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Somehow, it had all come together as if it had been preordained. Kitty made them the best pizzas they’d ever had. Indy started asking them about the restaurant business. Flannery had stood by the window, looking out at the abandoned restaurant, and her creative wheels already spinning with possibilities.

And that was how the Bennett sisters came to take over that old Italian restaurant and make it into Mountain Mama Pizza, where it had been reliably serving the community for the last seven years.

The catch was that they were in a rent-to-own situation. A very comfortable rent-to-own situation that had always been more when you’re ready than please pay a percentage of the purchase price with an obligation to buy in x years.

Kitty had never paid too much attention to that beyond the monthly rent, because Izzy and Alessandro Milan quickly became friends. More than friends. They all adopted each other, since the Milan children had long since moved away from this tiny corner of rural Montana, and only came back for holidays.

One thing Kitty had always known and never let herself forget was that family could turn toxic at the slightest provocation. She really shouldn’t have been surprised.

But she was.

This morning, she and Izzy had their typical morning coffee from the coffee cart that was parked next to the General Store. They sipped from their to-go cups on the walk home, chatting about things like the freshest ingredients around, the farms that could supply them, and the usual concerns about the snowpack versus the growing season. All very normal for them.

Then she asked where they were on that whole rent-to-own pathway. Also normal. She’d asked many times over the years.

But today, for the first time, Izzy looked… pensive.

“I don’t know,” she said, pushing back a bit of her white hair that the breeze had started to play with and tucking it behind her ear. “I think we need to rethink the situation.”

Kitty felt herself go entirely too still. She felt the telltale prickling sensation on the back of her neck. It was her red flag. Her alarm system. Proof positive that something was wrong.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

And as someone who had long been accused of intensity when she was just speaking, she worked hard to keep her tone pleasant. Especially when she was, in fact, feeling intense.

She focused on her friend. Izzy walked a lot slower these days. When they’d arrived in town she had been hardy Montana stock, as she’d liked to tell them, usually with her bawdy laugh as punctuation. Her hair was pure white now and she wore it in the same complicated French braid that somehow felt quintessentially western to Kitty. That braid also featured in many photos around her house, dating back to when that same hair had been a rich, dark brown and Izzy had clearly spent most of her time with horses. Her skin was gently creped, she loved turquoise and silver jewelry, and she still dressed like the cowgirl she’d been in her youth.

Today, her faded blue eyes were as canny as ever.

“Alessandro and I have been talking about this,” she was saying, still ambling along the road as if she hadn’t just dropped a bomb on Kitty’s head. “And we really feel that what’s important about that restaurant space, what makes it special, is that it’s a family endeavor.”

“Luckily, my sisters and I are a family,” Kitty reminded her, and had to force a smile to go with it. Because her neck was still prickling at her. “As you said years ago, we tick all the right boxes.”

But Izzy was shaking her head. “The thing is, it works right now because you’re all single. But you won’t stay that way, will you?” She laughed in a way that was clearly supposed to encourage Kitty to join in, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. “You’re all such pretty girls. Sooner or later, you’ll each find yourself the right man and move away. As all of my daughters did in their time. It’s the natural way of things, and we would hate for you to be saddled with a piece of property here in Cowboy Point when your new husband wants to move to Tacoma. You see what I mean.”

Kitty did not see what she meant, and not only because she would not follow a man anywhere—and certainly not to Tacoma. She felt as if she was having an out of body experience. As if she was standing beside herself, suddenly. She didn’t know which part of that astonishing statement she should address first because she was also very much afraid that if she did any addressing of any kind, she would irreparably damage their relationship.

She couldn’t bear the thought of that.

And Kitty might have been used to toxic family moments and the terrible reversals and denials that made them worse—or she had been before she’d removed her sisters and herself from that particular North Carolina swamp—but she couldn’t quite believe it was happening here. With Izzy, who had been more like a mother to her than her own mother had ever been.

Because her own mother had cared only about her husband to the detriment of… literally everything else.

Izzy remembered all their birthdays. She dropped off little gifts for them because she’d seen something and thought of them. She was free with hugs and invitations and always reminded them that her door was open to them as needed.

So she had no choice here but to bite her tongue, and it hurt. “I don’t know what to say to that,” she managed to say.

“I know you think I’m a silly old woman,” Izzy said with a laugh, but also with enough direct eye contact that Kitty was completely aware that her friend knew that no one who had ever met Izzy had ever thought for even one moment that she was anything like a silly old woman. Quite the opposite. “But Alessandro and I are aligned on this. I’m so sorry if that’s disappointing, my dear.”

She didn’t look particularly sorry. Izzy patted Kitty’s hand, and then continued on down the path that branched off toward her house. Leaving Kitty standing there on the dirt road that wound back from the street and branched off to Izzy and Alessandro’s house on the right and hers farther back and to the left.

With no earthly idea what to do with herself.

“I did not see this coming,” she muttered out loud to the pine trees and the watching mountains all around.

But that felt a little too much like self-pity, and she didn’t do that.

She wheeled around and marched herself back toward the street, thinking that she would do what any reasonable person would do when essentially sucker punched of a morning. She would head across the street, order herself the fluffiest French toast that Tennessee Lisle could whip up, and eat each and every one of her feelings until they were drowned in too much sugar and fried dough.