They had the sort of thing Libby had believed she’d had with Ryan.
That it had all been a lie had begun to weigh on Libby. It rooted into her thoughts, knitted into her days, sank into her heart. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. She had stopped living her life, had let things begin to slip and slither away.
It was Sam who had taken the golf club from Libby’s hand the afternoon she bashed the windows of Ryan’s truck, but it was Madeline who had called Libby’s mother.
Her mother, in turn, had taken Libby to the Mountain View Behavioral Health Center. “What you need is rest, honey,” she’d said as they drove to the facility on the edge of an industrial park near Colorado Springs. “The not eating or sleeping, the moping about, and now this.” She shook her head. “I am worried about you.”
Libby had been too exhausted, too far past the point of caring to argue with her mother.
Now, a little more than a month since she’d come home, Libby still wasn’t certain if she was grateful for Madeline’s intervention or terribly resentful. But then again, everything still felt a little gray and fuzzy to Libby these days. Sometimes, she felt as if there was something between her and the entire world, and if she just tried hard enough, it would all come together. Now, five months since Ryan first asked her to move out, Libby still couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
And then again, judging by what Ryan had said recently, maybe it hadn’t been a lie so much as a huge mistake on his part—
Can’t think about that now, not with Madeline in the living room.
Libby closed her eyes and took a series of deep breaths, a coping mechanism Dr. Huber had taught her at Mountain View. She reminded herself there were much more important things to think about, such as what they would do with this ranch they’d inherited from their dad.
Libby, Emma, and Madeline still hadn’t decided what they would do with the ranch in the long run. Sell it, keep it, abandon it—who knew? For now, they were focused on what would be the third event at Homecoming Ranch in the six months they’d owned it. The first had been a family reunion. The second a wedding. The third event, scheduled to occur in two weeks, would be a civil union between Austin and Gary.
Gary—or more precisely, Gary’s mother, Martha—had some very specific ideas for the ceremony, and that is what Libby made herself think about now. The event was tangible and imminent. Flowers, candles, wind chimes, a string quartet—if Libby concentrated on those things, she didn’t think about things that made her so blessedly angry.
Madeline clomped into the kitchen, carrying groceries and eyeing Libby warily, as if she expected Libby to do something crazy, like pick up a knife and start stabbing the faded curtains over the kitchen sink. “Hey,” she said, depositing her groceries on the counter. “Sam Winters was here again?”
“Yep,” Libby said, sliding immediately into Friendly, Upbeat Libby. “I’m going to make some enchiladas. I love enchiladas, don’t you? Cheese especially.”
“What’d he want?” Madeline asked as she began to take items out of the paper bag. Bananas, coffee, paper towels.
“Just to chat. Hey, did you happen to get tortillas?”
Madeline slid a package of them across the kitchen counter to Libby. “So what did he want to chat about?”
It was obvious that Madeline spent her days waiting for the next thing that would send Libby back to Mountain View. She walked on tiptoes and then pretended she wasn’t doing exactly that. It was annoying. The one time Libby had tried to explain, as best she could, why she’d lost herself that day, why depression had steamrolled over her, flattening her into a pancake with tunnel-vision anger, she’d come away thinking that Madeline didn’t really understand what betrayal could do to a person.
To be perfectly honest, Libby didn’t understand it either. She never once had any inkling that she was a person to resort to violence, not until the day she’d tried to speak to Ryan about seeing Alice and Max, and he’d exploded, telling her that she’d been too lenient with his kids and had turned them into little entitled monsters, and that it was best if she didn’t come around them anymore, and didn’t she get it, he and Gwen had been seeing each other behind her back for months?