Chapter Two
T hat evening, Sierra pulled up in front of her parents’ house just off Bramble Lane, considered by many to be the loveliest part of Marietta proper.
And it was as pretty as ever, Sierra could admit.
Yet despite all her tough talk earlier, she felt…
shaky. Apprehensive.
Maybe even a little scared, if she was prepared to be honest about it.
On the drive here from Cowboy Point, she’d found herself wondering if she’d been putting off any real reckoning with her marriage for as long as she had because of this.
Because she’d known that once she faced reality, she would also have to face this dinner.
That did not exactly make Sierra feel great—about either herself or the night stretching before her.
If she could have, she would have brought Boone with her.
She’d considered it, and she’d known that he would have been happy to tag along.
But she’d been pretty sure that her parents were likely to frown on her emotional support best friend if she tried to drag him to one of their painful family dinners.
Truth be told, they weren’t a huge fan of Boone at any time, though at least they’d stop complaining about him over the years.
Sierra had decided she needed to toughen up, face the music, take her medicine—all of those things.
These were her parents.
This was her mess. She could either defend what she was doing or maybe she shouldn’t be doing it.
Sitting in her Jeep, closed up tight again to ward off the chill that had crept back in when the sun started its way down—even though it was literally the first day of June, welcome to Montana—Sierra reminded herself that nothing was set in stone.
Matty was out of town and didn’t know she’d left yet.
She could go back. She could slide right back into the life she’d been living all these years and nobody would ever be the wiser.
Except Boone, of course.
But Boone was the sweetest, kindest, most supportive person she’d ever met in her life.
If she called him right now and told him she’d changed her mind, he’d haul all her stuff back down the mountain himself.
He wouldn’t even question her about it.
He was, as always, her angel.
She didn’t call him.
Boone had left her in the apartment and once she’d heard his heavy, booted feet go down the stairs, and then his truck as he drove away, she’d succumbed to the tears she’d been holding back that whole time.
If she’d cried in front of him, he would have been as sweet as he always was, but Sierra was so tired of crying.
And besides, she didn’t want him to think that she was anything but delighted to have escaped her life down in Marietta at last.
The truth was, she was delighted.
Or she thought she was.
She thought that was what she felt, kicking around inside her pretty shyly.
Somehow, after all these years with Matty, she’d lost touch with how to tell what she felt about anything.
“It’s not somehow ,” she muttered at herself, her hands too tight on the steering wheel.
“He did it. Piece by piece, drip by drip, until you learned how to do it yourself.”
Until she was so small, so biddable, so diminished—like a tiny, smooth, inconsequential little pebble.
Until there was barely anything of her left at all.
She shook her head and then shook the rest of herself too, like she was shaking all that off.
Then she told herself to get it together once again, and this time, she did.
She swung out of her car, though it was less of a smooth exit than usual since she always dressed up to have dinner at her parents’ and was wearing the sort of pencil skirt she knew her mother would like.
Along with appropriate heels and a little sweater, because her mother was deeply concerned with what was appropriate .
She smoothed her hair, swept back in a sleek ponytail, and then she walked up the front path to the door of her childhood home.
Like everything else in her parents’ life, it was beautiful.
It was a perfectly maintained, historic Victorian.
Not a bit of paint was chipped.
There wasn’t the faintest smudge on a single window.
The path of the front door was paved and well lit, as if this was a storybook instead of a rugged part of Montan.
Even the landscaping was exquisite, though this was still considered fairly early into the blooming season.
She made her way up the front steps and across the porch to the front door, then rang the bell.
Because everything in the Tate family was formal.
It hadn’t been until she had Boone in her life that she’d realized that everything she accepted as normal in her family was not normal everywhere.
Boone did not ring the doorbell at his parents’ house.
He walked right in like he belonged there.
It was his childhood home, after all.
Sierra had spent a long time trying to come to terms with that.
She still wasn’t sure she had.
But there was no time to dive into that old swamp.
Not tonight. She could hear her mother’s quick steps from inside, because Mary Catherine Bonneville Tate set the standard for the evening dress she liked to see at her table.
As far back as Sierra could remember, she had always dressed as if she expected a parade of refined, cosmopolitan people to descend upon her at any moment.
Not that any of them ever had, as far as Sierra knew.
Her mother swung the front door open and frowned when she saw Sierra.
This was not unusual.
After thirty-two years, it hardly even bothered Sierra any longer.
“Have you come alone?” Mary Catherine asked, sounding put-out.
“We already set the table for you and Matty, Sierra. If he couldn’t make it, the polite thing would have been to let us know in advance.”
As if Sierra was Matty’s handler.
As if her parents hadn’t invited them both, separately—meaning Matty could easily have declined on his own since he’d known he was going out of town when they’d set the date.
That he hadn’t—because he never did, because he too seemed to think that her job was to make polite excuses for him in all things—was not new.
He almost never came to her parents’ house for dinner.
She couldn’t remember the last time he’d showed up to take part in this monthly exercise.
But guess who Mary Catherine blamed for that?
“He can’t make it,” was all Sierra said, and she smiled while she said it, because there was no point getting in fights with her mother about such pointless things.
Not when there were likely to be far more intense fireworks tonight.
When Mary Catherine saw that she wasn’t going to get a rise out of her daughter, she turned and headed back toward the dining room.
Leaving Sierra close the door behind herself, then follow.
She noticed as she went that the house felt as sterile and cold as it always had when she’d lived here.
It seemed more pronounced tonight, for some reason.
She hadn’t been allowed to make a mess here.
She hadn’t been allowed to make noise.
There had been so many rules.
Rules about how she dressed, rules about what she ate.
Rules about how she slept, how she studied, how she did literally anything beneath this roof.
Those rules had gotten more intense when she’d hit puberty and had turned out not to have the willowy figure Mary Catherine claimed came to her naturally.
As if Sierra didn’t live with her mother and couldn’t watch her relationship with food and how ruthlessly she policed her every bite.
As if she’d never met Mary Catherine’s mother, her Nana, a round and happy woman who always seemed completely baffled by the daughter she’d somehow produced.
Same , Sierra thought.
Mary Catherine marched Sierra through the dining room, almost certainly to make sure that Sierra saw that the table was indeed configured for four, and would now have to be changed for three.
The inconvenience , Sierra thought, then continued on into the study where her father waited.
Because it was civilized to have a drink before dinner.
Everyone knew this, according to her parents.
As a child, Sierra have been forced to sit in this room and practice perfection.
She had failed. Repeatedly.
At some point she’d started to think that failing was the point.
If she could never measure up, she would always have to prove herself, and wasn’t that what her whole life had been about so far?
Trying to prove herself to people who, at the end of the day, just…
didn’t like her that much?
That was what Boone always said.
Not directly. But she’d heard him say it a thousand times.
Why am I going to contort myself to please someone who’s never going to like me?
he would ask. Seems like a waste of time and energy.
Sierra never had been a quick learner.
Tonight, she settled herself in her usual chair in the book-lined study, always kept without so much as a speck of dust. She felt as if she had a time bomb ticking inside her, but neither of her parents seemed to notice.
The grandfather clock in the hall chimed and her father, always a stickler for timeliness, didn’t even bother to greet her.
Cocktail hour had begun—there was no time to waste!
And her parents then indulged in the same conversation they had every single night of their lives.
An overview of the news that they had gathered from a selection of national and local newspapers.
A more archly amused overview of local issues, always careful to sound entertained rather than involved .
A seemingly endless conversation about the politics inside the wine club they belonged to up in Livingston.
Then a discussion about the cultural offerings from here to Bozeman and all the way south to Jackson Hole, which they always liked to talk about and rarely ever attended.
Only when all of these scintillating topics were exhausted—and it was no earlier than seven—could they move into the dining room, where Mary Catherine made a very big production of removing one place setting all by herself while Kenneth tutted and Sierra was left to sit in the miasma of disappointment her mother left in her wake.
Good thing she’d been doing it all her life.
Finally, Mary Catherine served dinner and all three of them sat there while classical music played gently in the background and her father made small talk.
More social now, less about the world at large.
But it was a trap.
The reality was that Sierra was on trial.
For every bite of food she put in her mouth.
For the size of each bite she took.
Points were deducted if she seemed hungry.
If her posture was less than perfect.
If she failed to laugh when her father made a joke, or laughed too much.
If she seemed off in her own world rather than engaged with the evening as it unfolded.
Points were never added.
Having been taught her whole life that one was never to bring up unpleasant conversations while people were eating, because it put people off their digestion, Sierra waited until it was time for coffee and dessert.
Another test. The dessert was to be seen, not heard.
Gazed at and admired, even sampled, but the trick was to always demure and claim to be much too full.
Sierra’s biggest teenage rebellion was when she’d scarfed down dessert every night for a whole summer, triggering an intervention.
She was tempted to do the same thing tonight—
But she had bigger fish to fry.
There was no use pretending otherwise.
She’d just have to come back here next month and do this all over again.
If she told them tonight and they reacted the way she suspected they would, it was possible they wouldn’t invite her back for months.
If ever.
That would be a reprieve.
It would also make her sad, but she knew that she had to stop mourning who her parents had never been.
There was only one person that hurt, and it wasn’t either of them.
“I have some news,” she made herself blurt out before she talked herself out of it.
Her parents made mild noises of vague interest. And Sierra knew that she didn’t get it out now, she never would.
“Matty and I have separated. Before you ask, no, there won’t be any reconciliation. I’ve moved up to Cowboy Point and I intend to stay there for the foreseeable future.”
And later, she thought, she would consider this a kind of out of body experience.
Because it was exactly what she thought it would be, and yet it was all kind of a blur.
It was like she tuned them out—a skill she’d perfected when Matty got into one of his moods.
Better not to let the unkind words take root.
Better to note the emotion, acknowledge it, and move on.
Hell, it had gotten her through a decade of marriage, their years of long distance, and all of that high school drama.
What was one dinner with her parents?
She marched herself out into the night a little while later, and she felt…
ragged straight through.
The cold night air felt like a cleansing.
Sierra took the deepest breath she could and let it wash everything away.
By the time she got to her car, she felt like herself again.
Or anyway, she felt like a grown woman, not the silent, cowed girl who had spent entirely too many dinners sitting in that house, braced for whatever character assassination might come.
She could have predicted the things they’d said and the way they’d said them.
She had, pretty much point by point.
How she had been raised by the two of them yet had somehow come out different, she would never know.
Then again, Sierra thought as she climbed back into her Jeep—and had to sit there for a moment because her teeth were chattering a little bit from the intense fight or flight situation going on inside of her—was she really all that different?
She didn’t like that question.
Once she felt a little bit calmer, she pulled away from her parents’ house and drove around Marietta the way she often had, all these years, to settle herself.
Because whatever was happening—or wasn’t happening—inside her parents’ house, or inside the house she’d shared with Matty on the other side of town, Marietta always soothed her.
This town that her parents thought they were better than, that they thought was beneath them because they considered themselves on a completely different social strata that anyone here, was in reality perfect .
Or anyway, Sierra had always thought so.
She loved how pretty it was, in every season She loved the restored glory of the Graff and the beloved little shops that felt more like a part of her now than a part of the town.
She loved Paradise Valley and had missed it terribly during the years she’d spent in college at Montana State in Bozeman, another huge disappointment to her parents.
They’d expected that their daughter would have had East Coast aspirations.
But she hadn’t. Her parents might have thought themselves too high and mighty for Big Sky country, but Sierra was Montana born and bred.
These mountains were in her blood.
She wouldn’t know what to do with skyscrapers and all those oceans, so few wide open spaces, and no access to the prairies or the splendor of Yellowstone.
Despite her parents’ best efforts and a great many of their threats, she’d insisted on staying in Montana.
People called it the Last, Best Place for a reason.
After she did a few laps through Marietta, she turned the Jeep toward Copper Mountain, the picturesque peak that rose up there above her pretty hometown and had once looked like the promise of a better life to folks escaping from worse situations back in places like Boston.
The ten miles of Dry Creek Road—called Desolation Drive by all the locals—wound itself around and around on its way up and over and deeper into the Gallatins.
This time of year, there was still snow at the top and it got colder the higher she went.
The road was dark and had no lights to speak of, but Sierra knew it by heart and wasn’t a teenager any longer—though even back then she’d never drove up here recklessly.
It was a little too scary for that.
Besides, there were stars everywhere, giving off more than enough shine for her to make her way through one switchback into the next, until she skirted around the base of the actual peak and then rolled over the hill that led down into the Cowboy Point community.
And as much she loved Marietta, and always would love Marietta, it was Cowboy Point that made her release a deep breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
She felt her shoulders creep down from her ears.
In Marietta she drove around and wondered how she could fit in to all the postcard prettiness.
Up here, she didn’t worry about things like that.
Up here, she was just…
herself.
Feeling that rush at her, she knew something else she hadn’t wanted to admit.
She’d almost lost her nerve tonight, and she hadn’t even gotten around to quitting her paralegal job at her father’s office.
She’d almost taken it all back—and she knew she still could.
That was the trouble with all of this.
All she had to do to maintain the status quo was to simply…
ride it out.
Nothing would change.
Not Matty, not their marriage, not her parents, not as single one of the details of this mostly pleasant life that she’d ended up in and could remain in if she liked.
But the trouble was, Sierra had turned thirty-two three weeks ago.
It wasn’t thirty, that big marker at the end of her twenties.
It wasn’t thirty-one, which had felt strange but still kind of a part of turning thirty.
Thirty-two was completely uninteresting.
It was just… in her thirties .
Thirty-two was simply life.
Her birthday had been fine.
Nothing bad had happened.
Matty had given her a card and some flowers, because he was always good at a showy gesture.
They had gone out to dinner, to his favorite restaurant up in Livingston.
Her friends had checked in.
Boone had delivered her a cupcake, by hand, at work.
He even smiled at her father’s secretary, making the usually unflappable Mrs. Lloyd blush like a schoolgirl.
And then she had woken up the next morning, looked in the mirror, and thought if this is it, I might as well drive off a cliff tomorrow .
Everything had cracked wide open from there.
Because once she’d started to see her life for what it was—what it really was , not what she wished it was—she couldn’t stop.
She turned over every stone.
She dug into every dark place she could find.
And it turned out that hers was not the sort of life that stood up to any scrutiny.
Sierra didn’t think that she could live with it.
Maybe she’d decided that she couldn’t.
Or, more revolutionary, she wouldn’t .
Now, coasting down the hill into Cowboy Point with its majestic pines on either side and the sprinkling of lights in the hills around this much smaller valley—plus the stately old lodge that stood so proud on the far side—she knew she’d made the right decision.
No matter what her parents thought.
Everyone in her life would think she was crazy, but she didn’t care.
Or she didn’t care when she was up here, on the back side of Copper Mountain and away from all of that judgment and commentary.
Up here she could be whatever she needed to be.
She took another deep breath and let it settle.
She drove through the tiny little town, smiling to see that Mountain Mama Pizza was still open with all its bright lights, happy music, and a bar that served drinks late into the evening.
In a few weeks they would open up their outside patio as well, always strung with fairy lights, so that folks could expand out into the summertime.
On the other side of the road, the historic market was closed, but had lights outside.
The coffee cart that had become a permanent part of town was shut up for the night too, tucked into the parking area on the side of the General Store.
On the other side, there was the family diner that would open up the crack of dawn.
Across the creek that ran through the valley was the Copper Mine, the more serious local bar that was always kicking.
Home , Sierra thought, not sure if that was delight or anxiety bubbling in her.
This is home now.
But it wasn’t until she drove up the hill on the far side of the little valley, and headed out into the hills that that words seem to really take root.
Not until she turned in at the marker that read High Mountain Ranch and took the offshoot dirt road that led to Boone’s, that was.
She didn’t go straight to her new, unpacked apartment.
She took the other fork that led up to his house.
It was like second nature to park in his yard, walk up to his door, and let herself in the way she always did.
Because wherever Boone was, she belonged.
Inside, he was where she expected him to be.
Kicked back on that massive leather couch, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and reading a book.
Her angel at home.
Sierra didn’t say anything.
She came in, sat down on the couch next to him, and swiped the remote control from his coffee table.
She turned his television on and found a program she liked, then unbuckled the uncomfortable shoes from her feet.
Then she tucked her legs up beneath her as she sat there in the pretty skirt she’d wore to impress her mother, who had not been impressed.
That , she told herself, is a Marietta problem.
And you don’t live in Marietta anymore .
Boone kept reading. Sierra watched her show.
After a while of this, Boone—not looking up from his book—asked, “So it went well, then?”
“Absolute carnage,” Sierra replied.
Boone only grunted. But Sierra felt even more of the night melt away.
And she stayed there, marinating in the sheer goodness that was time with her best friend, until she thought she might fall asleep.
Then she got up, didn’t bother to put her shoes on, and waved her hand at Boone as padded out into the night.
Where all she had to do was pretty much coast downhill to her new home, climb the stairs, and then pass out in the bed that Boone had made for her.
Because he was the best friend she’d ever had.
He’d helped her escape.
She couldn’t imagine how she would have done any of this without him.
And as she drifted off to sleep, Sierra started dreaming of ways she could repay him.
Her sweet, kind angel.