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Prologue

The first night in December had teeth, this high above Paradise Valley, Montana, in the remote mountain community of Cowboy Point.

Jenny Lisle liked it that way. She liked a winter night to feel like winter, and no matter what the calendar said, winter in the Gallatin Mountains pretty much started the moment summer ended. That being when August couldn’t fight off those cold mornings any longer. By the time December rolled around, she liked to sit in her little house halfway up Lisle Hill, let the fire crackle, and make sure that she was wearing something cozy while the winds blew in and the snow came down.

It was particularly delightful when shared with a friend.

And Jenny found that she still couldn’t believe what a friend she had in Peyton Patrick, the woman who ought to have been her mortal enemy. The woman her husband had built a whole second family with before disappearing without a trace.

Most of the women Jenny knew would never have given Peyton the time of day.

But then, most of those women had the good fortune to never have found themselves married to Patrick Lisle.

And, sure, it’s possible that Jenny and Peyton had both leaned into it more than was wise because it had felt pretty great to defy him and get together at all. Much less be friends. They both knew that he would never have allowed it. He would have actively pitted them against each other, in fact, in the same way he’d kept them in the dark about each other for so long.

They both knew exactly who Patrick Lisle had been. Or still was, if he was out there somewhere—though Jenny found she cared less and less about what might have happened to him as the years passed.

What mattered was that, in addition to giving her three children half siblings that they’d welcomed as if there was never any reason for any bad blood between them, the Patricks’ relocation to Cowboy Point had also given her Peyton.

First an ally, which had been gift enough. But now she was well and truly a friend.

Maybe a best friend, Jenny liked to think, and she hadn’t had one of those in a long while. That was what happened when a seemingly decent life went so obviously off the rails in the form of a husband just… abandoning not only his family but the long history of his people in a place like Cowboy Point. Folks kept a safe distance from that runaway train or they found ways to help it hurtle along faster, and Jenny couldn’t say she was mad about it. She understood. A lot of people thought infidelity was contagious.

She also appreciated every person around here who made it clear that they couldn’t be relied on. Information she hoarded and remembered, when situations reversed themselves as situations often did. Not that she’d act as they had, but she remembered.

Jenny bet they did, too.

Maybe it wasn’t such a mystery where some of her children’s martyrish tendencies came from, now she considered it.

The end result of all that turmoil, happily, was that she got to spend evenings like this with a good friend who was not only a surprise addition to her life this last little while—she’d gone through the same thing Jenny had. Literally.

Tonight they both got to hunker down in the sweet old house that had been in their mutual husband’s family for generations. They got to delight in the crisp weather outside, the snow falling gently enough to suggest that it was only going to be an inch or two to start December off. They got to watch their shows together, read their books, and let the fact that the man who’d betrayed them both was out there somewhere while they had fully taken over what ought to have been his warm them as surely as the fire did.

Jenny found that thought kept her nice and toasty all winter long.

Because they often enjoyed their wine of an evening, they didn’t bother worrying about getting Peyton back home as the night wore on. She often stayed over—so often that Jenny had started to think of the room that had once been Tennessee’s as Peyton’s, now. Sometimes they spent time together in the little cabin on the hill leading out of Cowboy Point and farther into the mountains. It was a cozy little space, one of the cabins that sat below the Stark family’s Cowboy Point Lodge that was finally completely renovated and revived and had started taking guests in its main building over the summer. But Peyton shared that cabin with her daughter, Helena, and her son Raleigh had his Airstream parked outside.

It’s like the fraternity and sorority I never joined, Peyton had said with a rueful laugh once.

That had been enough for them to obliquely agree that they might as well do most of their hangouts in Jenny’s overly-large-for-one-person house. Because there were often things to discuss that their children didn’t need to hear. No matter how grown-up they were these days.

Tonight, for example, they were engaging in their favorite pastime. Analyzing their children’s romantic lives—which the kids had a tendency to view as “interfering.”

Patrick Lisle being the lowlife that he was, he had spaced out each set of three children with both women so that they matched. Deliberately, Jenny often thought, because he had always been detail-oriented in his cruelties. That meant Jenny’s Tennessee was more or less the same age as Peyton’s Finn. Jenny’s Dallas and Peyton’s Raleigh came next, on either end of the same year. And then, as matching cherries on top, Jenny’s Cat and Peyton’s Helena were only a few months apart.

Helena had been the one to find the truth about the father she knew as Lyle Patrick. Then she’d found Cowboy Point and had come here to scope the place out. When she’d decided that the Lisle side of the family seemed…more like them than like her awful dad, she’d gotten the rest of her family to join her here to maybe build some bridges.

Jenny couldn’t remember now how she’d thought that would go, though she did recall that she’d been sure that it would be a temporary thing, back then. Instead, it seemed the Patricks were settling in—with the possible exception of Raleigh, who was the first to tell anyone who asked, and many who didn’t, that he wasn’t made to settle down anywhere. Finn had gone ahead and married one of the Bennett girls and Helena was talking about starting a second coffee truck since the first one, parked year-round outside the Lisles’ historic General Store, was such a success.

But it had been a good thing for everyone involved. Right from the start, they’d universally decided to put old family dynamics and potential hurt feelings that were Patrick’s fault, not anyone else’s, aside. And maybe that helped everything else ease a bit. Tennessee had finally seen Matilda Stark as more than the younger sister of a man he considered a friend, something Jenny would have said he’d never allow. The kids met weekly down in the pizza place that was in so many ways a hub of Cowboy Point—and was where Finn had first set eyes on Kitty Bennett—because they were all dedicated to making sure they made themselves a family.

It felt like roots. Good ones, this time. Not twisted around on whatever Patrick had done.

That Tennessee and Finn had managed to find themselves the kind of love that both Jenny and Peyton had believed Patrick offered them, once upon a time, except the real version this time, made everything that much sweeter.

It was what they wanted most of all for their kids, who didn’t deserve to carry the weight of that man. They figured they could do that. They should do that.

Jenny was happy to say that her daughter had found it a few years back with Wilder Carey, and the two of them, if possible, seemed even happier now than they had at first. No matter how appalled her sons had been that Cat was with someone their age. Jenny had not seen age as a barrier. She hadn’t even cared about the infamous feud between the Lisles and the Careys that dated back to the very first member from each of those founding Cowboy Point families getting heated in a poker game.