Chapter One
Kitty Bennett did not have problems, she solved them.
That had been her primary role in her family since she was small, and because of it, she’d come to think of herself as something of a fixer. Maybe that was dramatic, she sometimes thought. Then again, maybe it was just the simple truth.
After all, she was the reason that her sisters were not still stuck in North Carolina, still dancing to the tune of their parents’ toxic marriage.
She was the one who had gotten them out and helped them get away, so that they could see for themselves that there was a whole world outside their family.
And that literally every part of that world was better than what they’d grown up with.
Something she’d been pretty pleased to discover herself.
The three Bennett sisters were close in age, so they were always either going to fight bitterly about every last thing or end up close.
That was the way of things. Kitty liked to think that she was the reason that they’d gone the closeness route.
Her middle sister, Flannery, had the reddest hair out of the three of them and the temperament to match.
The youngest, Indy, had a temper on her, but had the business brain of the family and was much better at keeping her emotions under control.
It fell to Kitty to guide them through the chaos that was their upbringing, because, as the eldest daughter, she’d never had the option of giving in to her own temper.
That was a sure way to draw fire—and in the house they’d all grown up in, that was the last thing anyone wanted to do.
Kitty was the one who’d learned that the hard way.
That was why Kitty had more or less parented her sisters through high school and then had gotten them all out of there.
Once they’d put North Carolina behind them, she had set about educating all three of them about the realities of the world.
Because there was never going to be any money for anything unless they made it themselves.
Case in point: Kitty had spent the money she’d saved up working too many jobs in high school to buy a beater of an old VW bus, and her sisters had contributed to the fund when they’d gotten their own jobs.
The three of them had painstakingly refurbished it, and the three of them had traveled, which meant living on top of each other.
Literally. They’d seen some tempers flare, sure, but they’d also seen both coasts.
The red deserts, the Great Lakes. The bayous and the redwoods and the rocky shores of Maine and Oregon alike.
They’d found Cowboy Point entirely by accident.
But then, Kitty liked to think of accidents as opportunities.
They had happened upon Cowboy Point in the middle of a long, slow summer when the little valley had been bright and happy. It had felt almost unbearably charming, particularly because the geriatric old bus had broken down and they’d had to camp out while they tinkered with it.
Far better to do that in a gorgeous alpine valley than by the side of an interstate, they had all agreed.
One night, while eating dinner in the diner attached to the General Store—because they’d all reached their limit with campfire cuisine outside the tents they’d put up in the campground down by the river—Kitty had gotten to talking with a couple at the neighboring table who were bemoaning the fact that they had to drive all the way down into Marietta to get a good pizza.
Ten miles in good weather, but forget about it in winter, the older man had grumbled.
I make a great pizza, Kitty had told them.
She does, Flannery had agreed. It’s so good that we don’t even bother to get pizza anywhere else.
Indy had been nodding along. She makes them on a grill sometimes while we’re camping, and believe me, you really haven’t tasted pizza until you’ve tried it.
The older couple had been so excited by the idea that they’d had the Bennett girls over for a pizza night the next evening.
The two of them lived on a plot of land that contained their house, another larger house that sat further back near the steeper slope of the hill, and a big commercial space closer to the road that had been standing empty for some while now.
Their new friends had told them that the abandoned space had once been an Italian restaurant, back when the two of them were young. Back when the two of them could still keep up with the demands of running the only real restaurant in town.
Somehow, it had all come together as if it had been preordained.
Kitty made them the best pizzas they’d ever had.
Indy started asking them about the restaurant business.
Flannery had stood by the window, looking out at the abandoned restaurant, and her creative wheels already spinning with possibilities.
And that was how the Bennett sisters came to take over that old Italian restaurant and make it into Mountain Mama Pizza, where it had been reliably serving the community for the last seven years.
The catch was that they were in a rent-to-own situation. A very comfortable rent-to-own situation that had always been more when you’re ready than please pay a percentage of the purchase price with an obligation to buy in x years.
Kitty had never paid too much attention to that beyond the monthly rent, because Izzy and Alessandro Milan quickly became friends.
More than friends. They all adopted each other, since the Milan children had long since moved away from this tiny corner of rural Montana, and only came back for holidays.
One thing Kitty had always known and never let herself forget was that family could turn toxic at the slightest provocation. She really shouldn’t have been surprised.
But she was.
This morning, she and Izzy had their typical morning coffee from the coffee cart that was parked next to the General Store.
They sipped from their to-go cups on the walk home, chatting about things like the freshest ingredients around, the farms that could supply them, and the usual concerns about the snowpack versus the growing season. All very normal for them.
Then she asked where they were on that whole rent-to-own pathway. Also normal. She’d asked many times over the years.
But today, for the first time, Izzy looked… pensive.
“I don’t know,” she said, pushing back a bit of her white hair that the breeze had started to play with and tucking it behind her ear. “I think we need to rethink the situation.”
Kitty felt herself go entirely too still. She felt the telltale prickling sensation on the back of her neck. It was her red flag. Her alarm system. Proof positive that something was wrong.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
And as someone who had long been accused of intensity when she was just speaking, she worked hard to keep her tone pleasant. Especially when she was, in fact, feeling intense.
She focused on her friend. Izzy walked a lot slower these days.
When they’d arrived in town she had been hardy Montana stock, as she’d liked to tell them, usually with her bawdy laugh as punctuation.
Her hair was pure white now and she wore it in the same complicated French braid that somehow felt quintessentially western to Kitty.
That braid also featured in many photos around her house, dating back to when that same hair had been a rich, dark brown and Izzy had clearly spent most of her time with horses.
Her skin was gently creped, she loved turquoise and silver jewelry, and she still dressed like the cowgirl she’d been in her youth.
Today, her faded blue eyes were as canny as ever.
“Alessandro and I have been talking about this,” she was saying, still ambling along the road as if she hadn’t just dropped a bomb on Kitty’s head. “And we really feel that what’s important about that restaurant space, what makes it special, is that it’s a family endeavor.”
“Luckily, my sisters and I are a family,” Kitty reminded her, and had to force a smile to go with it. Because her neck was still prickling at her. “As you said years ago, we tick all the right boxes.”
But Izzy was shaking her head. “The thing is, it works right now because you’re all single.
But you won’t stay that way, will you?” She laughed in a way that was clearly supposed to encourage Kitty to join in, but she didn’t.
She couldn’t. “You’re all such pretty girls.
Sooner or later, you’ll each find yourself the right man and move away.
As all of my daughters did in their time.
It’s the natural way of things, and we would hate for you to be saddled with a piece of property here in Cowboy Point when your new husband wants to move to Tacoma. You see what I mean.”
Kitty did not see what she meant, and not only because she would not follow a man anywhere—and certainly not to Tacoma.
She felt as if she was having an out of body experience.
As if she was standing beside herself, suddenly.
She didn’t know which part of that astonishing statement she should address first because she was also very much afraid that if she did any addressing of any kind, she would irreparably damage their relationship.
She couldn’t bear the thought of that.
And Kitty might have been used to toxic family moments and the terrible reversals and denials that made them worse—or she had been before she’d removed her sisters and herself from that particular North Carolina swamp—but she couldn’t quite believe it was happening here.
With Izzy, who had been more like a mother to her than her own mother had ever been.
Because her own mother had cared only about her husband to the detriment of… literally everything else.
Izzy remembered all their birthdays. She dropped off little gifts for them because she’d seen something and thought of them. She was free with hugs and invitations and always reminded them that her door was open to them as needed.