Every day she was faced with the HFE and saw it working in real-time. But the only man she’d had any feelings for in years, feelings other than betrayal, frustration, anger, and hurt, was D, the one-night stand who had moved into her brain and lived there rent-free foran entire year and a half. She’d been totally unable to evict him no matter how hard she’d tried. The man had become a neural parasite, a recurring fever dream she couldn’t medicate away. He was the only man she’d been with since the divorce.
She’d gone on about a dozen dates and hadn’t even kissed another man. She hadn’t even been tempted. He’d set the bar so high it felt like she was cheating on him, which was insane. She didn’t know his name. He didn’t know her name, he’d heard James call her Jen, but he’d never even called her that.
She’d tried to intellectualize her attachment, telling herself it was the thrill of the forbidden or the high of being seen—trulyseen—for the first time probably since Asher saw her when they were fourteen. She’s not sure he ever really saw her as an adult, but he did see her as a teenager.
She wanted to be the object of someone’s unmitigated affection, the way she’d watched other women be cherished in this town. In Hope Falls, domestic bliss wasn’t just a myth or a marketing ploy, it was everywhere. She witnessed it in the way her clients’ husbands picked them up from the salon, in the neighbor who left wildflowers on porches “just because,” and in the senior citizen high school sweethearts who still made out like teenagers in the parking lot of the supermarket, despite Mayor Henry’s threat to, “turn the hose on them.”
But her HEA or HFE search would have to wait. She had a daughter to focus on. Three more years, then it would be her turn. Then the hunt for happily ever after would be on.
She finished packing up her stuff, then caught a glimpse of herself in the gilded antique mirror that hung above her dresser. There were bags under her eyes, littlecrescent moons of exhaustion and worry, and her skin looked rough and drab, not just from lack of sleep but from the kind of slow-burn stress that seeped into your pores and made itself at home. Jenna smoothed her hair, pinched her cheeks for color, then shook her head at her own futility.
Maybe she’d do a face mask when she got home that night. A little self-care never hurt anybody. New plan: her next three years would be focusing on Blakeandself-care.
Downstairs, she found her daughter on the couch, knees up, thumbs a blur on her phone. “You’ll probably be gone when I get back,” Jenna said. “Be safe, and only make bad decisions with consequences that last twenty-four hours or less.”
“—consequences that last twenty-four hours or less,” Blake sing-songed, not missing a beat, and they grinned at each other in the old, familiar ballet of the single-mom household. “Love you!”
“Love you more, Peanut!” Jenna shouted as she left.
Jenna didn’t expect her teenage daughter to be perfect. But she wanted her daughter’s bad decisions to have soft landings, to be the kind you could laugh about the next day and not the kind that snapped like a mousetrap over your future. So far, Blake seemed to be aligned on that front.
Hangovers, smoking weed, getting high, and then remaining in a contained environment where she wasn’t going to get harmed or harm someone while becoming sober was not behavior Jenna approved of, but getting in a car with someone who was drunk, doing a drug that could alter your brain chemistry for life, or getting pregnant were all worse evils.
And those were just IRL dangers. That didn’t even scratch the surface of the online terrors. Jenna hoped she’d raised Blake with enough awareness of the predators in theworld to keep her safe but not make her feel like the world wasThe Hunger Gamesand she was a tribute, although that was exactly how Jenna felt growing up.
The old terrors—her own after-school-special childhood, the predators around every benign adult corner—were still there, but she tried not to parent from a place of paranoia. She wanted Blake to have awareness, not a bunker mentality. That meant letting go, at least a little, and trusting that the foundation she’d laid was solid enough for a fifteen-year-old to stand on. Sometimes Jenna succeeded in that. Sometimes she failed, catastrophically and with great drama. That was parenting.
Did her “method” work? Who the hell knew? There was no control group, no blind study, no way to run the experiment again with improved variables, not that anyone would sign up for that version of childhood. Every parental instinct she owned was seat-of-the-pants, a wild, improvisational jazz solo she hoped would sound intentional to the crowd. She wanted Blake to be safe and strong. She wanted her to never, ever feel the kind of unquenchable thirst for validation that Jenna witnessed her own mother suffer from like a sickness in her blood.
Jenna had raised Blake alone, for all intents and purposes, since the day she was born. Asher had only shown up for the last lap. Her second husband, James, was a “good” stepdad in the sense that he didn’t actively try to sabotage anything, but he also didn’t do much beyond making himself sandwiches on Sundays and hogging the streaming remote. Jenna had never seen a man so physically present in a home and yet so emotionally absent. It was almost artful, the way James could be in a room and leave not a single fingerprint behind besides crumbs and the stench of farts.
But if there was one thing Jenna knew, it was that shewanted more for her daughter. She wanted Blake to be the center of her own universe, not the satellite orbiting someone else’s gravity. Not because of anything Jenna had done, but maybe in spite of it.
These next three years were pivotal. That’s why she needed to be there. With her. No distractions. Bringing another man into the mix, no matter how lonely Jenna was, would be counterproductive in every way. The most important thing was that she wanted Blake to have the best life she could possibly have.
Jenna’s phone buzzed, and she saw that she had a message from the assistant manager at the salon saying the hot water wasn’t working. She checked to see if she had time to stop by, but she didn’t. She pulled over and messaged him back with the steps to take to check that the water heater was working.
She knew she needed to replace the unit and go electrical. The downtown salon had been a circus since she took it over, but in the best way. When she moved, all she had was her Kia Sportage, a teenager, and a toolbox of shears and brushes. She’d landed in Hope Falls, the world’s most aggressively charming mountain town, and rebuilt her life in a Main Street shop that still smelled faintly of decades-old perm solution, had cracked mirrors, peeling linoleum flooring, and broken ceiling tiles. Over a year later, the business was thriving, and so, it sometimes seemed, was she. But when she thought about what she lost, she still felt the bruises.
It all started with James and a bad lawyer. She’d trusted the wrong people, James, again. Because of a contract she didn’t understand—courtesy of James’s fraternity brother, who’d done her “a huge favor” by handling setting up the paperwork for her business pro bono—she walked away from both salons with nothing toshow for them. She signed papers she shouldn’t have signed without doing her due diligence and watched James claim ninety percent of everything she’d built. If she was being honest, that humiliation stung far more than the actual loss of her investment. She could earn more money. She could rebuild a brand. But what she couldn’t believe was how much he’d fooled her. The cheating. The business. All of it. Those contracts were drawn up two months after they were married. None of their relationship had been real.
She could have fought him, but by then she just wanted to be rid of him, of his empty presence and his hungry, beady, entitled eyes. She signed the divorce papers in a daze, convinced that anything was better than being legally bound to James.
Why had she trusted him? How could she have trusted him? He’d gotten past her intuition, and it had shaken her to the core. If she didn’t have that, who was she? She’d spent her entire life trusting her gut, it was how she’d survived in the house she grew up in.
She shook that thought away, trying to get in a good headspace as she made her way across town to her first client of the day.
The only good thing that had come from that marriage was the one night she spent with D. A year and a half later, the night with him felt more and more like a hallucination, a beautiful blip between the days of pain and numb routines that came before and after. He’d been too perfect, a walking contradiction of tender and filthy, present but never crowding, a good communicator whoactuallylistened. She wondered a thousand times if he’d been an actor hired for a reality prank show. An X-rated reality prank show.
She replayed that night over in her head every day, atleast once. And she only had one regret…the morning. How she’d woken up in his arms, her mind quiet, maybe for the first time ever in her life. She felt…peace. Safe. Happy. Content. And she panicked. She got up, got dressed, and left.
When she got down to the garage, Martin, the concierge, was still on duty. He tried to call her a car, but she told him she’d already ordered an Uber and insisted on him taking her to the front of the hotel. He spoke to her on the way, but everything he said sounded like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. She had no clue what he said, she just replied to him haphazardly to keep the conversation flowing and distract him from the full-blown panic attack she was having.
It took forever to walk around to the front of the building, and when she got into her Uber, she could finally breathe. But by the time she got home, all she wanted to do was go back to the hotel room. Her panic attack had passed by then, and she instantly regretted leaving. And she’d regretted it every day since.
Still, it was probably for the best.
After their night together, she’d experienced physical withdrawal from him. Her body ached and she didn’t want to get out of bed. Like she had the flu. People thought she was upset about James and Bree, or the marriage, but it wasn’t any of that. It was D.
