welcome to our ongoing discussion, Clara! I am glad you made it over here! This is where all the "action" is, and even though we have a small number of commenters here, there are a LOT of readers.
About the abrupt transition, those are pretty much par for the course in our stories. What you have not yet seen, however, are several stories that include Colson's daughters and the Red Stallion, one of them is a book -length story I wrote for Christmas 2006 entitled "Red Stallions for Christmas" where Pam and Katie Ann put on a full court press on their father about going to Tourmaline to escape from their mother. So while the attack on Pam is a rather sudden thing in the plot, the idea of their moving has been brought up several times, and each time, their father has rebuffed them. We are just now getting to the first iteration of that theme in "The Long Way Home" where Colson discovers, to his shock, that his ex-wife still has strong feelings for him, and that her jealousy of Ellery is a force of nature.
And -interestingly enough, your second comment about the girls and what they might get up to in Tourmaline, I have given a certain amount of thought to.... but let me leave it at that!