Page 17 of Well Aware

The one single graduation Sonja had—elementary—we’d missed that, too.

Hell, three days after her funeral, we were back at that fucking stadium.

To say that I hated the place would be an understatement.

Then, he’d gone and acquired the Cowgirls.

On one hand, my father purchasing the Cowgirls had come from a good place deep inside his heart. He’d taken her joking “buy the Cowgirls” and run with it. Meanwhile, Sonja had felt the same way that Lysander and I had. We’d been mentally and physically exhausted, traveling back and forth between our home in Montana and the stadium in Wyoming once a freakin’ week—because it wouldn’t do to not present a united front family-wise.

Sonja had jokingly said it to our dad because she’d thought life couldn’t get any busier.

Why not add one more team to our already busy life?

Except, my dad had said the magic words.

If you don’t do it, I’ll let your sister keep the Cowgirls.

And that was something that I could never let happen.

My dad lived and breathed football.

He’d played professionally for several years, which was how he’d met my mother, who also happened to work for the same organization when he’d purchased the Condors.

The two of them had moved to Montana, and after Sonja’s passing, they’d sunk every single cent of their savings into buying the Montana Cowgirls.

My parents had four children—Lysander, Seraphina, Sonja, and myself.

As the middle child, I’d always hung at the back of the party, observing and doing the exact opposite of my oldest sister, Seraphina.

Seraphina was everything that I wasn’t.

She knew how to be the billionaire. She went to the parties and wore the fancy clothes. She spent the money, swooned at appropriate times, laughed at jokes that weren’t funny just to appease, and ultimately knew how to live rich.

Meanwhile, I’d figured out young that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the parties or the money grabs. I just wanted to live a quiet, simple life.

I’d joined the Marines at eighteen—much to my parents’ dismay. Spent twenty years there doing what I loved, then retired to become a science teacher who loved that job just as much as his first one.

Lysander, the baby of the group, had just been along for the ride.

He worked at the hospital in town as a radiologist.

He was somewhere in between my live simply lifestyle and my sister’s high life only one.

My sister was a snob who hated anyone who didn’t have money, looked down on you if you worked somewhere she didn’t deem “acceptable” and treated everyone like her servant.

And our parents just let it happen because Seraphina was their child. And their children were their everything.

I couldn’t pinpoint a time when I realized that I didn’t like my sister very much, but one day I’d come into the kitchen and realized that it’d been a really long time since I looked at her like a sister. Someone that I loved.

Honestly, on a good day, I could barely tolerate her.

She was every stereotype you could conjure up when thinking of a stuck-up rich asshole.

I’d felt like that about her since I was old enough to understand, and it’d only gotten worse after she’d killed Sonja in a drunk driving accident. Then gotten off with not even a slap on the wrist.

So, when my father had told me that Serphina was running their beloved company into the ground, I’d reluctantly agreed to turn it around and make it profitable again. When the season was up, he agreed to sell it.

With one caveat—Serphina wasn’t allowed anywhere near me or the Cowgirls.