“Wish we could ask her and get an honest answer out of her.”
I finished off everything but the last swallow in the cup and handed it back to Boone, who didn’t hesitate to swallow it down and place it on the counter by his hip.
“To be quite honest,” Josephine, Denver’s daughter, said quietly. “Why don’t you just divorce her, Uncle Sawyer? And you, Boone. Stop talking to her. Stop listening to her. Cut her off. Everyone just cuts her off. You have an iron-clad hold on the company. So she takes some money. You don’t need it all. Not to mention, what I’ve overheard Dad talking about she’s squirreled away, that’s only a small percentage of what the company makes a year. Cut her off. Stop catering to her. Let the FBI figure it all out on their own. It’s not your job anymore.”
The girl had a point.
“When’d you grow up on us?” I asked.
Josephine smiled. “Last year when I turned sixteen and you never came to my party.”
“Hey, I was playing in Europe. I tried to get home in time, but you wouldn’t wait.”
Joe grinned, unbothered that I’d missed it. I’d made it up to her by taking her to a Taylor Swift concert.
“Maybe we should take Joe’s advice,” Sawyer said quietly. “Maybe we’ve given her too much attention. Maybe that really is all she seeks. Let’s see where this leads us. I’ve had those papers ready to draw up for years. I file. You all cut her off. We get on with our lives and see what she does with the freeze-out.”
“Do it,” I suggested, eyes gleaming in excitement at the thought of pissing Gail off. “Let the party begin.”
Twenty
He wiped away her tears, and accidentally her eyebrow, too.
—Boone to Nettie
Boone
One month later
Nettie is seven months pregnant
The Dixie Wardens MC had a big reach. Not just in Montana but everywhere.
The chapter in Montana worked to make her life miserable, refusing her service at their stores all the way to going out of their way to ignore my mother if she came around.
Honestly, life was pretty good.
It’d been a month into the freeze-out, and my mother had disappeared.
The divorce was finalized in record time.
The judge Dad knew awarded my mother a small monthly stipend that would end the moment that she met another man and got married or found a job.
Dad was awarded the estate since it was his before he got married. And Mom got absolutely no stake in Dad’s company, and was forced to sell her shares to Dad at a reasonable price.
Mom was pissed as hell, but there was nothing she could do without drawing attention to her, so she took the divorce quietly.
Even better, when she went to buy a house in town, no one would work with her. Sellers refused to sell. Renters refused to rent.
It was beautiful.
The best part, though, was that she was forced to move out of town. And not just into the surrounding towns since those were run by the Dixie Wardens, too. She was forced to go to a completely different county well over two hours away.
The town was quiet, and the best part was, I was able to enjoy being newly married to my wife with a baby on the way.
It felt like the world was finally working in my favor.
Holly sidled up to me in that moment and leaned against the pillar next to me.
