“Sammy, you need a plan. You need a house. A real job...”

“I make money with my jewelry.”

“Health insurance.”

“I’ll figure it out,” she said.

“Sammy, life is expensive. And when you think you got everything under control, one of the dumbass kids that you take care of goes hiking, slips off the trail and has to get airlifted out. And where do you suppose that bill goes? How much do you suppose health insurance covers of air transportation? A lot, but twenty percent of thousands of dollars is still thousands of dollars. You’re one accident away from being absolutely buried.”

“That’s thinking a little bit further ahead than I need to.”

“You have to think further ahead,” Ryder said. “You have to. That’s having children.”

“Ryder, whether or not I go out and get pregnant tomorrow, I need to make some changes in my life. And you demanding that I submit to a life plan is not going to change what I want.”

He had half a mind to accuse her of wanting to do this out of sheer stubbornness. Or try and call her bluff, because with Sammy, it was very difficult to tell the difference sometimes between a harebrained scheme and a provocative statement.

She lived to be unknowable, and usually, from his perspective, that made her easy enough to decode. But with this he honestly couldn’t say.

“All this and you want to leave, too?”

That got him. The idea that she might not be there. That for the first time in seventeen years Sammy might not be steps away from his front door.

“Yes,” she said. “You have... You have Hope Springs. It’s yours. You work the land, and you make something wonderful out of it. I admire that. I have my...my thing. But I need to be...”

“So what is this about? Your mom or Pansy?”

“Both. I mean, one fed off the other.”

He shook his head and huffed. “Women get so weird about weddings. Is it just because you’re feeling competitive because she’s younger than you and she’s getting married?”

Right then he knew that it was the wrong thing to say. Sammy was a beacon of light. Sammy was all sunny smiles and glitter. Until she wasn’t. And very few people knew what it looked like to watch those summer-blue eyes shift and sharpen into shards of ice. But he did. He knew it well.

And that was just what they did then. Sharpen until he was sure he was about to get stabbed clean through.

“Is that what you think? That I’m in some kind of marriage competition with your little sister? I don’t need a man to realize my life plans. And that includes you. I don’t need your input. I don’t need your advice. I’m not a child, Ryder, and this is the problem. I haven’t given you a reason to think that I’m not. But you... I’m two years younger than you. I understand that you were put in a very weird position where you were basically raising people your age. But I was never one of them.”