Page 8 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

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 beensomany 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 soundentertainedrather thaninvolved. 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 settingall by herselfwhile 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 bemuchtoo 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.

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