3. Tara

“Okay, are you ready?” Tara opened the passenger-side door for Paige.

“Ready!” Her hair was in two long braids today; they shone like burnished copper against her blue shirt. She was nearly vibrating with excitement, eager to start her twice-weekly lessons.

Piper, who enjoyed riding but didn’t love horses with quite the same single-minded passion as her twin, would be hanging home with Cody.

The sixteen year old walked past them now. As Tara started the car, he opened the long front gate that stretched across the end of their driveway.

“Good luck today,” she said as she drove through. He was due to give a powerpoint presentation today in his online biology class.

Well, he certainly had plenty of real life experience to draw on. At a signal from Cody, their farm dogs herded a flock of chickens up the driveway so that he could close the gate. A curious goat tried to nose her way out at the last minute, but he pulled her back by one horn.

Paige found the next CD of an audiobook that she had checked out at the library and popped it into the car stereo, leaving Tara’s thoughts free to wander as the narrative of a girl and her horse faded to background noise.

Her thoughts were fully focused on their destination – or rather, on the man who was there waiting for her.

Tara, I’ve loved you for years.

She hadn’t seen him since the day that he had shown up at her front gate and confessed his feelings.

It had been the same day that she and Mitch signed their divorce papers. Dating again had been the last thing on her mind. She had been completely taken up with the new business that she had started to make ends meet, not to mention helping her children through this transition and wading through the mind-numbing legal hurdles required for even a no-contest divorce.

She had zero interest in making time in her busy life for dating or meeting anyone new.

But Liam… he had been a dear friend for years. She had been friends with his wife first, but after Laura had passed away and left Liam with a little girl to raise on his own, a true friendship had formed between him and Tara.

For years, she had looped his daughter Maddie in the homeschool activities she had carted Cody to. These days, Maddie was nearly grown and teaching lessons at the family ranch.

And Liam wanted more than friendship from Tara.

Her predominant reaction to his confession had been a blank sort of shock. For the past couple of weeks, she’d had Cody drive his sisters to their riding lessons.

It was partially avoidance, maybe, but she was also impossibly busy. More and more people were buying into her weekly meal deliveries, and most days she sank a solid fourteen hours into caring for her animals and preparing food for sale.

Of course, those long hours spent in the kitchen left her with plenty of time to think. And more and more, she had been thinking of Liam.

Now, following the road up the mountain that she had driven a thousand times before, she could hardly believe the fluttery feeling that had overtaken her limbs.

His words had awoken a part of her that she had believed to be long dead, a sort of adolescent excitement that she had never expected to feel again.

All the pressure that she was under, all the responsibility of homeschooling her children while running a business, and a few words from him had still managed to turn her world upside down and steal her attention.

Her nerves seemed to vibrate as she drove up the long tree-lined drive to Liam’s place. Paige, happily oblivious to her mother’s nerves, laughed at her audiobook. When Tara parked near the stables, Paige was out of the car before the engine was even off.

“Got your helmet?” Tara called after her.

“Right!” She dove back in through the window and grabbed her purple riding helmet, the one with fat ponies dancing around the brim. She had added those herself with silver sharpie.

“God give us all the energy and confidence of an eight year old girl,” Tara murmured as she watched Paige sprint towards the stables.

Then again, she couldn’t remember having even a fraction of her girls’ confidence at their age. School had whittled her spirit away already, and had continued to do so for years. The bare hallways, monotonous classes, and mean-spirited teasing that she had endured in her school days had taken their toll.

Then her mom had moved her to Hawai’i as a teenager, and she had opted for a GED instead of finishing up in school. She had found jobs working on local farms and discovered her calling, caring for plants and animals in the Hawaiian sunshine.

Or, as today would have it, a heavy Hawaiian mist. It beaded on the car windows and clung to her face when she stepped out into the open.

Liam stood on his front porch, hands in the pockets of his jeans. As soon as she climbed out of her minivan, he freed them and jogged down the steps.

“I have your meals for the week,” she said by way of greeting.

He had been one of the first to sign up for her meal delivery service. Most weeks he gave her frozen beef in lieu of payment. Always such monstrous portions that they far outstripped the value of the meals, though he stubbornly claimed otherwise.

Liam was quiet, his blue-gray eyes intent on her face, and she could feel her cheeks color. She opened up the back of the van and stood beneath the hatchback door, sheltered from the drizzle.

“I made coconut soup this week,” she said. “Tom Kha Gai with lemongrass and Thai lime leaves from my garden. I found some galangal at the market, too. I should really start growing that myself. It’s island grown, right down to the fish sauce. There’s a lady at the market who makes her own.”

“Tara,” he started, but she kept talking.

“I made laulau too,” she went on, nerves getting the better of her. “For dessert I made purple sweet potato pie bars. My girls are crazy about them, though I’m not sure how they’ll go over with my customers. I guess we’ll see. Cody added a feedback page to the website, where people can tell me what they thought of the food and make requests.”

“Do you want to help me carry these inside?” he asked.

She nodded. He could have easily carried the food inside himself, like he did every week. But he was inviting her in out of the rain, and she wasn’t going to say no.

They walked through the gentle drizzle and into the house, where Tara set the two half-gallon jars of Tom Kha Gai on the kitchen counter. The ranch house was beautiful, with bare wooden walls on one side and wide mountain-view windows on the other.

“I wanted to apologize,” Liam said.

Tara startled and turned to look at him. “Apologize for what?”

He ran a hand through his silver hair and looked out the window, searching for the right words.

“For coming on too strong, I guess.” He looked at her with a slight smile. “The ink wasn’t even dry on your divorce papers, and I went and loosed ten years of pent-up feelings on you in one big word.”

Her jaw dropped at ‘ten years’ and Liam looked down, laughing at himself.

“See? I’m doing it again. I’ve forgotten how to do this, Tara. If I ever knew to begin with.”

“You haven’t loved me for ten years,” she protested. His wife had been gone that long, and Liam had worshiped the ground that she walked on.

“I loved you even before that, for your kindness to Laura and Maddie. But you’re right. I haven’t been head over heels in love with you quite that long, not like I am now.

“After I lost my wife, I never thought I would feel that way about anyone again. And while my feelings grew for you over the years, I knew that I wouldn’t act on them. Not while you were married.

“So, I don’t know… I didn’t really look them in the eye. I focused on raising my daughter and running this place.

“But then last month, when Maddie told me that you and Mitch had split up… it was like something was let loose in my chest, something that I had tamped down for years without ever fully realizing it.”

She stared at him, speechless. He had drifted closer to her as he spoke, but now he shook his head and moved away.

“I started with an apology and just dug myself a deeper hole.” He offered her another bashful smile, so out of step with his usual calm and quiet steadiness that she felt her heart lean further towards him.

“I’m sorry, Tara. It isn’t like me for my words to run away on me like that. I just don’t know how to say what I feel for you, so I end up spilling out this jumble of words hoping some of them will be the right ones. You make me feel like a teenager again, and I don’t entirely like it.”

“Same,” she said. And she smiled.

With that one syllable, that bare acknowledgment of reciprocity, most of the awkwardness between them seemed to drain away. They were two old friends standing in a kitchen – standing at the cusp of something.

Liam opened his arms, and Tara walked into them. She wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned into him, breathing him in.

His arms settled around her, a warm comfort against the cold of the day.

A sense of calm settled over her, a stillness that she had entirely forgotten the feel of in the midst of her harried life as a mother, farmer, and now entrepreneur. There were always a million things to keep track of, and her brain never fully settled.

In that moment, though, it did.

They stood there for a long while, just holding each other. Breathing together. Long enough for the rightness of it to sink into her bones. She began to remember what contentment felt like.

Eventually, he leaned back just enough to look her in the eye. One hand rested lightly on her hip. The other came up to push a strand of hair behind her ear.

“When’s the last time you got away from the farm and did something fun? Just for you?”

She blinked up at him, thinking. Just for her? No kids?

“Never?”

A laugh rumbled through his chest.

“What if you took an afternoon off and we went on a date?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Well, there’s not a restaurant in town that can hold a candle to what you make every day, but you deserve a night off from cooking all the same. What if we went for a hike up north someplace, just you and me? Then we could grab some dinner in Hilo on the way back.”

“That sounds good.”

He put a hand under her chin and bent down to kiss her, slow and sweet.

A beginning.