Chapter One
FLORA
THE SAPPHIRE RANGEwas doing that thing where it tried to kill you with beauty before you’d even found a gas station. Late April in western Montana meant snow on the peaks and wildflowers rioting across every south-facing slope — balsamroot blazing yellow against dark volcanic soil, lupine just starting to purple up in the meadow edges. That spring light in the Northern Rockies made everything look as though it had been rinsed clean and hung out to dry. I drove through it with my windows down, the rental car full of gas station coffee and prenatal vitamins.This is either the bravest thing I’ve ever done or the dumbest,I thought.And I will not know which until I’m already in too deep to fix it.
The plan had been so good. Insemination. Positive test. Baby on my own terms, on my own timeline, with my own perfectly researched donor — a tall, healthy, college-educated man with good teeth and an essay about sustainable agriculture that made me cry in the fertility clinic waiting room. Donor #3847. I’d read every profile in the catalogue twice before I chose him. Nowhere in that catalogue did it say “drive to rural Montana and stalk your sperm donor.”
And yet.
Six weeks pregnant, nine hours into a drive I’d told my mother was a “design research trip,” I was winding through the foothills with binoculars on the passenger seat and a half-formed plan that boiled down to: see him, confirm he’s a real person and not a serial killer, go home, never speak of this again. A solid plan. A sane plan. A plan made by a woman in full control of her faculties who definitely had not Googled her sperm donor’s hometown, found it on a map, and packed a bag the same afternoon.
I checked the GPS. Four miles to Colter Creek. My stomach flipped — the baby or the nerves, impossible to tell at six weeks, though I suspected the baby was already picking up on my poor decision-making and forming opinions.
I found his road by accident, which felt on-brand for the day. A gravel track turned off the county road with no sign, no mailbox, just tire ruts worn into mud from snowmelt. I pulled the rental onto a wide shoulder fifty yards short and killed the engine.
The property opened up through the trees: meadows, a cabin, outbuildings, and hives. Dozens of hives, white-boxed and scattered across the meadow edge in clusters that followed the tree line. Even from here I could see the placement was intentional: south-facing exposure, windbreak from the conifers, proximity to what would be prime wildflower forage in another few weeks. Whoever had sited those hives understood sun, wind, and bloom timing. Good loam. Southern aspect. The balsamroot density suggested undisturbed meadow, which meant good mycorrhizal networks underneath.
I pulled the binoculars from the passenger seat and told myself this was fine. Normal. A perfectly reasonable thing for a pregnant woman to be doing alone on a Tuesday in Montana.
The problem with binoculars is they eliminate peripheral vision, which is relevant when you’re creeping through unfamiliar terrain toward a man who doesn’t know you exist.
I’d left the car and moved closer — just to the tree line, just for a better angle — and I was so focused on the cabin porch where a figure had appeared that I didn’t see the hive equipment until I was in it. My boot caught the edge of a hive box. I stumbled forward into a stack of honey supers, which went over with a spectacular crash that scattered wooden frames across the grass, startled approximately ten thousand bees, and sent me to my hands and knees in the dirt.
The binoculars hit a rock. My notebook landed in a puddle. A single bee detached from the general chaos and settled on the bridge of my nose with the energy of a very small, very disappointed hall monitor.
I did not scream. I want that on the record. What I did was hold very, very still and think: This is it. This is how the story of Flora Diaz ends. Not with grace, not with dignity, but on all fours in a stranger’s bee yard with equipment scattered to the four winds and a bee on her face.
“Don’t move.”
The voice came from above me, low, flat, and about as warm as the mud currently soaking through my jeans. I looked up.
The donor profile had included: height, 6’2”. Weight, 210. Brown hair, brown eyes. Athletic build. Education: B.S. Entomology, Montana State.
It had not included: the shoulders, the forearms, the way he stood like the mountain had grown him specifically to fill that space. He was shirtless — working in the spring warmth, apparently, because the universe had decided I hadn’t been punished enough. Close-cropped hair, trimmed beard, hands the size of dinner plates. Chest and stomach built by actual labor, not a gym — the kind of torso that existed to ruin yourconcentration — and a trail of dark hair that started below his navel and disappeared under his waistband, and my eyes followed it down. All the way down. And then my imagination kept going without authorization from the rest of me. I should mention: there were ten thousand bees in the air. The part of my brain responsible for self-preservation was screamingstinger, stinger, you are surrounded by stingers— but the rest of my brain had looked at this man and decided there was only one stinger in this meadow it was interested in, and it did not belong to a bee. I was going to die here. Not from anaphylaxis. From being a person who thinks like this. One hand held a bee smoker. The other was reaching toward my face, and my first thought — I need to be honest here — was notoh noorI’m sorryorplease don’t call the police.It was:I want those hands on my skin.It was:I want the weight of him.It was, specifically and vividly, the image of that body pressing mine into a mattress, and I could not stop staring at the cut of muscle above his hip where it angled inward and I was having this thought facedown in his bee yard. Six weeks pregnant with his genetic material. Covered in mud. A bee on my nose.Get a grip, Flora. Get an immediate grip.
He lifted the bee off my nose with two fingers. Gentle. The same fingers had old scars across the knuckles from what I assumed was a lifetime of exactly this kind of work. He set the bee on a nearby frame, then looked down at me the way you’d look at a raccoon that had gotten into your trash: annoyed, mildly curious, waiting for it to leave.
Great. Perfect. I’m on my knees in front of this man and I got here via beekeeping equipment. Exactly how I drew it up. And yes, I heard what I just thought.On my knees in front of.My brain served up the full image — unprompted, in vivid detail, the two of us in a context that had nothing to do with hive repair and everything to do with what was at my eye level if I looked straightahead. I caught the thought. I killed it. I buried it in a shallow grave and my brain dug it back up. My brain had been feral since the waistband and showed no signs of rehabilitation.
“Hi,” I said, from the ground. “I am so sorry. I’m — this isn’t — I’m a landscape designer.”
He stared at me.
“I’m scouting the area,” I went on, because apparently my mouth had decided to commit to this before my brain could catch up. “For a client. Native plantings, pollinator habitat, that kind of thing. I saw the property from the road and I was — I got curious about your setup and I should have knocked, obviously, I should have absolutely knocked, and I will pay for anything I broke.”
He still hadn’t said a word. He looked at the toppled supers. The scattered frames. Me, still on my knees in his mud, with dirt on my face and a notebook dissolving in a puddle.
“You done?” he said.
I stood up, wiped my hands on my jeans, and tried to look like a professional person who had not just destroyed a man’s livelihood with her shins.
“I’m Flora,” I said. “Flora Diaz. Landscape design. I’m based in Portland.” All true. Every word of it true. The lie was everything around the truth: why I was here, why I’d been watching, why my jaw ached from clenching.
He studied me for a long moment. Then he turned toward the meadow, the open stretch between the hive clusters where wildflowers were pushing through the spring mud.
“I’ve been thinking about pollinator plantings,” he said. “Around the hives. Native species, perennial. Extend the forage season.” His eyes came back to me. “You do that?”
I had dirt on my face. I’d just knocked over his equipment. A bee had sat on my nose.
