Maggie
She had told herself she wasn't going to go over there.
The upper pasture gate had been sticking for two weeks. Maggie had meant to fix it herself — had the tools for it, knew what the problem was — but between the vet appointment for Daisy and the hay delivery and the three fence sections that needed checking before the rain came in, it had stayed on the list.
She'd spotted Marcus that morning from across the creek, already working on his fence line before eight. He moved like someone who'd been doing manual labor his whole life — not rushed, not performing effort, just steady. Efficient. The kind of pace that covered a lot of ground by the end of the day.
She'd gone over anyway. Told herself it was just practical.
He agreed to look at the gate without making anything of it. Followed her across the shallow ford, tools already on his belt, and walked the fence line with her in the easy silence of someone comfortable with not filling space.
"You rotate the pastures well," he said at one point, nodding toward a lush section the cattle hadn't touched in a few weeks.
She glanced at him. "Most new people don't notice that." He shrugged. "It shows in the grass."
At the gate he crouched, examined the hinge and latch with a practical eye, and got to work without asking for instruction. Strong hands, quick and precise. He lifted the gate slightly to test the alignment, adjusted it, filed the latch smooth. It took him maybe twelve minutes. When he stood and swung the gate open and closed, it moved like it was new.
"Should hold a while," he said. "If it gives you trouble again, I've got spare hardware." Maggie tested it herself. "Thank you. Seriously — you didn't have to."
"Neighbors," he said simply. Like it wasn't complicated.
She found herself wanting to keep him there a while longer, which was not something she'd expected. She talked, and he listened — really listened, in the way some people didn't. She told him about the tractor incident in high school that her father still brought up at Thanksgiving. About the year after her mother's death when she'd been angry at everything and taken it out in spectacularly unhelpful ways. About how the farm had eventually pulled her back around.
He offered his own pieces in return, plain and unembellished. He and Sam had grown up spending time outdoors — camping, fixing things, learning to move through the world with their hands. Simple living suited them both, he said, though in different ways.
When he finally headed back across the creek, Maggie stood by the gate for a moment watching him go. She caught herself doing it and went to find something useful to occupy herself with.
She didn't think much of it. Not yet.
* * *
Davina
Sam was already there when she came out of the diner at three, leaning against the passenger door of his truck with his arms crossed and that easy half-smile she'd thought about more than she intended to.
Her first thought was that he'd come because he'd said he would.
Her second thought, stepping into the truck, was that Beth would have made that seem natural without even trying. Beth was good at that — at moving through the world like it was friendly territory. People just responded to her. Boys especially.
Davina pushed the thought down and buckled her seatbelt. "Feed store first?" Sam asked.
"If that's okay."
"That's why I'm here."
He drove easy, one hand on the wheel, and asked her questions that weren't the ones she was used to. Not about school or the diner. About the horses she helped care for at the Hendersons' place on weekends — which ones she liked best and why, what she was learning from it, whether vet school was something she was serious about or just something she said.
She told him she was serious. Had been since she was nine and she and Beth had found a stray cat with an injured leg in the back field and she'd been the one who'd figured out how to splint it with a popsicle stick and medical tape from the kitchen drawer.
"Beth helped," she said. "She held it so it wouldn't panic." "But you knew what to do," Sam said.
"I'd read about it."
"Same thing." He glanced over. "Reading about things before you need them is a skill. Most people don't bother."
She didn't have anything to say to that immediately, which was unusual. She was used to her own compliments feeling conditional somehow, like they came with a footnote. His didn't.
At the feed store, she handled her paperwork while Sam loaded the bags she'd ordered into the truck bed without being asked. On the way back they stopped at a small ice cream stand she'd been going to since she was small, and he ordered chocolate while she got strawberry because that was what she always got and she wasn't going to change it on account of someone watching.
They sat on the tailgate in the shade. She told him more about school, about her mother's allergies making a dog impossible, about how horses had filled that space instead. He told her a little about what it was like to grow up with Marcus — the camping trips, the way his brother communicated more through what he did than what he said.
"He seems like that," Davina said.
"He is." Something warm and uncomplicated in his voice when he talked about his brother. "Best person I know."
When he dropped her at home, the sun was low. She stood at the end of the driveway for a moment after his truck had turned the corner, not ready to go inside yet. She felt something she hadn't quite named, lighter than she'd expected to feel.
She would tell Beth about it. Maybe. Parts of it. She didn't want Beth to meet him yet.
That thought arrived clearly enough that she had to sit with it a moment, uncomfortable with how true it felt. It wasn't like her. Beth was her best friend. She didn't keep things from Beth.
She went inside and didn't say anything about the afternoon.
* * *
Marcus
He and Sam sat on the porch of the main house that evening while the fireflies came out over the fields. Marcus had his rifle apart on the side table, cleaning it in the easy familiar way that let the rest of his mind wander.
"Davina's good," Sam said, from the other chair. He had coffee though it was nearly nine. He always had coffee.
"Be patient with her," Marcus said. "I am."
"She's sixteen, Sam."
"I know what she is." A pause. "I'm not in a hurry for anything."
Marcus didn't push further. He trusted Sam's judgment — not blindly, but because he'd never seen Sam be careless with people he actually cared about. And Marcus had already sensed that Sam actually cared about Davina, which was different from just finding her interesting. Sam didn't get many people in that category.
"Greenes are solid," Marcus said after a while.
"Very," Sam agreed. He turned his coffee mug in his hands. "Hershel's the real thing. Faith and land and family — he means all of it. Maggie's more complicated."
"She's not complicated," Marcus said. Sam looked over.
"She's direct," Marcus said. "That's not the same thing."
Sam's expression was unreadable for a moment, and then he smiled — not the easy public smile, but the smaller, more private one that meant he thought something was funny and wasn't going to explain why.
Marcus went back to cleaning his rifle. The fields were dark and the creek made its quiet sound and the circle was small but it was starting to feel real.