Chapter Five
J une was the best month of Sierra’s life.
When she got home that Monday morning, she dove right into the dairy.
She settled into the space in the office that Boone had prepared for her in the barn and started mapping out what she thought the dairy needed and what she knew about artisan projects in this area—which was a lot, because almost everyone she knew in Marietta was obsessed with farm-to-table food and local everything else.
She was very pleased when her mother called the very next day to tell her that there was a hand-delivered letter waiting for her at her childhood home.
It was worth the drive back down to Marietta to pick it up and see that Matty had clearly used his influence to process a dissolution of marriage petition as quickly as possible.
Better yet, since her mother had left a letter for her out on the front porch, she didn’t have to interact with her parents, either.
She could simply call a lawyer friend she knew for advice—not her father, God help her—while she turned right back around, headed back up the mountain, and got to go do something she loved instead.
“The first thing to discuss is the distribution of assets,” her friend said as Sierra was driving back out of Marietta.
“I want whatever gets me divorced the quickest,” Sierra replied, with that same bedrock certainty that had come over her again and again lately.
Seemingly out of nowhere.
But it was true. She had stayed with Matty all those years and she’d had no inkling that she would ever even want to leave him—and now she was done.
“I don’t care what it looks like.”
Her friend had made a noise.
“Are you sure?”
Copper Mountain was rising up in front of her and she wanted this.
She wanted her hometown behind her and Cowboy Point in front of her.
She didn’t want to look back or mire herself in the past—she just wanted to be done.
Sierra hadn’t hesitated.
“I’m sure.”
The first thing she did was take over the distribution of Copper Mountain Dairy & Creamery’s daily milk.
Instead of having people traipse out to the ranch, which had meant in the past that Boone had to sit around and wait for them to come—thereby irritating his brothers, and worse, giving them ammunition to poke at him about abandoning the ranch—Sierra started a delivery service.
That led to her creating a website, a logo, and a social media presence so that customers could keep up with them in real time if they liked and also get a sense of the operation.
Boone had no interest in doing any of those things, so was happy to give Sierra free reign.
She took it. She told the story of Boone’s dream and his small farm, with minimal input from him because she’d been his sounding board all along.
She wandered all around Boone’s property and uploaded all the pretty pictures that she took herself—when she hadn’t played around with photography since high school.
She pinned a post to the top of their page featuring an adorable picture of one of the cows, Gwendolyn, and named her employee of the month .
Sierra wasn’t at all surprised that post took off.
Gwendolyn was freaking cute.
So she shared the names of all the cows and made them their own social media account too, because cows were always fun.
In the mornings, she would wake up before dawn and always found that Boone had beat her to the barn.
While he milked the cows, Sierra loaded up the milk that they’d put through the small-batch pasteurization process the day before—then chilled and bottled in old-fashioned glass—and set off on her deliveries.
Copper Mountain Dairy & Creamery promised fresh milk within a day and they delivered on that promise.
Sierra made certain of that.
Personally.
Deliveries usually took her a couple of hours, and she plotted out her route so she could swing through Cowboy Point at least twice.
That meant she could get some of that good coffee from the coffee cart that had now pretty much taken over what had once been a parking area next to the General Store.
No one really parked there anymore, she found, because as June moved along, more and more of the area was populated with little tables and fold up chairs set out beneath umbrellas.
The cart was really more of a whole coffeehouse experience this summer.
Sierra considered it something of a personal coup when she managed to talk the owner of the coffee cart, the mysterious Helena Patrick—who Sierra thought looked a whole lot like Cat Lisle Carey, though no one else seemed to have noticed that—into putting in a standing order for heavy cream.
Boone’s little dream was killing it.
Every Sunday, Sierra went to that big, sprawling family dinner at the Carey ranch house.
She’d gone a bunch of times over the years, but going weekly hit different.
The Careys were nothing like her family.
No one stood on ceremony.
There was nothing formal .
They were always laughing, jostling each other, and calling each other out in a way that it had taken her years, since she was a teenager, to realize was pretty much good-natured.
Now there were three generations gathered around the kitchen table and still nobody cared about posture, nobody commented on how much anyone weighed or was eating, and the goal never seemed to be dressing each other down—unless it was funny.
She started to look forward to the loud, raucous, happy gathering every week.
Once it was officially summer, the Saturday market started.
Sierra had loved driving up the mountain over the past couple of summers to experience it.
It was even more fun this summer, because Boone had a few of his cheeses ready.
Saturday mornings they would set up a little booth in the market.
It was an offshoot of her Jeep with the big Copper Mountain Dairy & Creamery logo she’d had put on the side, the freezer in the cargo hold, and a little table piled high with “market-only experiments.”
Boone, by virtue of being his gruff, no-nonsense self, sold out every time.
“It’s amazing,” she told him the last Saturday morning in June.
“All you have to do is look as if you might smile and your fans clear out our entire inventory.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Boone replied in that low rumble of voice, though his mouth was curved.
“You do. The ladies love… dairy,” Sierra replied with a laugh.
“I think that many ladies in the greater Marietta area do indeed enjoy dairy products,” he told her piously.
“And who am I to blame them?”
After they sold out, Sierra wandered around and soaked in the rest of the vibrant market, packed with local artisans including Boone’s father—who had Kendall there to run things for him and sell his bespoke spurs and bits.
All the people she’d met in town over the years and had spent more time with recently seemed to have a presence here, though the artists and farmers came from all over.
All the major ranches were represented.
The Art Collective folks, who lived on some land out in the hills and were known for the occasional festival and their fair-weather pop-up, had a booth.
The alpaca ranchers who ran the fiber and textile barn on the main road showed up with all kinds of hand-dyed creations.
There were jewelry makers, ceramicists of the mug and bowl to high art varieties, handmade clothing boutiques, wood carvings, and crafts of every possible description.
It made Sierra proud to be a part of this community.
And the last Saturday in June, Rosie was there—in an Airstream with a canopy and crates upon crates of artfully-arranged books.
“I had no idea you were opening a bookshop!” Sierra said delightedly when she found herself standing in the cozy-looking space Rosie had made the Airstream into, inside and out.
“This is amazing.”
“I’m going to open a permanent shop up by the Lodge,” Rosie said, and nodded her head in the general direction of Cowboy Point Lodge, the old Victorian manor that had been built in railway baron style.
Even though the railway had never come this high into the mountains.
The Stark family had owned it forever and had run it for several generations, though it had been empty for years now.
Rosie’s older brother Jack was heading the renovation and restoration project and a major step forward had occurred in March, when Jack had thrown Rosie and Ryder a wedding reception in the grand old lobby.
Even though it wasn’t entirely done, it had been so splendid that everyone in town, and even down in Marietta, were still talking about it.
“That will be home base,” Rosie was saying.
“But if this goes well, I can use the Airstream to have a pop up shop wherever books are needed. And this is rural Montana, so that could be a lot of places.”
Sierra nodded, but then remembered.
“I thought you all were living in this Airstream.”
“We were absolutely living in it,” Rosie said with a laugh.
“That’s why I wasn’t here last week. But we just moved into the house. I’m not sure I would really call it a house, mind you, but the walls are up, there’s a toilet, and we can figure out everything else.”
Sierra shook her head in awe.
“I never thought of myself as particularly high maintenance, but camping out in half-built house with two little boys seems like… a lot.”
Rosie shrugged.
“It is a lot,” she agreed.
“It definitely wouldn’t work in winter. But this is our first summer together.” She smiled when she said it, in such a way that it made Sierra’s own heart seem to jump in her chest. “I don’t care if it’s chaos. I just want to spend every possible moment together.”
Sierra was still thinking about that she walked on through the market with a couple of books in her arms, smiling at the vendors she knew and those she knew by sight.
It was a whole different world up here.
She had been visiting Cowboy Point forever, but it was only over these past few weeks that she’d realized there was more to it than met the eye.
Even her eye, which she would have said was fairly observant.
In winter folks hunkered down and news traveled—but a lot slower, and in places like the diner, or on slow and cozy nights at.
Mountain Mama. Now at the beginning of summer it was here in the market where everyone talked about the things going on in the community.
It was here that Sierra learned that all the rental cabins that people had been building and outfitting were full pretty much all the way through the high season.
Cat’s brother Dallas had been renovating the big lighthouse that sat on the top of Lisle Hill—on the west side of the Cowboy Point valley, equidistant between Copper Mountain and the old Lodge—and was expected to open next summer.
Rumor was that Jack Stark was thinking of opening up the Lodge’s many outbuildings and cabins, though the manor house itself was going to take a few more years.
The tourists had found Cowboy Point.
There were more of them every summer, and some had lingered on through the winter, too.
Locals were of two minds on this.
They were already an eclectic group of people, and the community was a lot larger than it seemed if all a person did was drive through the center of town.
There were all the New Age and artistic communities out in the hills.
Some of those were ranches, some were bespoke hotels, and still others were owned by the kinds of celebrities who liked to keep a low profile and only rarely ventured in to mingle with the local people.
Tourists flooded up from Marietta and from all over the Paradise Valley.
They came down from Bozeman and Livingston, up from Jackson Hole, and were making Marietta and Cowboy Point must-stop locations if coming or going to Yellowstone.
As the summer wore on, everyone in the market confidently expected that they’d see more and more people.
There was a rumor that one of the old, abandoned houses along the main street had been bought and permits had been filed for a new restaurant, but no one could confirm or deny who might have done that.
The Bennett sisters all seemed delighted at the notion that they wouldn’t have to feed everyone in town.
Even grumpy Tennessee Lisle was rumored to have said that he was considering expanding the hours in the diner next to the General Store, which he’d kept from roughly dawn until midafternoon—on weekdays—as long as anyone could remember.
Meanwhile, Helena Patrick seemed to have kicked of some kind of food truck revolution.
There were always food trucks at the market, but now there were new ones every week in the parking area with the coffee cart, and they stayed as long as it was light on those endless Montana summer evenings.
Sierra didn’t expect that Cowboy Point would offer all the same things that a much bigger place like Bozeman did.
Or even what Marietta did.
But she did find, as June tipped over into July, that she didn’t miss the things she couldn’t get.
She was too busy enjoying the things she could.
Like her Sunday night group meetings with the Carey sisters-in-law, always over drinks and the pizza special on offer that week at Mountain Mama, whatever it was.
“You have a funny look on your face,” Rosie said one of those Sundays.
The 4 th of July had been bright and happy up here in the mountains that Friday and the festive atmosphere was still continuing.
There was live music out on the patio and everything seemed to be gleaming and glittering in the sparkling lights strung everywhere.
“Almost wistful.”
Sierra considered.
“You know… I think I’m happy?”
Rosie laughed.
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever felt happy before,” Sierra confessed.
But before Rosie could respond to that, she waved her hand in the air between them.
“Does that sound tragic? That’s not true, not really. I mean, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt happy for an extended period of time. The last time was college, but that was different. I didn’t feel as if my decisions were mine to make, if that makes sense. Now they’re all mine.”
Across the table, Kendall and Cat leaned in closer.
“Happiness is a good thing,” Kendall said.
“Particularly if it’s hard won. That just makes you hold onto it that much tighter.”
Sierra didn’t have to ask what Kendall meant by that.
Not only had she said that she was raised by wolves, Sierra knew that the wolves in question had showed up not long after she’d married Harlan.
But Cowboy Point took care of its own.
The community had come together to encourage her family to go away.
And stay away.
So far, so good.
“This is what I was telling my brothers the other night.” Cat smiled at Sierra.
“I’m sure you know who they are, but what you probably don’t know is that they’ve basically been in a competition to see who’s the grumpiest for their entire lives. But they claim they support my happiness, so I like to drench them in it whenever possible.”
“I can’t decide if that makes a wish I had siblings or makes me glad that I don’t,” Sierra said.
“Be glad that you don’t,” all three of her companion said, more or less at exactly the same time.
But then they all laughed.
They all talked about the market the day before, which had been spectacularly busy, thanks to their communal decision to open on holiday weekend.
When Flannery Bennett came over, they talked about it with her, too, as she was the organizer.
“We’re really becoming a destination,” Flannery said, her thick red braids seeming to share in her excitement, since she never really stood still.
“How cool is that?”
The middle Bennett sister had a kind of humming energy that made it seem to make sense that she was always on her feet like this, moving around between the crowded tables while her sister Kitty dreamed up new recipes and cooked them in the back and their younger sister Indy was the one who focused on the business side of things.
A perfect team , Sierra thought.
And another point in favor of siblings.
Another thing she loved about Cowboy Point was how thick on the ground these family businesses were.
“I talk a lot with the folks down in Marietta who run their farmers market scene,” Flannery was saying.
“We work really hard not to have too much overlap, or to pull too much from them, and vice versa. And with all Yellowstone tours this time of year, I think our numbers are just going to keep improving.”
“Here’s hoping,” Kendall said, and they all toasted the idea.
“If I can maybe sound a little indelicate, though I don’t mean to,” Cat said after Flannery went off to work the crowd, her gaze swinging to Sierra, “it’s really nice to see you looking so happy all the time. It feels like that’s not actually normal for you.”
Sierra supposed she could take offense to that.
But she didn’t. Because it was true.
“I’ll probably be looking happier all the time now,” she told them.
“Barring any unforeseen events, my divorce should be final next week.”
All three went silent.
Sierra watched as they looked at each other, then back at her, but she couldn’t quite read what she saw there.
It wasn’t the same as last time.
This time felt more like she’d lobbed a grenade into the middle of the table.
“You’re getting divorced?” Kendall asked, and she sounded as if her voice was higher than usual.
“I don’t know whether to say that I’m sorry, or…?”
“I don’t know your ex,” Cat said, sounding careful, which was almost scarier than anything she could possibly have said.
“But I think—”
“I’ve met him,” Rosie butted in, her voice…
firm. Her gaze was the same on Sierra’s.
“When all is said and done, he’s a tiny little man, isn’t he?”
And Sierra laughed.
She didn’t know where it came from.
Normally, when people said things about Matty—and the truth was, people always said things about Matty, because he was who he was—she defended him.
She couldn’t even say why she did, only that she always had.
It was a long ingrained habit.
She might have even picked it up in high school.
Whatever people said, whatever was implied, she would always wave it off.
She would always try to interpret what it was that he actually meant and then share that with them, or show them why what they thought they’d seen or heard was wrong.
It was a reflex.
But here, on a bright patio in beautiful Cowboy Point with all that high mountain air and a Montana summer night lazily blue above her, with a group of women who she was beginning to consider actual friends, she didn’t do any of that.
It hit her, for the first time, that she didn’t have to do that ever again.
So she laughed. “He is a little man, actually,” she said to Rosie.
To all of them. “I don’t really like to admit that, because I don’t think it says good things about me.”
She was fiddling with her beer, maybe, and she didn’t like that.
So she sat up straighter instead and looked around the table, because why should she be ashamed about anything?
She wasn’t small.
No one said anything, so she kept going.
“He likes ultimatums. He always has. We never fight, you see. If there’s any fighting or any hint of fighting, he always says, leave me then . And he means immediately. In that moment, everything has to end and there can never be any taking it back. I was always too afraid to do it.” She lifted her shoulder then dropped it.
“Until last month. He did it the way he always does, and I…” She laughed again.
“I told him to go right ahead. He filed for divorce next day. There’s a twenty one day waiting period, and so I’ll divorced next week. It’s that simple after all these years.”
There was a shocked sort of silence on the table, but Rosie was the first to break it.
She lifted up her Coke in tribute.
“Hear, hear,” she said, and the others did the same.
“I feel like I ought to feel… more,” Sierra told them.
“I think maybe there’s something wrong with me.” But she smiled as she said it.
“Yet even if there is, I don’t think I’m going to regret this decision either way.”
“Maybe,” Kendall suggested, “you’ve already given situation all the emotion it deserves. Now that it’s over, you just get to be done.”
Sierra smiled.
“I like that take.”
“But if you divorce, that means you’re single,” Cat said, her eyes sparkling as she leaned in.
“And everybody knows that the best way to truly be done with one man is to find yourself another one.”
“ Does everyone know that?” Rosie asked her, shaking her head.
“Is that something you know from personal experience over there, Cat?”
Sierra had already guessed that Wilder was Cat’s one and only, but the way the other woman blushed then confirmed it.
“I’ve read extensively.”
“That’s not the saying anyway,” Kendall interjected.
“Everyone knows it’s you get over one man by getting under another.”
“I think I’m fine,” Sierra assured them.
“I don’t need to be getting under anyone. And I think I’ll wait until it’s official, anyway.”
But that was all that she could think about.
The following week, she went to the courthouse with her lawyer.
She didn’t have to look at Matty.
Everything was cut and dry and she didn’t want anything from him, though the judge divided up some assets all the same because of the length of their marriage.
Sierra didn’t care. She just wanted to be done.
It was so brutally efficient that when she was back in her car and driving home, it was hard to believe that it had really happened at all.
She’d been mixed up with Matty for half her life.
Now she was free of them.
When her phone buzzed beside her as she parked outside the barn, she looked down to see a message from him, which she supposed wasn’t particularly surprising.
He always had liked to get the last word.
When she opened it, she laughed when she saw the message.
You have three days to pick up your shit or it’s out on the curb , said the message.
That was it. It was done.
She didn’t cry, though she sat there a moment because she wondered if she should.
But maybe Kendall had it right.
Maybe she’d spent all the emotion there was to spend over the course of all these years.
She saw Boone moving around in the barn, but she didn’t get out of her Jeep.
She didn’t feel quite right.
A little jagged, a little edgy.
Sierra heard Cat’s voice in her head.
She thought, I’m actually single .
The last time she’d been single, she’d been a teenager—and a good girl, at that.
Now she was much older and if he wanted to think about getting under another man, she not only could go right ahead and do that, she could probably make that happen fast.
But the truth was, there had only ever been two men in her life.
She’d never had the faintest interest in another one, to date or as a friend or at all.
And she didn’t think she wanted to get under Boone.
She couldn’t imagine that either.
He was such a sweet, kind man.
He wouldn’t know what to do, she was almost positive.
But she did feel that she needed to mark this occasion.
She swung out of the Jeep when he came out from the barn.
He had his gaze trained on her, those dark gold eyes of his tracking over her the way they always did.
Seeing everything. Probably standing there coming up with ways to support her before she even needed him to.
Just an angel, this man.
“You okay?” he asked.
Gruffly. Because he was being careful with her.
“Never better,” she told him.
“Totally divorced.”
Something shifted on his face, but she couldn’t really track it.
It wasn’t an expression she’d ever seen before, but she waved that away.
She went and launched herself toward him, the way she always did, because she knew that he would catch her.
Because he always caught her.
He caught her this time, too.
And she thought that a hug would do it, but in these bizarre first moments of freedom, she figured that it deserved a little bit more.
Not under —but her version of it, she guessed.
And as he held her up against him she way he always did, she wrapped her arms tight around his neck.
“What are you doing?” he asked her, with very little inflection in his voice.
And that odd look in his eyes.
“Boone,” she whispered, “I have to do this.”
Because this deserved a celebration and he was it.
So she leaned in and kissed him.