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She grinned as she followed me to the back door.
Seconds later, Axe was going outside and doing his business.
“Bobo uses the front yard,” she said as she watched Axe. “Axe uses the back. They’ve crossed paths once, and only growled at each other, but I swear my heart was in my throat the entire time.”
I could imagine.
Bobo was a trained military dog. Axe, though he could probably hold his own, wasn’t.
There would’ve been no contest.
“Y’all are doing good,” I admitted. “Much better than I gave y’all credit for.”
She smiled at me just as there was a knock on the adjoining door that separated Sierra’s place from Grans.
I walked over to open it, unsurprised to find her slipping through the door and closing it in Bobo’s alert face.
“Grans,” I said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
She beamed at me. “It is, isn’t it?”
I grunted something under my breath and walked to the back door, opening it.
As I did, my forearm brushed Sierra’s breast, and both of our breaths caught.
She didn’t acknowledge it, though, so I chose not to either.
Instead, she turned and walked over to my grans before wrapping her up in her arms. “You’re a conniving, smart, exceptionally awesome woman.”
Grans laughed. Actually, it was more like a cackle, but I was so used to it that I went with laugh just so it wouldn’t be creepy.
“I knew that it wouldn’t take him long to see you,” she admitted.
I felt my head start to shake and stopped it before she could see how much she amused me.
“Now if you’d only met him earlier and convinced him to have a baby with you…” she mused.
Sierra’s eyes went comically wide at that comment.
“I—” Sierra started, but I interrupted.
“Grans, did you know that this is the girl that I’ve been writing to since she was in high school?” I asked as there was an all-too-familiar knock on the door.
“What?” Grans gasped as she turned to look between Sierra and me. “This is the girl that convinced you to come back to Kilgore?”
Now that hadn’t been something I’d told her.
“What?” Sierra asked.
And before I could interrupt and tell her that it was nothing, Grans started talking.
“After his imprisonment, Malachi wasn’t originally going to come back here. There are a lot of memories here, mostly bad.” She gestured at the door where my parents stood waiting beyond it. “And he knew, of course, that I would go wherever he went. But he came back and stayed in Kilgore because he knew that you were somewhere in the area. That you might need him one day and he could make it here fast if he stayed where he knew you might be located.”
Sierra’s shoulders slumped slightly, and her face softened as she looked at my grandmother.
“That’s really… sweet,” she admitted. “I didn’t know that. Thank you for telling me.” She turned accusing eyes my way. “You wouldn’t have told me that, would you?”
I wouldn’t.
She didn’t need to know that she was a major part of the reason that I’d made it out of that hell hole in the first place.
She didn’t need to bear that kind of responsibility.
“Now, let’s go open that door,” Grans ordered as she walked forward. “Get this shit over with.”
Sierra’s face changed to amused as she went to her living room couch and sat down.
The couch was some hugely massive, likely very comfortable, thing. Something that my parents wouldn’t have had in their formal living room if they had nooses hanging around their necks.
I fucking liked it.
A lot.
I also loved the dog bed that she had in the corner—yet another thing my parents wouldn’t be caught dead having in their house.
Grans opened the door and tried to block the opening with her body, but as usual, my father just barged in, not caring that he wasn’t invited.
“We’ve been out here for hours, Mother,” he said stiffly, taking a look around.
My mother did the same, scooting in behind my father, and came to a halt when she saw the dog.
She glanced at it with no recognition on her face, then sniffed and turned her eyes to the not-so-formal-anymore living room.
She curled her lip up in distaste.
That lip curled farther when she spotted Sierra on the couch.
I wanted to punch her in the throat.
Sadly, I knew that was wrong and I wouldn’t do it in a million years. But the thought was there.
“Hours,” my mother said, dismissing Sierra to stare at my grandmother. “How are you, dear?”
I rolled my eyes at her overtly sweet use of pet names.
“I’d be better if you wouldn’t barge into someone else’s house. This isn’t my house anymore. And I told you that it wasn’t over the phone. Let’s go outside and we’ll discuss this there.”
“It’s hot outside.” My mother waved a hand in front of her face as if she was sitting outside for the last hour and not in the air-conditioned car.
