Silence greeted her from the other end of the phone.
“Chase?”
“No. Thank you.”
She waited for an explanation. None came. Not even a lame excuse about having to work like she’d used tonight. Though she truly did have to work. She scowled at her laptop and his handsome mug before snapping the lid shut.
“Will there be anything else?” he asked. Tersely.
At his formal tone, ire slipped into her bloodstream as stealthily as a drug. Her back went ramrod straight; her eyebrows crashed down.
“No,” she snapped. “That concludes my business with you.”
“Very well.”
She waited for goodbye but he didn’t offer one. So she hung up on him.
“Jerk.” She tossed the phone on the coffee table and rose to refill her glass. She’d called out of the kindness of her heart and he’d made her feel foolish and desperate.
Just like ten years ago.
“This is who he is, Miriam,” she told herself as she poured more wine. “A man who owns a sixteen-million-dollar mansion he rarely visits. A man whose only interest is to increase his bank statement and buy up beautiful bits of land because he can.”
She swallowed a mouthful of wine and considered that, as much disdain as she’d had for Chase’s mother then and still, Eleanor Ferguson had been right.
Miriam and Chase were better off apart.
Miriam hadn’t been in her mother’s kitchen for more than five minutes before she started airing her grievances about Chase and the phone call from last night.
Kristine was placing freshly baked rolls into a basket and her brother Ross snatched another one and dunked the end of it into the gravy.
“He’s the mayor of what?” their older brother asked around a bite.
“Dallas, dummy,” Kris replied. “And stop eating my rolls. I made three dozen and you’ve already snarfed three of them.”
“Four.” He argued. His mouth curling into a Grinchy smile.
Kristine sacrificed one more that she tossed at him, but Ross, former college football player that he was, caught it easily, struck a Heisman pose and absconded to the dining room.
“He doesn’t act thirty-nine,” Kris grumbled. “Anyway. Chase is a jerk and I’m sorry you had to deal with that.”
“Yeah, well. I’m sorry I didn’t say what I thought to say until after I hung up.”
“Such as.” Kristine motioned with a roll for Miriam to go on.
“I would’ve informed him that I wasn’t one of his underlings and I deserved better treatment than a haughty No. Thank you.” She dipped her voice into a dopey tone that didn’t sound like him, but made her feel better. “I’d have told him that I became a success without his billions and in a field where I wasn’t causing global warming. My line of work is admirable.”
“It is, sweetie.”
“Thank you.”
Miriam had completed her degree in agricultural sciences, going on to do compliance work behind a desk for a few years until she realized how wholly unsatisfying it was to push papers from one side of her desk to another. Five years ago, she’d found the Montana Conservation Society and stumbled into her calling. She’d started as program manager and was then promoted to director of student affairs. She mostly worked with teenagers. She taught them how to respect their environment and care for the world they all shared. She found it incredibly rewarding to watch those kids grow and change. Several of the students who came through MCS wouldn’t so much as step on an ant if they could help it by the time she was through with them.
And yet Chase had dismissed her like she was a temp on his payroll.
“I should’ve gone over to his big, audacious house and told him what I think of his wasteful habits and egomaniacal behavior.”
“Who, dear?” Her mother stepped into the kitchen and gestured to the basket of rolls. “Kristine, to the table with those, please. We’re about to start.”
“No one,” Miriam answered. “Just... No one.”
Kris shuffled into the dining room and Judy Andrix watched her go before narrowing her eyes and squaring her jaw. Since Miriam’s father, Alan, had died five years ago of complications from heart surgery, her mom had taken it on herself to play both the role of mom and dad. It wasn’t easy for any of them to lose him, but their mother had taken the brunt of that blow. Thirty-nine years of marriage was a lifetime.
“Miriam, would you grab those bottles of wine and take them to the table for me?”
“Sure thing.” Relieved the conversation was over, she did as she was asked.
Halfway into dinner, however, her wine remained untouched and her food mostly uneaten.
“Meems, what’s going on in your world?” Wendy’s girlfriend, Rosalie, asked conversationally.
Miriam blinked out of her stupor and realized she’d been staring at her mashed potatoes, Chase on her mind. “Work. That’s about it.”
“How did the camp go this summer? I meant to ask but I was so busy.”
Busy being a surgeon. It happened.
Miriam filled her in on the camp for eighth graders she’d cochaperoned. “You haven’t lived until you’ve been in charge of thirty hormone-riddled teens in tents.”
Wendy nudged Rosalie with her shoulder. “That’s what I keep warning her about every time she brings up having children.”
“Children are great,” Ross’s wife, Cecilia, said at the exact moment their five-year-old daughter Raven threw her butter-covered roll on the floor.
“Raven!” While Ross went about explaining to his daughter that the food belonged on her plate and not on the rug, Wendy and Rosalie answered questions from Kristine about having children. Surrogate, they agreed, but they weren’t against adoption.
Mom interjected that she didn’t care how any of them went about it so long as she was given another grandchild.
“Or two,” she added with a pointed look at Kris and Brendan, who wisely filled his mouth full of stuffing rather than comment. “Meems, have you been seeing anyone?”
And that’s when the last strand on the rope of Miriam’s dwindling patience snapped.
“I’m sorry.” She stood abruptly from the table and the room silenced. Even Raven seemed to sense the importance of the moment and stopped her complaining. Every pair of eyes swiveled to Miriam. “I have to run an errand.”
“What? Now?” Her mother’s voice rose.
“I’ll be back in an hour, tops. That leaves plenty of time for dessert. Feel free to start playing games without me.” She could easily make the round trip to Bigfork and back before the traditional board game battle began. And she didn’t mind at all ousting herself from a conversation involving families and children when there was a man very nearby who was going about his evening as if she didn’t matter. Been there, done that. She didn’t care to suffer a repeat of ten years ago.
Miriam rushed into the kitchen and rifled through her mother’s cupboard for a plastic storage container. She sliced one of her pies and slid three large wedges into