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“My mom is having a baby.”
She was? Was that even possible? God, she hoped her mom didn’t decide to have another baby too.
“Blythe, be nice,” Renie told her before she even said anything.
“But—”
Renie put her hand over Blythe’s mouth. “I’ll work on telling you how I’m feeling. You need to work on the opposite. We don’t always want to hear what you’re thinking, Blythe.”
“Bravo!” There were claps and cheers from her mom and Liv.
“’Bout time you stood up for something, Renie,” said her mom. “I’ll enjoy finding out how you feel about things.”
Renie rolled her eyes. “It hasn’t been that bad.”
“Don’t pout, sweetheart,” her mother said when Renie left the room to talk to Billy.
“Seriously? You’re siding with Renie on this?”
“She’s right,” her mom said quietly while Renie bickered with Billy about something Blythe didn’t care about. “We don’t always want to hear what you’re thinking. Just because your dad gets away with it doesn’t mean it’s okay, or that you should do the same.”
Blythe was fuming. First Renie lectured her, and now her mom was adding to it. Blythe hadn’t been in Crested Butte twenty-four hours, but she already wanted to go home.
“Maybe I should leave. Would that make everyone happy?”
Liv walked over and hugged her. “No, it wouldn’t make everyone happy, least of all me. I’m sorry, Blythe. We’re encouraging Renie to be less of a doormat, but it shouldn’t be at your expense.”
“What time is dinner?” Renie asked, coming back into the kitchen. “I’m thinking about going for a ride. Blythe, are you up for it?”
“I will be if you let me ride Pooh.”
“Of course I will.”
Blythe wasn’t as comfortable around horses as Renie. In fact
, they usually scared her, but Pooh was different. She was easy and gentle.
“Which horse are you riding?” Blythe asked while they put on their jackets and boots.
“Micah needs some exercise. I’ll take him.”
Micah was the horse Liv rode as a competitive barrel racer, something she’d taken up last year. Blythe thought she was crazy and said so after Liv was badly injured but started competing again soon after she’d recovered.
“Liv would be miserable if she’d quit,” her mother had explained at the time. “It’s been her lifelong dream to compete.”
Blythe understood what that meant on a philosophical level, but there wasn’t anything she’d personally felt strongly enough about to call a dream. She’d been in nursing school, but quit, saying she hadn’t liked it as much as she expected. Truthfully, she hated it.
“I’m thinking about going back to school,” Renie told her on their way to the barn.
Right around the same time Blythe quit the nursing program, Renie transferred from Dartmouth, where she was studying biomedicine, to the Colorado State University in Fort Collins. She’d planned to become a large animal vet but had dropped out of that program too last year.
“When?”
“After Billy and I get married.”
Renie and Billy were getting married. It would take some time for that to sink in. Especially since Billy, eleven years older than they were, discovered he had a daughter he hadn’t known about, and the baby’s mother had passed away.
Renie broke up with Billy over it, and for a long while, Blythe didn’t think they’d ever speak again. Not that Blythe had heard any of this first hand.
