"I'll read it," he said, picking up the binder. "The forty-seven pages. Tonight."
"You don't have to —"
"I'm a slow reader. I'll need the head start." He said it the same way he said everything else, carrying the binder to the couch, and I added it to the growing list of things about Cliff Masterson that did not fit the model. The list was getting long enough that the model was starting to look stupid.
Goodnights were brief. He took the couch. I took the bedroom, closed the door, and did my routine in the bathroom — face wash, moisturizer, teeth. The same steps I did in my San Francisco apartment, except the mirror was smaller and the silence outside the door was absolute.
I got into bed. The blanket was heavier than I expected. I pulled it to my collarbone and lay still.
The silence arrived — not empty, but textured. The river ran underneath everything, constant and unhurried. Wind moved through old trees. Wood settled in the walls. No traffic, no sirens, no neighbor's TV through the wall — just the dark and the weight of the blanket and a quiet so complete it felt physical.
Through the wall, faintly, through the hallway and the closed bedroom door, the couch creaked. A muffled shift. Then another. I couldn't see him, but I could hear enough to know his feet were hanging off the end and he hadn't said a word about it.
I lay in the dark and my imagination did what my plan had not accounted for. His body on that too-short couch. The binder open on his chest. His gray eyes reading my conception schedule, my communication protocols, my neatly tabbed timeline for making a baby with a stranger. His hands turningthe pages, the same rough, warm hands that had slid a ring onto my finger and scratched a cat's ears with equal gentleness.
The ring hadn't cooled on my finger. I turned it with my thumb.
I had Marcy's number in my phone. I'd email her in the morning, confirm the timeline.
Married. Cedar Bluff. Phase one complete.
I closed my eyes. Everything was going according to plan.
Chapter Two
Cliff
I WOKE UP AT FIVE WITHa dead leg and a crick in my neck and a woman’s forty-seven-page manual open on my chest.
The couch was six inches too short. I’d known that going in. I’d also known that offering to take it was the decent thing to do when your wife of twelve hours was standing in your hallway looking at you with eyes that kept doing math I wasn’t supposed to notice. So I’d taken the couch, read thirty-one pages of the most aggressively organized document I’d ever held in my hands, and fallen asleep somewhere around the section on preferred ambient temperature ranges during conception attempts.
I sat up. My back popped in three places. The cabin was cold and gray, first light just starting through the east windows, and through the hallway the bedroom door was still closed.
I got up, started coffee, and stood at the counter while it brewed. Black. Same way I’d been drinking it since I was nineteen and too broke to buy creamer.
The poker game had been eleven days ago. I could still see Drew’s face across the table, the exact moment he realized I’dbet everything I had on a hand that wasn’t there. Fifty thousand dollars. My entire down payment on the property I’d rebuilt from a wreck into the only place I’d ever wanted to stay. The old man who owned the land had died in January, and his kids wanted to sell, and I had sixty days to come up with a hundred grand or lose the place where I’d put myself back together after prison.
Drew, being Drew, had felt terrible about it for roughly forty-five seconds before seeing a business opportunity. Download Mountain Mates. Find a match. Get married within thirty days and prove it’s real. At the thirty-day mark, the debt gets forgiven—fifty grand, gone. Stay married a full year, and he’d pay me another fifty on top of it. A hundred thousand total. Enough to buy the land outright.
I’d told him his dating apps were bullshit. He’d told me his dating apps had a sixty-three percent successful-marriage rate across all platforms and that I was statistically more likely to find lasting love through his algorithm than through any decision I’d ever make on my own. Which, given my track record, was probably true.
So I’d downloaded the app. Matched with a fintech consultant from San Francisco who had sharp eyes and a plan for everything. Did one video call where I answered her questions about the property and she answered mine about her timeline, and neither of us tried very hard to be charming, and I’d thought: this could work. A year of pretending. I could do that.
What I hadn’t planned on was the vasectomy being a problem.
I’d gotten it the year I got out. No kids, no plans for kids, no plans for anything that required me to think past next month. It was the most permanent decision I’d ever made, which was ironic coming from a man whose entire identity wasbuilt around not being permanent. But Nell Chambers had a conception schedule. Footnoted. And I was a man who could not get her pregnant if my land depended on it, which it did.
She didn’t know. About the vasectomy, about the bet, about any of it. She thought I wanted a wife and a family and a life on this mountain with her. And I was going to let her keep thinking that for as long as it took to save my property, which made me exactly the kind of man I’d been trying not to be since I walked out of Monroe Correctional three years ago.
The coffee was ready. I poured a cup and took it to the porch.
The river was running high, snowmelt still feeding it this late in May. The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge yet but the sky was going blue above the tree line, and I stood there in the cold and drank my coffee and tried not to think about the fact that my wife was asleep in my bed twenty feet away and her hair had been down when she’d said goodnight and I’d noticed, and my hands had gone still on the mug.
I went back inside.
She emerged at seven fifteen, and I almost dropped my mug.
I’d seen her yesterday—polished, put-together, every hair where it was supposed to be. This morning she’d done her routine because she could have stepped out of a magazine ad for expensive face cream, but she was wearing silk pajama pants, a cashmere sweater that had no business being on a mountain, and slippers that would’ve been destroyed by the porch. Her hair was up in a twist that had clearly taken effort.
