don’t need me to hold your hand. But... I want to.”
“And I want to push you out of the nest,” Sammy said. “But if you’re not ready yet... I’m not going to be mad.”
“I don’t care what you do,” Rose said. “I’m just going to put it out there right now.”
“Thanks, Rose,” Pansy said.
Her sister was being funny but Pansy’s throat was tight. She might not get to have this moment with her mom, but she had them. These wonderful women who wanted different things, lived life in different ways and loved her.
She loved them too.
They didn’t need to be alike, they just needed love. Acceptance. And they had that. Pansy had never really done anything that might test those bonds. She had grown into someone decidedly uncontroversial.
Until this week.
And still she’d known she could talk to them.
She’d been right.
“You’re welcome.”
“Why not do it?” Sammy asked. “You’re already in. Might as well jump in all the way.”
She still felt so raw. So fragile. But somehow this all made her feel better. Giving it a reason. Giving it a name. That she’d been looking for a place to be wild while all else stayed orderly. It made her feel less like she was losing her mind.
She looked at the three women that she called sisters. “Thank you,” she said.
Her family might not look like very many other people’s families. But she had a wonderful family.
And whatever she decided to do about West, she had never appreciated her family more.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CONSIDERING THE WAY that Pansy had run away from him, West’s primary concern when he got back to the homestead was that he check on her.
Everything had gone well for Emmett at the bakery. West was impressed with the way Carl dealt with his half brother. He gave him just the right amount of responsibility while offering a certain amount of guidance. It was just what a young boy in Emmett’s situation needed. He didn’t need to be treated like a kid, no, that ship had sailed.
He still was a kid, though. A kid who’d had to grow up too fast with no guide on how to do it.
But he had grown up in a household with a mother who had never treated him like he needed to be nurtured. Offering it suddenly now would seem strange. Backward. Because he had never, ever been given anything like that in the past. Not when he had needed it more. And he had grown hard and tough in the intervening years, and he needed to be given the respect that he had earned by still being here.
West understood that, because it had been his experience.
Emmett was exhausted by the time they got back to the house. They had gotten a take and bake pizza from the store, and he had put Emmett in charge of baking it and had made no pretense about the fact that he was going to find Pansy. Because Emmett had assumed they were sleeping together anyway. And he was sure his brother hadn’t believed their denial. So given that it was true now, West didn’t see the point of pretending it wasn’t.
He grabbed a beer out of his fridge, then another, and went out the front door, and down the porch, down the well-worn path that led to Pansy’s cabin. When he got there, he knocked on the door.
It took a moment, but then it cracked open and he saw one suspicious dark eye looking up at him.
“I came to check on you,” he said.
“I’m here,” she said. “And I’m whole.”
“Proof required.”
She opened the door a bit farther, and revealed that she was in fact intact. “A relief,” he said.
“Did you think that I had been eaten by wolverines?”
“Not eaten. Maybe just gnawed on a little bit.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to be gnawed on by wolverines.”
“Who does?”
“Someone probably does. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my line of work it’s that people are weird. So trust me, someone, somewhere out there, really wants to be chewed on by a wolverine. And will probably film it. And upload it to the internet for other people to watch.”
“The world is weird,” he said.
“No argument from me.”
“You ran away,” he said.
She drew up to her full height. Which wasn’t that impressive. “No I didn’t. I went to visit my sisters.”
“You ran away from me,” he repeated.
She kept her posture, all stiff and huffy. “Well. OK. Fine. Maybe I did.”
Her eyes met his and his stomach went tight. What had