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T iffany opened up the rear loading dock to her clinic, as the delivery truck backed up.

She’d already told her staff that some supplies would be coming in and would be stored in her walk-in cooler.

She had the cooler cleaned out just recently, so that was a good thing.

What she couldn’t have was the bodies of animals they had put down stored in there with fresh or frozen food.

At the moment she was lucky in that area.

Absolutely nothing in here could be crossed over in terms of products, and so it went for the rest of the week.

Every day, she spoke to Timber or Dwight, getting a list of what they needed and then loading it up, sometimes needing the assistance of her own staff, as some of the boxes were fairly hefty, and then she drove it out every night.

When she arrived the next day, she pulled up to the house, and this time Timber came out to help her.

He smiled at her. “You have no idea how huge of a help this has been.”

She laughed. “Not exactly what I expected to do with my week, but I’m happy to help. I’ll be looking forward to my weekend though.” When he looked at her in concern, she waved it off and added, “I’m fine, honest.”

“I know you’re fine,” he said, shaking his head. “Of course you’ll say you’re fine.”

She laughed. “And I am. It’s just that coming out here every night wasn’t among my plans. I will say I’m grateful you don’t live farther away.”

“Right,” he muttered, with a sigh. “Sometimes I think I’m too far out, and then, other times, it seems as if I’m way too close.”

She laughed. “It’s all good. We just need to get through some of this right now.” When she looked around, she gasped. “What the heck?”

He nodded and smiled. “Right, when you think about what’s been done in just a matter a days, it’s pretty amazing.”

She whistled. “Holy cow, this is massive.” She was absolutely stunned at the amount of work that had been accomplished.

He nodded. “And remember that a lot of the work you can’t even see from here.” When she frowned at him, he added, “We’ve got the entire sixty acres fenced.”

“What? How in the hell—”

“Two teams have been working on just that all week, and that’s been a job I can’t even contemplate what my man-hours working alone would have been.

Come look at this,” he suggested, as he brought her inside and showed her the drawing, revealing everything they’d managed to get done. She just stared in shock.

He added, “Now these men are not just any men but men quite capable and quite comfortable seeing what needs to be done, forming teams, and getting at it. I think that’s been one of the biggest parts I wasn’t really expecting.

“They also,” he began, as he nudged her out the front door again and pointed off in one direction, “have this going. It’s not finished,… but we have a second big barn going up over there for more animals,” he shared, with a sense of joy and contentment in his tone.

“The old barn has had all its timber reframed, a new roof, the water system repaired and hooked up,” he shared, “which is huge. There’s always been water, but the pipes had rusted out, and now they have all been replaced.

The plumbers have been in the main house as well, since they were here,” he noted, with a laugh, “so the plumbing has been updated.”

“Already?”

“In the process of being updated,” he clarified. “I’m not sure that it will all get completed right now, but it’s definitely way better than it was.”

She just stared at him. “This is like…”

“I know. Believe me that I know. Which is also why any foodstuffs, anything that could be brought in to make these guys happier and their jobs easier, I’m more than happy to provide.

I know I have a huge bill with Badger to take care of, but I’m more than happy to pay that because they’re the ones who have been organizing all this food. They also organized all the people.”

“All this in just one week?” she asked.

“Absolutely, and for just one week,” he confirmed. “We will reassess on Sunday. It’s shocking how much these guys have done.”

She stared at the new barn and shook her head, speechless. “This is one of the most incredible gifts anybody could have ever given you.”

He looked at her, and she saw the almost helpless awareness, when realizing that somebody had done something so incredibly good for him that he just didn’t even know what to say.

She smiled. “And you deserve every bit of it.” Startled he looked at her in shock, and she nodded. “I can see it. You’re still thinking that you need to do something to pay all these people back or to somehow come up with wages for them or something.”

“They’re doing it for nothing,” he stated. “They all took time out of their lives to come and help.”

“And they did that because they wanted to,” she pointed out.

“I know that, and I hear you. I hear Badger’s and Kat’s comments on that as well, but it’s such an incredible thing for people to do, and for so many to do.”

“And yet what did you do when you worked with Badger?”

He frowned. “That’s different.” Her lips twitched as he glared at her, and then his shoulders sagged, and he nodded. “Yeah, we did something like this, but I’ve never been on the receiving end of it.”

“And now you are, and I think it’s unbelievably awesome. Can we go see the barns?”

“Sure.”

They went to the older barn first, and, as she walked in, she noted that the big support beams had been fixed, new hinges were on stall doors, new framing was up, more water troughs with water were already installed, plus a big concrete walkway had been added through the center, complete with drainage.

She just stared at it all. “This is unbelievable.”

As she looked up, she saw a big hay storage area at one end of the loft. At the far end on the ground floor was a big tack room and also grain storage and other needed supplies. “You’ll need some equipment for moving this around.”

“I know, and that’s in the budget, or at least it was,” he admitted, with half a laugh. “That might take a little longer to pull together, considering what this is likely to cost when all the bills come in,” he noted, with a shrug.

She turned to look at the second construction project close by, and she asked, “Did you say a second barn?”

“Well, I call it a barn, but I suppose it’s also an intake room, treatment center…”

Her eyes lit up. “May I see?” she asked eagerly.

“It’s still in the very basics of being put together.”

“Of course,” she said, but she was already eagerly walking toward it.

Timber laughed. “So, what you’re really saying is this is the building you care about.”

She stopped and looked at him intently. “Not so much.” She shrugged, feeling self-conscious.

He just laughed, slung an arm around her shoulders, and said, “Come on. Let’s go have a look.”

Smiling as they walked up to the group of men who were working, one of them came over and greeted her. “Hey, Doc.”

She smiled. “Hey, I heard you guys were helping Timber get a second big building up, and, I must say, it’s already looking fabulous.”

“I guess it’s a good thing you’re here because we had some issues with where to put some of the electrical, since our electrician does not like some of these ideas.”

“And what kind of problem is there?” she asked. “Because, for any kind of an examination room, treatment center, and surgery, power is critical.”

“Yeah, that’s what we were telling him, but he didn’t quite get the whole picture.”

“I got the picture, just not right off the bat, that’s all.” Somebody off to the side came over, hitching up his tool belt as he came across, a big grin on his face. “Hey, Doc.”

“Hey,” she replied, wondering how everybody knew who she was or that she was a vet at least. She glanced over at Timber, but he was talking to some of the other men.

“So, I know that this is still kind of rough,” the electrician began, “and we’ll certainly get in as much as we can and get it done as fast as we can, but it’s at this stage that we really want to get in as much of the groundwork as we can.”

“Right.” So, she found herself dragged into a discussion about individual exam rooms, how to set it up, from moving animals from one room to the other, and she answered a lot of their questions on the fly because she didn’t know what kind of animals they would be looking at.

And the problem was, it could be any and all species.

When she finally stepped back out again, she blew strands of hair off her face.

Timber walked over to join her. “Thanks for helping out George, the electrician.”

“Wow,” she muttered, “I wasn’t expecting all that.”

“Yeah, sorry. Nobody has too many answers yet. We’re trying to do the best we can, maximizing the opportunity to utilize the skilled tradesmen we have here, making fast and workable decisions about some of these things.”

“Oh, I hear you, and it’s fabulous. You do need a drainage system, depending on what you’ll be doing here at this level. Then there are security systems, cameras, heat, water in every room, that kind of thing.”

He nodded. “We’ve got the water in and set up for four treatment rooms.” She stared at him in surprise.

“I wasn’t sure if we needed to hold the animals here,” he explained.

“I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, but thinking about things a lot doesn’t necessarily mean I have a really good idea of how it should work in reality.

” He shrugged. “My brother was a veterinarian and—”

“Will he come join you?”

He looked over at her. “He passed away a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.

He smiled and nodded. “Thanks. So am I. It’s been a huge loss in my life, but this was also something that we dreamed up together, so I have a lot of his notes as to what could work and also pros and cons of different things. I’m just kind of going off that.”

“And that must be a fabulous help.”

“That’s what I thought,” he agreed, with a smile.

“Do you have any other family?”