pen goes on top—Ray’s pen, Matthew said once. “He liked the weight,” Matthew told me. “Said it made his words count.”
My phone face-down on the quilt buzzes with other people’s lives. I don’t pick it up. Instead I crawl under the blanket that smells faintly of sawdust and soap and the cologne all the men in this town seem to agree upon by secret vote, and I let myself cry very quietly into the edge of the pillow case until my breath slows down enough to sleep.
***
I don’t dream. Or I do and it’s all weather—wind that knocks and asks to be let in. The gray of morning comes as a relief. It’s the kind of dawn that can’t decide if it’s going to rain again, everything bleached and clean and undecided.
Matthew is at the kitchen counter nursing coffee when I pad downstairs, hair in a knot, face swollen. He doesn’t do the kindof looking that makes you feel observed. He slides a mug across the counter instead. “There’s toast if you want toast.”
“Toast is a safe decision,” I say.
