Chapter One
Nell
THE CASCADES WERE STUNNING, and I didn't have a contingency for that.
I'd been driving for two hours through scenery I could manage — green hills, a pleasant sky, beauty I could multitask through. Then the road climbed, the mountains opened up, and my whole running agenda went quiet. Snowcapped peaks rose above the tree line, still holding snow in late May, and a river appeared below the road, running fast and bright with snowmelt. I heard it before I saw it. Wildflowers filled a meadow to my left, every color sharp enough to stop me mid-thought, and the afternoon light turned everything so gold I took my foot off the gas without meaning to.
I had not budgeted for this.
I had budgeted for everything else. The flight from San Francisco to the regional airport, the white Prius rental, the 47-page Partnership Agreement and Household Operations Guide in a binder on the passenger seat. I had budgeted for the man I was about to marry, his mountain, and the twelve to eighteen months I planned to stay before filing for divorce. What I hadnot budgeted for was a landscape that made me forget, for six full seconds, that I was a woman with a plan.
I put my foot back on the gas.
The plan was solid. Four months of research, one casual remark from my gynecologist ("if you're planning to have children, earlier is better than later"), and the kind of decisive action that had made me very good at my job and very bad at second dates. I was thirty-two. I'd set this as my deadline not because a doctor told me I was running out of time, but because I did not leave major life milestones to chance. Other women waited and hoped. I had a Gantt chart.
Mountain Mates had been the efficient choice. Not a dating app, but a matchmaking-to-marriage service for men in remote areas who wanted wives but couldn't attract them through conventional means. The company handled compatibility screening, a structured introduction, and logistics right down to the officiant and the rings. Match to marriage in under a month. I'd read the fine print. I'd read the reviews. I'd had Marcy Ferrante, named one of Silicon Valley's Top Ten Divorce Attorneys, review the legal exposure before I ever created a profile.
Marcy was on retainer. The exit timeline was drafted. Get married, get pregnant, stay through the birth in case of complications requiring a second attempt, then divorce and raise the child as a single mother in San Francisco. A wilderness guide in a remote mountain town was ideal. Isolated. Unlikely to contest custody. Unlikely to show up at my door in Pacific Heights wanting to talk about his feelings.
Cliff Masterson and I had exchanged profiles through the app and done one fifteen-minute video call. He'd been direct and quiet, answered my questions about his property with minimal enthusiasm, and hadn't tried to impress me once. I'd found that reassuring. A man who couldn't be bothered to fake charm wasunlikely to fight a divorce. I'd written ideal in the margin of my notes and booked the flight into the nearest airport.
The Prius rounded a bend and Cedar Bluff appeared — a cluster of buildings along a main road, a town that fit inside a single glance. A hand-painted sign welcomed me. Where the population should have been, someone had painted A Bushel and a Peck. I tried to convert that to an actual number, ran it twice, and got nowhere. I hadn't crossed the town line and my primary skill set was already useless.
My phone had lost signal ten minutes ago. I checked my reflection in the rearview, took one extra second I shouldn't have needed, and pulled into the gravel lot beside a storefront with a covered wooden overhang and a sign that read MOOSE'S GENERAL GOODS, EST. 1974.
He was already there.
I'd seen his photos. I'd had the video call. I knew what he looked like: dark-haired, bearded, gray-eyed, big. What I did not know, and what no camera on earth could have transmitted, was what Cliff Masterson felt like at twenty feet.
He leaned against the storefront post with his arms crossed, watching my car pull in, and the sheer physical fact of him hit me below my ribs before my brain caught up. He was bigger in person. Not just taller but wider, denser, taking up space the way a man does when his body is the primary tool of his profession. His thermal shirt pulled across his shoulders when he shifted his weight. Jeans worn pale at the knees. Boots resoled at least once. Hands large enough to make mine disappear.
My pulse climbed. Warmth spread low through my belly and I pressed my knees together, which was not in any section of the 47-page manual.
I turned off the engine. I took a breath and got out.
He straightened off the post and walked over. Unhurried. His legs were long enough that unhurried still covered ground, andI caught myself watching how he moved, loose and easy and nothing wasted, and then caught myself watching, which was worse.
"You're shorter than your photos," he said. His voice was lower in person too. Of course it was.
"And you skip the pleasantries. I was told there'd be small talk first."
"That was small talk."
"Barely."
He held out his hand. I took it. His palm was rough and warm and engulfed mine. I felt the calluses against my fingers and thought about those hands in places I had no business thinking about in a parking lot in front of a general store at four in the afternoon.
The handshake lasted exactly the right amount of time, which annoyed me because I'd expected to be the one controlling that.
He glanced through the Prius's back window at my luggage. Two coordinated Louis Vuitton leather bags, a garment case, and a tote containing my laptop and three backup charging cables.
"That all yours?"
"I like to be prepared."
"For what?"
"For anything."
