Page 35 of Sweet Home Louisiana

Yeah, Sawyer’s chance of getting his own way might even get into the seventies.

“Wow.”

She looked up.“Wow?”

“Cash is a long-time friend.”

“Everyone here is a long-time friend,” she said.“That’s what happens when people never leave a fifty-mile radius.”

Uh-huh.Owen moved to the counter.“Cash is actually a long-time friend of Tommy’s.Tommy helped him get started.The butcher thing was his idea.”

She swallowed, then said, “I know.”

“You do?”

She looked up.“Yeah, I know.Dad told me about the whole thing.The name, Tommy getting them started, the breakup.All of it.”

“You talk to your dad?”He hadn’t been expecting that and he was totally thrown off track for a moment.

“I do.Once a month.”

Owen stared at her.Hereallyhadn’t been expecting that.“Are you okay with that?”

She stared back.She looked surprised that he’d asked that.“I’m…notnotokay with it.I like talking to him.But it usually takes me a day to get over missing him and being pissed that he made the choice to go to prison instead of being my dad.”

Owen felt like she’d hit him in the gut.“You feel like that was achoice?”

“No one turned the key on the truck for him,” she said.“No one told him to go after Bobby.And there’s no way he didn’t know that he’d end up in a cell no matter what happened after he got to Bobby’s house that night.”

Owen had no idea what to say.She was…right.

He, like most people here, had chalked Danny’s actions up to grief and passion over his wife’s death.Most people had been shocked initially but then they’d started nodding their heads, saying they understood where he’d been coming from.Or at least forgiving him for his actions because of what he’d been through.

But Maddie was right.Danny had had two kids to still take care of.Getting in his truck that night had been a choice.

She sighed.“Anyway, he told me about Cash and Tommy.And I thought the idea was dumb even then.”

Owen shook his head.He didn’t quite have his head around her talking to her inmate dad on a regular basis, and that she felt her dad had betrayed her by choosing to go after her mom’s killer instead of staying and taking care of Maddie.It made his chest ache and he really wanted to hug her again.

Maddie lifted a brow.“Owen?You okay?”

He really wasn’t.But he shook his head, clearing his thoughts.“Cash isn’t…a great businessman.Sawyer’s wanted to fire him for a while.”

Maddie nodded.“And he won’t do it because he feels guilty about Tommy dying.Tommy was the only guy to give Cash a chance and encourage him.And Sawyer feels, at least partially, responsible for Tommy not being here, and so it makes it difficult to put pressure on Cash and impossible to fire him.”

Owen blew out a breath.“Yeah.”

“So I just did Sawyer a favor.”

Owen studied her.She wasn’t saying that flippantly.She actually meant it.

“You did that for Sawyer?To help him out?”

“Of course.I can be the bitch for the business.I get that sometimes it’s hard to make tough choices.You guys know everyone and feel like everyone is your friend and because you’re a small-town local business, you want to support everyone else in the same position.So I can make the decisions that you guys can’t and then take the blame.Sawyer’s excuse to everyone who’s pissed can just be that I’m an equal majority partner and there’s nothing he can really do.”

Again, she was right.And that really did let Sawyer—and him and Josh—off the hook for some of the bigger, tough decisions.

“So you didn’t really mean that you’re doing it so we have money to buy you out.”

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