“No,” Jamie said, “of course not.” She felt deflated, and more than a little bit irritated.

“Are you still mad about last night?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m mad. Because you can’t have it both ways, either. You can’t treat me like I’m independent and tough, and then like a lost little girl. You can’t talk about how everyone feels sorry for me and then expect me to just get my own dinner.”

“Jamie, I’m confused as to how these are part of the same fight.”

“You know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It mattered enough for you to come up here guns blazing and get in a fight.”

“Well, how would you feel if you found out that...nobody actually thinks you’re a great rodeo rider? And everybody just thinks you’re kind of a sad, delusional sparrow that they’re humoring?”

“Jamie...” His voice softened. “It’s not a bad thing to have people feel some sympathy for you.”

Except it was. And he wouldn’t understand. Because it was useless damn sympathy. No one had... No one had offered her any help. No one in the town had given her anything to assuage their guilt over her status of sad half orphan. And she was questioning every interaction she’d ever had with anyone and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all.

More to the point, it made her feel...

Lonely.

Which was a strange reaction to the whole thing, and she knew it. But that she was doing one thing, while so many other people seemed to think something else, while her brothers knew something else...it was really isolating. And she was already feeling...

Left behind. Extraneous. Useless.

She’d always been the only girl. She’d done her best to close that gap by being as tough as possible.

Now everyone was a couple. And she was the only in another way.

She was alone.

She looked at Wyatt, standing there with the porch light on behind him, and for the first time she was struck by how different the house looked all of a sudden. There was a wreath hanging on the door, and there were little potted plants everywhere. New covers and cushions on the seats that sat beneath the windows.

It was so very much not the house she had grown up in. Not anymore. Wyatt and Lindy had a life. They had a home.

So did Kaylee and Bennett.

Grant and McKenna.

Luke and Olivia.

Her friend Beatrix and her fiancé, Dane.

Everybody had a life except for Jamie.

Sad Jamie, who was apparently pitiable, and not a competent, tough Dodge woman like she had always imagined.

She felt like she was standing outside her life, looking at herself, and there was a strange and horrible clarity to it that she didn’t like at all.

And she didn’t know what she was angrier about.

Everything that Wyatt had said to her last night, or the revelation of why it all bothered her so much.

Of the fact that she was...