Page 7 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

She made a face. She did not like that.

“Mom?”

She turned to look at her daughter. “What?”

Fifteen-year-old Sadie looked at her from the passenger seat, and then twelve-year-old Michaela—Mikey for short—leaned forward. “Are we going?”

Wendy was at the end of a long dirt driveway. The one she knew would take her to help. The one she didn’t want to drive down.

“Yeah. In a second. I’m just sitting here thinking about how little I like any of my options.”

“You have our support,” said Sadie.

“Yes,” said Mikey. “It isn’t your fault that Dad’s an untrustworthy blight on humanity.”

“Your vocabulary,” said Wendy, rolling her eyes, but she was actually very proud, and beamed a little every time Mikey opened her mouth.

“It’s because I read,” said Mikey. “And also, because I binge-watch TV shows that are probably above my age rating.”

“Let’s just leave it at reading,” said Wendy.

“I thought Boone was Dad’s friend,” said Sadie.

“He is,” Wendy said slowly.

And she left out all the complications that Boone made her feel. She made sure to keep the pronunciation of those words as simple as possible. She made sure to leave any kind of subtext out of what she said. Because she had to. She had no room in her life for subtext. Not right now. And never when it came to Boone.

“So, why are we going to stay with him?”

“Because he offered.” And he’d offered her a job. It was humiliating. But she didn’t really have another choice. The one thing she had any kind of experience with before marrying Daniel was housecleaning. Boone said now that he was back from the rodeo, he needed a cleaner, and he had more than one house on the property, and more than enough room for her and the girls. She was in no position to turn it down. She had to take the offer.

Anyway, that night...

She kept seeing it. Over and over again. She’d been unhinged. But brave. And she couldn’t help but admire herself. But also, she kept seeing the way Boone had put his body between hers and Daniel’s. The way he’d been. Like fire and rage, and completely on her side.

And then the way he told her...

Don’t regret it.

So she hadn’t. Because Boone had told her not to, and maybe that wasn’t healthy, but dammit all, she didn’t have a whole lot of healthy available to her right now. Mostly she had disillusioned and confused.

“He didn’t take Dad’s side on this.”

“Good for him.”

“I admire his willingness to break with traditional toxic masculinity,” said Sadie.

“Well, don’t go giving that much credit,” Wendy said. “He is still a rodeo cowboy. He just happened to...bear witness to some things.”

The brief text conversation she’d had with Boone after her grand performance in the parking lot had confirmed that Daniel had been well on the way to cheating on her that night too.

At that point, she had known it was a routine thing.

Any guilt she might have felt eventually over smashing up the truck had been effectively squashed at that point.

There was no room for regret in the well of rage created by Daniel’s own actions. If he didn’t like the way she behaved, he should have been different. From the very beginning.

“I need something to get back on my feet. And I think we all need a fresh start. This isn’t where we’re going to stay forever but...”

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