Watching them try to figure out why the candles kept relighting was better than cable TV.
“We could cook on the grill,” Scott suggested, trying to salvage something from the day. The gas grill was empty.
The charcoal grill required actual charcoal knowledge. They attempted it anyway, producing what could generously be called blackened everything.
Even the vegetables were somehow both burnt and raw.
Dinner was canned beans again—cold this time—eaten in the flickering light of the trick candles while rain dripped through various ceiling spots and Diablo paced the porch like a feathered sentry. “I want to go home,” Sophia said quietly. It was the first completely honest thing any of them had said.
“This is Scott’s home now,” Patricia said acidly.
“His inheritance, right, Scott? This is what you wanted?”
Through the infrared camera—battery‑powered, of course—I saw my son’s face.
He looked broken. Good.
“I just thought,” he started.
“You thought you’d take over Mom’s retirement paradise,” Sabrina finished. “Turn it into our vacation home. Maybe rent it out when we weren’t here.”
“You talked about it for months,” Madison added.
“How much money the property was worth, how you could subdivide it.”
Subdivide it.
My eighty acres. Our dream.
Ruth squeezed my hand as we watched. “You okay?”
“I’m perfect,” I said, and meant it.
At nine p.m., something magical happened.
The clouds cleared, revealing a stunning Montana night sky—thousands of stars, the Milky Way visible in all its glory. Through the cameras, I watched them venture onto the porch. Diablo had finally retired to the coop.
For a moment, they were silent, looking up at something most of them had never seen—a sky unpolluted by city lights.
Connor pointed out Mars. Ashley saw her first shooting star.
Even Patricia seemed subdued by the majesty of it. “It’s beautiful,” Sabrina admitted quietly.
“Dad loved this,” Scott said suddenly.
“He used to email me photos of the night sky here. I always deleted them without looking.”
The confession hung in the air like another star. “He built this place for Mom,” he continued.
“Every fence post, every garden bed.
Even when he was sick, he was out here working. And I—I called it a waste of money.”
“You said worse than that,” Patricia reminded him.
Because of course she did. The moment shattered.
They went back inside to their damp, dark rooms.
Through the night‑vision cameras, I watched them toss and turn on the uncomfortable beds. Too hot, then too cold. Scratchy blankets providing little comfort.
At midnight, the coyotes started howling—not close enough to be dangerous, but close enough to be heard clearly through the broken window.
Then the owls joined in. Then Bertha, still in the Mercedes, discovered the horn.
Sunday. One more day.
Tomorrow they would break completely, and I would return to reclaim my kingdom.
But tonight, just for a moment, under those stars, Scott had remembered his father. That was more than I’d expected—maybe more than he deserved. “Ready for the grand finale?” Ruth asked, pulling up the weather forecast on her phone.
I looked at the prediction for Sunday.
102 degrees, no cloud cover, and a wind advisory. “Oh, yes,” I said, raising my champagne glass to the screen where my son sat in the dark, finally understanding what he tried to take.
“Let’s finish this properly.”
The best part? I hadn’t even deployed my secret weapon yet.
Tomorrow, they’d meet the llamas.
Sunday dawned with what the weather service would later call an unprecedented temperature spike for the season. By 6:00 a.m., it was already eighty‑five. By 7:00 a.m., when the exhausted group stumbled into the kitchen after another rooster serenade, it was pushing ninety.
“Why is it so hot?” Ashley moaned, fanning herself with a paper towel.
Because, darling, I’d shut off the central air conditioning before I left, leaving only the inadequate window units in the guest rooms—which required electricity they didn’t have. The manual override for the generator was in Adam’s workshop behind approximately seven hundred pounds of lumber I’d had Tom stack there for winter projects.
Through my laptop at the Four Seasons, where Ruth and I were enjoying eggs Benedict and perfectly controlled air conditioning, I watched them discover that the refrigerator, without power for over twelve hours, had become a box of spoiled potential food poisoning. The smell, when Connor opened it, sent everyone fleeing to the porch where the llamas were waiting.
Now, I should explain about the llamas.
They weren’t mine. They belonged to the Johnsons two properties over. But llamas—like teenagers—tend to wander when they find weak spots in fences.
And someone, definitely not Tom on my instructions, might have created a very convenient path from the Johnsons’ south pasture directly to my front yard.
Three llamas: Napoleon the Spitter, Julius the Screamer, and Cleopatra, who had personal‑space issues. Brett was the first to make eye contact with Napoleon.
Fatal mistake. The llama’s ears went back, his neck arched, and with the accuracy of a trained sniper, he launched a green grassy spray directly into Brett’s face.
The scream Brett produced harmonized beautifully with Julius’s responding call—a sound somewhere between a rusty gate and a demon’s laugh.
Cleopatra, not to be outdone, decided Madison’s hair looked like hay and tried to eat it. “What are these things?” Sabrina shrieked, dodging Julius’s attempt to smell her armpit. “Guard llamas,” I told my laptop screen.
“Very effective ones.”
The thing about llamas is they’re curious.
Extremely curious. And once they decide you’re interesting, they follow you everywhere.
The group retreated to the house, but the llamas simply stood at the windows, staring in with their enormous eyes, occasionally screaming their displeasure at being excluded. Inside, the temperature was climbing.
Without power, without air conditioning, and with the morning sun turning the windows into magnifying glasses, the house was becoming an oven.
They opened every window, which led in the flies that had multiplied exponentially thanks to all the animal droppings no one had properly cleaned. “We need ice,” Scott declared, already sweating through his last clean shirt. The ice maker, of course, required electricity.
The backup ice in the barn freezer had melted when the power went out.
The nearest store was forty‑three minutes away, and the car situation hadn’t improved. The BMW still had a flat.
The Mercedes was now Bertha’s permanent residence. She’d had piglets during the night—five of them—all nursing contentedly in the back seat.
And the rental cars remained mysteriously locked.
“There’s a hand pump,” Connor announced triumphantly. “We can at least get cold water.”
What Connor didn’t know was that the well pump hadn’t been maintained in years. It worked, technically, but the water came up rust‑colored and smelling of sulfur.
They tried it anyway.
Maria threw up. Even the llamas backed away from the smell.
By noon, the temperature hit 102. The metal roof was clicking and popping with expansion.
The horses had found the only shade directly under the kitchen window and were contributing their own special aromatherapy to the situation.
The chickens had given up entirely and were lying in dust bowls they’d created—panting with their beaks open. “I’m calling 911,” Patricia announced, holding up her phone. “And telling them what?” Scott snapped, his patience finally gone.
“That it’s hot and there are llamas?”
That’s when Diablo, heat‑stressed and furious about everything, discovered he could fly high enough to come through the broken bedroom window.
The sounds from upstairs were a mixture of rooster rage and human hysteria. Derek‑David came running down with scratches on his arms and Diablo’s tail feathers in his hand.
“It attacked me. The chicken attacked me in my sleep.”
Technically, no one had been sleeping—but the drama was appreciated.
The afternoon brought the wind.
Montana wind doesn’t play. It comes in at forty miles per hour and brings half the topsoil with it. The broken window became a portal for dust, hay, and what I can only describe as farm confetti.
Within minutes, everything was coated in a fine layer of agricultural history.
“We’re leaving,” Sabrina announced for the hundredth time. “We’ll walk to town if we have to.”
“It’s 105,” Scott pointed out.
“It’s over forty miles.”
“We’ll die.”
“We’re dying here.”
That’s when they heard the trucks. Three pickup trucks rumbling down the drive.
Music blaring, horns honking.
The cavalry. The rescue. No.
It was the Hendersons from the next ranch over coming for the Sunday social I’d forgotten to mention I’d signed up to host weeks ago.
Fifteen people poured out of the trucks carrying casserole dishes, coolers of beer, and a karaoke machine. Big Jim Henderson, all three hundred pounds of him, grabbed Scott in a bear hug.
“You must be Gail’s boy. She told us all about you.
Said you were dying to experience real ranch life.”
“I—what?”
“Don’t worry.
We brought everything. Even got the mechanical bull in the truck. Your mama said
