Free The Final Tap by Amanda Flower

fine , I texted back. I wasn’t the kind of girl who needed a guy to run to her rescue. I’d been rescuing myself for a long time and was pretty good at it. A memory nagged at the back of my head … maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Chase had rescued me from the Barton House cellar last summer when someone had trapped me in there. I frowned. But that was just one time, and I would have made it out on my own eventually. I’d had a plan. He just beat me to it.
    The phone chirped again with a new incoming message: See you at 5:45.
    I frowned. How typical of Chase not to listen, but this could work to my advantage. Maybe Chase could stay with Hayden while I went to the meeting. That might require a bribe. Food would work. If he was coming straight from the station, I bet he’d be starving. I started gathering ingredients to make a vegetable stew. It sounded good to me on such a cold night, and after spending so much time in the frozen woods.
    The stew was made from root vegetables and dried herbs, all from the Farm. Despite his less-than -charming personality, Shepley knew how to care for plants, and the Farm had enjoyed one of its best harvests ever that fall. I was already plotting events we could host around the vegetable harvest next year. We could have gardening and harvesting classes and cooking classes too. Maybe something with “organic” in the title? That would catch people’s attention. I wasn’t above succumbing to trends to raise the number of visitors to the Farm each year.
    The trick would be getting Shepley on board. I frowned. That was no easy feat. Shepley would be much happier if no one came to the Farm and he was left alone with his plants. But if that happened, there would be no Farm at all and Shepley would be out of a job. We’d received a nice endowment and trust from the Cherry Foundation last November, upon the death of Cynthia Cherry, the Farm’s original benefactress, but that alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain the Farm. We had to be self-sufficient to keep our doors open. It was something I was determined to do, especially since I had committed the next fifteen years of my life to Barton Farm. One of the stipulations of the trust was that I had to agree to stay on as the Farm’s director and live in the cottage for the next fifteen years. It’s one thing to have job security, but it’s quite another to be tied to your job with iron chains.
    Yet I knew Cynthia had set it up this way not only to protect the Farm, but to protect me. She’d cared about Hayden and me and had spent thousands to renovate the old caretaker’s cottage into a home for us. The cottage was small, and the kitchen, living room, and dining room spaces were all one room. Behind the kitchen, there was a large pantry that we’d converted into a spare room for my father during the summer. There was one full bathroom on the lower level, and a half bath and Hayden and my bedrooms upstairs. That was it.
    I hadn’t asked for much, but everything I requested, Cynthia made sure happened. By tying me to the trust, she’d ensured my job until Hayden was well into his college years. I blinked away tears. Cynthia had been like a much-beloved aunt to me. I teared up every time I thought of her, even this many months later.
    I wiped a tear from my eye and set Hayden’s snack on the coffee table, along with a cup of apple juice. He sat on his knees in front of the couch, zooming his favorite Matchbox cars back and forth over the cushions. Seeing him there, so happy in our home, made me all the more grateful to Cynthia for what she’d done—and even more determined not to let her down. She’d believed in the Farm and in me. Barton Farm had to thrive.
    I told Hayden about his snack and went back to the kitchen to work on the stew.
    My son jumped to his feet, grabbing two ants-on - a-log with the motion, and walked into the kitchen. He watched me chop