Page 62 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

It was clarity from her oldest daughter that she hadn’t really expected. But she could understand the truth there. They were teenagers. And she wasn’t going to be able to make them happy. Not all the time.

“Okay. I accept that. But I do want you to know that I love you,” she said. “No matter what. And all this stuff... I don’t want it to make you afraid.”

“What?”

“We haven’t talked that much about what it was like for me growing up. But for good reasons, my mom was afraid of some things. And she made me afraid of them too. And I don’t want my issues to become yours. I have them. Of course I do. And you can have your own. Like you said, you can’t be happy all the time. Because you have your own life. I’m not in charge of that. But I love you, and I’m here for you. And to the best of my ability, I don’t want the stuff I’m going through to mess with you. If you’re miserable here, I want you to tell me. But I think I want to try to make a life with Boone. I don’t know if he’s going to want that with me.”

“Okay. I guess that’s...fair.”

She could tell Sadie wasn’t exactly overjoyed, but she didn’t look upset or outraged either.

“I’ll talk to Mikey.”

“Maybe you should talk to Boone first,” said Sadie.

“Well, what if Mikey can’t deal?” She hated all this fear. This fear that made up her life. She’d been so certain that marrying Daniel had gotten rid of it, but it hadn’t. She was stitched together by fear, her whole life a patchwork quilt. Hunger, fear, then family, love. But the thread was fear either way.

She’d been so scared of losing Daniel, of losing her stability, and now she had. She was afraid of messing things up with her kids, afraid of losing Boone...

There was just so much to be afraid of. And it was what she’d known from the time she was a kid.

“Mikey is twelve,” said Sadie. “I don’t think you should go making decisions based on her moods.”

“I could apply the same thing to you.”

“I know. You shouldn’t make decisions because of me. You’re the adult.”

She was the adult. But she was a freaked-out adult.

Still, she had to act like the adult.

And maybe as much as she wanted to be gentle with her kids right now, there was a merit in setting boundaries too. And in that, she supposed Sadie was right. Maybe she had to figure herself out first. She had a little bit of that epiphany earlier. But there was a certain amount of happiness she had to find before she could be the best parent.

This conversation with Sadie was confirming it. Removing barriers and obstacles she had put in her own way.

“Okay. I’ll sort it out with Boone.”

“He is nice. It’ll be weird for you to be with someone that isn’t Dad. But...”

“Yeah, life is weird. I guess if you’ve learned one thing from me, I don’t want this to scar you, but it’s not the worst thing to learn, it’s that life changes. And sometimes the best thing you can do is just go with it.”

So she was going to go with it. Whether it was smart or advised or not anything of the kind. She was going to go with it because it was her life. And it didn’t matter what best practices were. She was living. And it was messy. Real. One of her kids understood, and one of them didn’t. She wasn’t going to get a one hundred percent buy-in here. She was just going to have to love them.

And herself.

And Boone.

And in the end she was going to have to hope it was enough.

Because fate might’ve put her in his path all those years ago, but fate wasn’t going to make the right decisions for her now. Only she could do that.

She had resisted for a while. But what she wanted was going to require some work. So she was going to have to get busy.

Chapter Eleven

When Boone woke up the next morning, coffee was on in the kitchen.

And he could smell bacon.

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