Page 1 of Waiting in Wyoming

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Something feltwrongtonight.

Everything was chaos. And nowhere was really safe.

Nowhere, no one. At any time.

Meyra Talley had learned that lesson well. Nothing had been thesamesince what had happened in the hotel dining room back in November. Everything had felt just…different in the four months since. She was still trying to figure out why.

Maybe it had been cleaning the blood off the front of the buffet table she had refilled thousands of times since she was fourteen that had done it. Changed her.

Or watching the police and the coroner wheel the dead body past where she had been standing. She had already known someone was going to be hurt while she was running out of the back door.

She had known some of the people she loved most in the world were trapped inside.

She had known it was going to bebadinside.

And it had been.

The inn where she’d spent most of her life just didn’t feel safe anymore. Her entire view of the world was different now.

Meyra had helped her cousin Dixie, a nurse, clean the blood off the front of their buffet bar and from the kitchen floor two days later, once the authorities were finished doing whatever it was they had done. It had taken the family a while to adjust after that.

How could it not? Her cousin Dylan had been shot—it was Dylan’s blood that had stained the kitchen tile. No amount of scrubbing had erased it from Meyra’s memories. Her cousin Devaney had been abducted.

A hitman had escaped the police and wasstillout there.

Her cousin Dusty had been abductedby Meyra’s own uncle. Dusty’s father. He’d been trying to protect Dusty that night.

It didn’t even soundrealin her own head.

Stuff like that just didn’t happen in Masterson County every day. But it seemed to be happening far more often than Meyra wanted to think about.

Masterson just didn’t feel safe now. She didn’t know what to do about it.

“You can’t hide in the kitchen your entire life,” a woman said behind her. Meyra turned—to look into green eyes the same shade as her own. Her oldest sister, Miranda, was there, a smirk on her face. Miranda was usually laughing about something.

Sometimes Meyra couldn’t figure out the joke. Her sister didn’t always tell her either. Miranda could be difficult sometimes.

“I’m not hiding. I’m just…grounding myself. There are too many people in the dining room tonight. It’s noisy.” She liked that from a business perspective, but from the perspective of how she felt about dealing with people, well, Meyra knew herself well enough to know that wasn’t something she would ever be comfortable with.

Meyra didn’t likepeople.People were just too overwhelming. So was noise. Noise…was like needles in her head.

Her entire family’s way of life was welcoming people into their worlds. Their home. It had taken her a long time to be okay with the fact that it wasn’t as easy for her as it was her older sisters and her cousins.

She hadn’t felt like the rest of them. She was getting over that, though. Learning to accept who she was—and how different she was.

It wasn’t easy forallof them either. Some struggled even more than she did. “Is Dahlia okay today?”

Dahlia was twenty-one years old. She had been one of the four kids that Uncle Arthur and Aunt Geena had had after they had run away twenty-three years ago. Meyra had just met her in November. Dahlia had never officially been diagnosed with autism—but everyone in the family suspected she was on the spectrum.

Just like Meyra was.

Dahlia acted a lot like Meyra had when she was younger. Meyra had made a point of helping her younger cousin navigate the world at the Talley Inn. It could be complicated; Dahlia was even worse with crowds than Meyra, and hostessing wasn’t very easy for her at all. Sometimes Dahlia just couldn’t handle it even a little bit. Meyra at least looked like she did.

Meyra had gotten very good at masking how much she struggled. Girls and women with autism tended to mask socially sometimes. Meyra had done a lot of research on autism and what it actually meant—for her, her dad, and Dahlia, too. So she could understand. Autism was different in everyone—that was something she tried to remember.

Her experience wasn’t necessarily everyone else’s.