“I’ll marry you.”
I barked out a stunned laugh. “You’llwhat?”
He looked away, muttering something under his breath that I didn’t understand. Then, “This will, the completely unenforceable one with the ridiculous clauses—it grants a one-year intermediary period?”
“Yes. In order to fully inherit the land, I have to live here and be married by next July.”
“I’ll marry you,” he repeated. “You don’t want to fight a frivolous will? Fine. Then meet the terms of the will, build the venue, close the estate next July, dissolve the marriage next August.”
“You’re joking,” I said. When he didn’t respond, I continued. “It’s not that simple.”
“It can be,” he replied. “Just choose to be unemotional about it.”
I gazed at him, this fully grown man who barely resembled my old friend. He was different now. Hard and calculating in a way I didn’t understand. He was indifferent and that was the last thing I’d ever imagined he’d be.
“What’s in it for you?” I asked, throwing his words from the other day back at him.
He met my eyes and I recognized him for a split second before he stared out at the shimmering blue of the cove. “The land, obviously. If you go through with this wedding business, you still have a surplus of acreage. Everything from here”—he pointed to the far side of the property, beyond the barn—“up to the top of the hill. If you’re not cultivating it, I can put it to work. There’s a good spot for a pollinator garden. Or a summertime cutting garden, pick-your-own style, that’s close enough to the farm stand for us to carve out a path through the orchard. That’s a light lift for a big impact.”
“You want…the land.”
Still staring at the cove, he asked, “Why else would I offer? It’s a business deal, Shay. I’ll take a stake in your venue and help get it off the ground, and put some of your land to work in the process. You’ll inherit the farm. What else is there?”
The acid in my throat tasted like chocolate pudding. The water wasn’t helping. Too much talk of weddings today. One hundred percent more marriage proposals than I could stomach.
“That’s—wow. That’s a lot of things packed into a few sentences, Noah. Okay. You should know I just got out of a—um, well, a situationship. So, I can’t really talk about the future or marriage without wanting to barricade myself under a blanket. Not even a fake marriage.”
He folded his arms over his chest again and I noticed his thick, corded forearms. This was an objective observation. Scientific, really. Not at all based on attraction or interest. It was more a study in contrasts: this strong, sun-kissed man versus the boy I’d known all those years ago. More and more, it seemed the Venn diagram comparing the two was a pair of circles overlapping only in name and origin. The past fourteen years had pushed the rest apart until the edges only kissed each other.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Not something I feel like discussing,” I said.
We stared at each other for a heavy minute. Then, “I can secure financing for this kind of project. You might run into issues with the title being tied up but I can work around that.”
“Because you want a summertime cutting garden.”
He shifted, taking in the land, mostly flat with slight hills, and all the whimsical weirdness contained in its borders. “The only square of earth I don’t own on the hill is this one. There’s an opportunity to increase my holdings and give me access to the one thing I don’t have the right space for, which is an event center I can rent out year-round. A summertime cutting garden is a simple revenue generator. The costs would be next to nothing and it would fill the pick-your-own gap between blueberry and apple seasons. Would you like me to continue? Should I explain the rest of the ways your land can be better utilized?”
No, this new, grumpy vibe had nothing to do with me. This was Noah, all grown-up and freed of his teenage ideals. He cared about revenue generators and land holdings now. I didn’t know whether it was college or Wall Street or coming home to Friendship that had changed him but I didn’t like it.
“It’s just about the land,” I said.
He watched me for a moment. “It doesn’t have to be emotional, Shay. Things get a lot easier when you stop making everything about your feelings.”
“How can you say that?” I asked. “You used to—”
“Noah!” Gennie hollered. “I caught a grasshopper and it’s brown.”
“We can both get what we want. It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said to me before turning his attention to Gennie. “That’s probably a cricket. Don’t crush it, okay?”
“I won’t,” she said, jogging closer. “I’m not going to bring it home. It lives here with the Twin Tulip grasshoppers.”
“Yeah,” Noah agreed. “Little Star would be like a foreign country.”
“Like Connecticut,” she said.
Noah gave a quick shake of his head that said he wasn’t getting into geography with Gennie right now. “Let me see,” he said to her, bending low to look into her cupped hands. “You must’ve been wicked fast to catch him.”
