one
“Sloane, is this a resort?” Teagan asked his sister as soon as his confusion grew strong enough to overcome the inertia of his medication.
He didn’t know where he was. But he knew that giant tents—if the wordtentcould adequately describe a canvas-and-wood structure larger than his condo back home—were found only in resorts. A luxury resort at that, because there were thick, soft carpets around the king-sized bed, a full living room set in rattan and batik-print cotton, and enough cheerfully twee Edison bulbs strung among the rafters to illuminate most of Williamsburg. It looked like a space specifically arranged to trend under theglampinghashtag or grace the front page of theWall Street Journaltravel section. “Are we... on vacation?”
Gracie Square Hospital had doped him up for discharge this morning, so he’d been high as a kite when he boarded the plane to Montana. And his sister had shut down his initial inquiries about their destination. But now that he was slowly swimming toward full consciousness, Teagan had alotof questions about what he was doing here.
“No, this is a wellness retreat,” Sloane corrected him, as uncharacteristically attentive as she’d been during the entiretyof their journey from New York. “Wilderness therapy. It’s run by a doctor.” She emphatically flapped her hands in the sleeves of the oversized sweater she wore over her thin frame.
Sloane and Teagan didn’t look very much alike. Sloane, slender and brunette, looked just like their mother, her father contributing just as much to her features as he had to her upbringing. It was startling, sometimes, how much Sloane looked like Teagan’s earliest memories of their mother, even thoughworriedwas not an expression that had typically graced her face.
“But why am I at a wellness retreat? I’m not actually sick. I was cleared to go back to work,” he protested. Under a cocktail of medications that kept all sharp-edged thoughts at bay, Teagan was having trouble following the reason that Sloane had dragged him to a wellness retreat in Big Sky when all he’d been instructed to do was enroll in outpatient therapy. He had not, in fact, had a heart attack. Physically, he was fine.
Sloane’s eyes—blue to his hazel—welled up with concern.
“Oh my God, Tiggie,” she said. “Your brain is like a bowl full of betta fish right now, isn’t it? You can’t go back toworklike this. But don’t worry. I’ve got it. I told your secretary you’d be gone for at least a month.”
That too was hard to follow. Teagan didn’t have a secretary or any kind of PA—he couldn’t justify it, despite the swamping press of calls and invitations and correspondence that had threatened to drown him even before this current misadventure. The family charitable foundation he’d run for the two years since his mother’s death was bleeding cash. He barely even paid himself a salary.
“You talked to Rose, maybe? The investment officer?” heclarified, heart beating faster. Who else knew by now? He wouldn’t have willingly gotten anyone at his office—let alone his sister—involved in this painfully embarrassing situation. He’d thought he was dying. A heart attack would have been easier to explain than this. Hisnotdying would be easier to handle if fewer people knew he was only struggling to cope with his very ordinary professional obligations.
“Whatever! Rose, yes. She told me you’d need a responsible person to be released to, then probably some outpatient treatment too. I said I’d take care of it. This is me taking care of it.”
It took Teagan a minute to process that. It wasn’t as though he’d left Rose much in the way of instructions during his ambulance ride to the hospital, but only someone who didn’t know Sloane well would consider her aresponsible person.
“This will be, like, so good for you,” she told him, wrapping her hands into the slightly grubby cotton sweater he wore over his very grubby oxford. “This is a place where you can get healthy. You need to be somewhere you can relax, deal with your stress, maybe get some space to feel whatever you need to feel about Mom. Not the hospital, not your stupid little condo building that doesn’t even have a fitness room.”
Teagan ran a hand through his hair and looked around the tent where Sloane was proposing he stay. Great purple mountains towered over golden hills. The camp was on the edge of a sparkling blue lake ringed with gray pebbles and green fir trees. There were a dozen luxurious canvas tents with their sides rolled up to admit the sweet July breeze. Each tent had a wooden patio adorned with strings of fairy lights and tasteful groupings of cream-colored pillar candles.The big fluffy beds within the tents, set with half a dozen pillows and a faux sheepskin throw, promised hours of seductive rest. But Teagan didn’t need any of this—he had prescriptions and a safety plan, and as soon as this last round of benzodiazepines wore off, he had a week of missed work to catch up on.
“I can’t take that much time off,” he protested.
“Rose said you could,” Sloane insisted.
He really couldn’t. His mother had left the foundation’s finances in a shambles, and two years of drudgery spent cleaning up the books had only clarified its current dire straits. And even if it had been hubris to think he was qualified to fix that with no professional experience besides trading municipal bonds, he couldn’t let everything drop now. He’d be no better than his mother.
“Sloane, this all looks very nice, but—”
His sister shoved him lightly. “Did you see there’s horseback riding?” Sloane asked, eyes wheedling.
Teagan groaned and put his hand on his forehead.Horses.He needed ten million dollars in new endowment commitments and a direct flight back to LaGuardia, nothorses.
“The last horse I was on was a pony in Central Park. I was eight.”
“Forget the horses, then. There’s plenty of other stuff to do. We need this,” Sloane argued.
Teagan began frowning overweas Sloane pushed the admissions paperwork into his hands. Setting aside the question of why there weretwoadmissions packets, he humored her by opening the folders and flipping through the glossy brochures.
There were pages of information on the nutritionists,physical trainers, and astrologers he might expect to encounter. There was sunrise yoga, sunset yoga, crystal-guided mindfulness, and—on full moon nights—full moon yoga. There were painting classes, jewelry-crafting workshops, canoeing, archery, and gourmet plant-based dinners served under the stars. Did this place even have therapy? Finally, Teagan reached the professional biography of Dr. Goedert, the program director’s husband.
He was a clinical psychologist, which seemed like overkill. Teagan’s own doctor would handle his medications, and he didn’t think his other therapeutic needs were large. But when Teagan reached Dr. Goedert’s professional specializations, he stopped. Dr. Goedert specialized in the treatment of addiction.
“Oh,” Teagan said, feeling very confused again. “This is rehab?” Dislocation was becoming a familiar sensation. He’d gone to the emergency room for what he’d been certain was a heart attack. Somehow he’d ended up in the psychiatric hospital. Somehow he was in rural Montana with a questionnaire about his nonexistent drug use and a second questionnaire about his equally nonexistent skin care routine. He couldn’t make the progression of events make any sense.
“It’s not really rehab,” his sister said, a little too quickly. “It’s personal wellness, tailored for the needs of people with chemical dependency issues.”
“Sloane, what I have is brain chemistry issues. And I’m already treating those.”
“Well, even if that’s true, maybe we still need to talk about substance abuse with a professional.” Her face wrinkled in consternation as she wrung her hands. “Given everything with Mom?”
