“My mother helped you mock our family?” Callie asks.
“She helped me mock both families. Equally. With love. She said humor was the only way to survive being married to men who’d rather nurse a grudge than admit they were wrong.”
Callie’s quiet, processing. “She never said anything.”
“She couldn’t. Your father would have combusted. So we kept it secret. We had tea every Tuesday while the men were at the cattle auction. We exchanged recipes. She taught me her apple pie-making technique, and I taught her proper biscuits. We complained about stubborn men. Laughed about the ridiculousness of it all. Started a book club that was really just an excuse to drink wine. She helped me through my husband’s death. I held her hand through her cancer diagnosis.”
“You were with her? When she was sick?”
“Every chemo appointment your father couldn’t make. He thought she was going alone. She was with me.”
Callie’s crying now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She asked me not to. Said you needed to stand with your father, that the truth would come out when it was meant to. She said...” Mrs. Delaney pauses. “She said someday you’d find the tag, find the recipes, and you’d come asking. She said when that happened, I should tell you everything.”
“Everything?”
“About the feud being nonsense. About our friendship. About how she always hoped you’d be brave enough to follow your heart instead of your last name.” Mrs. Delaney looks directly at us guys. “Even if your heart led to three McCoy boys who are currently standing behind you dying to touch you.”
Callie turns and looks at us.
“My mom thought I’d...”
“Your mother was a romantic. She said love was worth more than pride.”
“Oh my God.”
“She’d be proud of you. For living your truth. For being willing to blow it all up.”
“Did my dad know? About your friendship?”
“Not then. I told him last week. He didn’t take it well. Then he took it very well. We’re going public this weekend. At the festival. Your mother would have loved the symmetry. You know, the feud ending where it began.”
Callie looks at the recipe card still in her hand. “She wrote ‘Choose love, grudges can wait’ on her apple pie recipe.”
“That was for you. She knew you’d find it someday.”
Callie nods slowly, then says, “The whole town’s going to lose their minds when you and Dad go public.”
“Good. Maybe it’s time for some truth in this place. Your mother always said Cedar Ridge was drowning in its own mythology.”
“She was part of that mythology.”
“And now you get to write a new story. The question is, what’s it going to say?”
Callie looks back at us one more time, then to Mrs. Delaney. “It’s going to say the Thompsons and McCoys were idiots for thirty years, but maybe their kids don’t have to be.”
We follow Callie back to her truck, still carrying the evidence of her mother’s secret friendship, her mother’s hope for her daughter’s future, her mother’s belief that love beats grudges every time.
Before getting in her truck, she stops. “Three days,” she says. “Festival. Be there. Be ready. We’re ending this properly.”
Then she drives away, leaving us to process the fact that not only was the feud fake, but two of the women in our town knew it all along. And were laughing the whole time.
“Our lives are a joke,” Boone says.
“But maybe the punchline doesn’t have to suck.”
Back at the ranch,we’re processing everything in our own ways. Which means Wyatt’s hammering another fence post, I’m fiddling with twisting a bottle cap into a ring shape, and Boone’s having a one-sided conversation with Rita’s photo on his phone.
