“Did you have any trouble filling out the admission paperwork?” Rachel tactfully asked, no doubt eager to get paid.
“I can do that while my sister gets settled,” Teagan said,resolved to staying with Sloane until the charms of the outdoors failed her.
Sloane gave a muted squeal of approval, tugging on his arm with both hands.
Rachel favored them with a polished smile. “This afternoon we have a class on rock garden design using crystal healing methodologies. Does that sound like fun?”
“Yeah, of course,” Sloane agreed, as eagerly as though she’d been waiting her entire life to design rock gardens, with rock crystals especially.
Teagan set his shoulders back and blinked at the ceiling for a moment, willing his mind to fully wake up, even though thoughts oozed out like the last ounce of toothpaste in a roll. He needed to call his bank. Call Rose and maybe the program officer of the foundation. The front desk of his building, maybe a couple of the people on the planning committees whose meetings he’d miss...
His gaze landed on the pile of luggage at the front desk. He had no idea what Sloane had even packed for him, and he otherwise had only the clothes he’d worn into the hospital. His skin itched to change out of clothing he’d sweated through a week ago.
“Can I bring our bags to our tents first?” he asked Rachel.
“Oh no,” she said. She opened the door and craned her neck outside, shouting at an unseen person around the back patio. “Don’t worry about carrying a thing here. Darcy does all of that.”
two
It was almost midafternoon before Darcy got the chance to duck into Rachel’s office to use the telephone. With the arrival of Teagan and Sloane Van Zijl the day before, the ranch was at capacity, and that meant Darcy could barely make it from one chore to another without being intercepted and asked to explain, fetch, or fix something.
She cradled a package of lightbulbs under one arm as she punched up her voicemail. Two messages from zombie debt collectors looking for her father, one from her dentist telling her she was four months overdue for a cleaning, and one from the shitweasel she’d been calling every day for the past week.
“Hey, babe,” said the cheerful voice of her ex-roommate, scratchy and distant on the recording. “It’s Travis. I’m almost done over here in Washington. I should be able to bring the car back by next Friday. I’ll give you a call when I’m in town. Just hang tight till then, okay? ’Kay! Later.”
Darcy’s hand clamped down on the phone receiver so hard she thought she might crack the plastic. The car?Thecar? The lack of a possessive pronoun made her so angry her vision nearly whited out for a moment. That washercar—the car she’d spent almost all of her savings to purchase from Travis, and which was supposed to have been parked at thewellness retreat next to Rachel’s pickup truck as soon as the finance company returned the title.
Resisting the strong urge to throw something, Darcy called Travis back.
“Travis,” she gritted out when she went straight to his voicemail. “Like I told you yesterday, you need to drop offmycar. Right now. Not next week. Turn around and drive back to Montana this instant. Or I’ll—” She broke off, swearing under her breath. She wouldn’t call the cops on him, and he knew it. “Or I’ll have you killed.” Yeah, that felt satisfying to say. “Assassinated! I will have youassassinated, by a bunch of big, scary guys. I know guys from the Navy. Like Navy SEALs, but worse. Black ops, wet work, off the books guys. Who owe me favors. Who owe me theirlives.I am sending them after your lying, stealing ass if you do not have my car here bythisFriday. Call me back and confirm that you do not long for the sweet embrace of the grave, otherwise they’re coming for you.” Darcy slammed the receiver down.
She didn’t actually know any goon squad, but one would have been really handy. She pinched the bridge of her nose between the fingers of her free hand as she massaged the tension there. It had been a mistake to fall for Travis’s aw-shucks, single-dad schtick—that was on her, fine, she should have known better—but trapped out here in Big Sky without transportation or cell phone reception, she couldn’t even hunt the creep down.
For just one moment, she let her knees sag.
Et tu, Travis?
She’d covered for him on more than one shift at the warming hut, because he had a kid to visit back in Tacoma, and she’d felt bad about his long commute. But doing nicethings for other people was no guarantee they wouldn’t cheerfully screw her over if the opportunity arose. Everyone did.
Darcy could chart the port calls in her unbroken voyage of screwing-over: the college financial aid officer who told an eighteen-year-old Darcy that she’d get plenty of loans even if her parents had already wrecked her credit by putting their utility bills in her name. The Navy recruiter who promised a nineteen-year-old Darcy that she’d learn a ton of marketable skills in uniform. The Park Service contractor who guaranteed a twenty-seven-year-old Darcy a permanent position in forestry if she just got her foot in the door doing hospitality work. Finally the Goederts, who’d pitchedthisjob as involving a lot more wilderness education and a lot less property maintenance.
Coming to the end of another seasonal gig always made Darcy punchy as she scrambled to figure out housing, transportation, and other logistics for her next move, but something about this transition was really rubbing her face in her failure to live her life in anything more than ninety-day increments.
In October, Rachel would close the ranch up until the next May. October was shoulder season, and without a car, Darcy wasn’t sure what she could do until it snowed, even if she wanted to spend another winter babysitting tourists in Yellowstone. Thirty-year-old aspiring rangers who couldn’t seem to finish a bachelor’s degree were not in high demand.
She rested her forehead against the wall, granting herself sixty more seconds to be angry before she got back to work.
She heard the motor of the blender from the kitchen next to Rachel’s office and looked at the clock—almost snack time for the guests. She glared at the telephone one last time,daring Travis to call her back without the promise of the delivery of her car, then headed to the kitchen to collect the afternoon smoothies.
Kristin, the only other live-in staffer besides Darcy, was tossing produce into the blender at random. Darcy nodded companionably at her sturdy, purple-haired, and heavily tattooed coworker and began pulling mason jars out of the dishwasher. The guests ate that stuff up—the implication that someone might be pickling their own vegetables using the same glasses they drank their smoothies out of. High-priced authenticity.
Darcy couldn’t tell if Rachel actually, sincerely, in her true heart of hearts believed that the guests at the wellness retreat were benefitting from the organic food, the essential oils, the guided meditation, and all the other vaguely New Age crap she pushed on them. A reasonable person couldn’t really, right? Darcy did not believe in it. So she didn’t press Rachel on whether she did either. Darcy was sure the guests benefitted from being out in the woods where they couldn’t drink or do drugs, and that was enough to assuage her conscience about her participation in what might otherwise be considered an elaborate health scam. Darcy kept her mouth shut about the ridiculous aspects of her job, like the smoothie served after Midafternoon Mindfulness.
She scanned Rachel’s instructions for the day, trying to make sense of what the woman was saying about immune support and glycemic load, as though Rachel was a certified nutritionist, rather than a former LA yoga mom with a big Instagram following for her perfectly lit breakfast photos where she posed with ancient grain oatmeal in her underwear.
“Any luck with your ex?” Kristin asked as she tossed beets into the juicer.
“He’s not my ex,” Darcy insisted. “He was just a... horny mistake.”
