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Jenny nodded. “He hasn’t let go of her, is what I see.”

“And if I’m not mistaken, because I don’t know Kitty Bennett particularly well,” Peyton continued, “she’s blushing. Just a little bit.”

“I believe you’re right,” Jenny said, sounding delighted.

And then the two women who should never have met, and who shared more than any two women should have had to, grinned at each other.

Because the one thing they had vowed from the start was that one way or another, they would see to it that their children did not make the same mistakes that they had.

And if they could hasten that non-mistake-making activity along a bit?

Well. That was even better.

How kind of Kitty and Finn to get things moving along nicely.

And right on schedule.

Chapter One

Kitty Bennett did not have problems, she solved them.

That had been her primary role in her family since she was small, and because of it, she’d come to think of herself as something of a fixer. Maybe that was dramatic, she sometimes thought. Then again, maybe it was just the simple truth.

After all, she was the reason that her sisters were not still stuck in North Carolina, still dancing to the tune of their parents’ toxic marriage. She was the one who had gotten them out and helped them get away, so that they could see for themselves that there was a whole world outside their family.

And that literally every part of that world was better than what they’d grown up with.

Something she’d been pretty pleased to discover herself.

The three Bennett sisters were close in age, so they were always either going to fight bitterly about every last thing or end up close. That was the way of things. Kitty liked to think that she was the reason that they’d gone the closeness route. Her middle sister, Flannery, had the reddest hair out of the three of them and the temperament to match. The youngest, Indy, had a temper on her, but had the business brain of the family and was much better at keeping her emotions under control.

It fell to Kitty to guide them through the chaos that was their upbringing, because, as the eldest daughter, she’d never had the option of giving in to her own temper. That was a sure way to draw fire—and in the house they’d all grown up in, that was the last thing anyone wanted to do. Kitty was the one who’d learned that the hard way.

That was why Kitty had more or less parented her sisters through high school and then had gotten them all out of there. Once they’d put North Carolina behind them, she had set about educating all three of them about the realities of the world. Because there was never going to be any money for anything unless they made it themselves.

Case in point: Kitty had spent the money she’d saved up working too many jobs in high school to buy a beater of an old VW bus, and her sisters had contributed to the fund when they’d gotten their own jobs. The three of them had painstakingly refurbished it, and the three of them had traveled, which meant living on top of each other. Literally. They’d seen some tempers flare, sure, but they’d also seen both coasts. The red deserts, the Great Lakes. The bayous and the redwoods and the rocky shores of Maine and Oregon alike.

They’d found Cowboy Point entirely by accident.

But then, Kitty liked to think of accidents as opportunities.

They had happened upon Cowboy Point in the middle of a long, slow summer when the little valley had been bright and happy. It had felt almost unbearably charming, particularly because the geriatric old bus had broken down and they’d had to camp out while they tinkered with it.

Far better to do that in a gorgeous alpine valley than by the side of an interstate, they had all agreed.

One night, while eating dinner in the diner attached to the General Store—because they’d all reached their limit with campfire cuisine outside the tents they’d put up in the campground down by the river—Kitty had gotten to talking with a couple at the neighboring table who were bemoaning the fact that they had to drive all the way down into Marietta to get a good pizza.

Ten miles in good weather, but forget about it in winter, the older man had grumbled.

I make a great pizza, Kitty had told them.

She does, Flannery had agreed. It’s so good that we don’t even bother to get pizza anywhere else.

Indy had been nodding along. She makes them on a grill sometimes while we’re camping, and believe me, you really haven’t tasted pizza until you’ve tried it.

The older couple had been so excited by the idea that they’d had the Bennett girls over for a pizza night the next evening. The two of them lived on a plot of land that contained their house, another larger house that sat further back near the steeper slope of the hill, and a big commercial space closer to the road that had been standing empty for some while now.

Their new friends had told them that the abandoned space had once been an Italian restaurant, back when the two of them were young. Back when the two of them could still keep up with the demands of running the only real restaurant in town.