Chapter One
The day Marlowe Davis’s life changed forever was depressinglyaverage. If her husband hadn’t told her he was having an affair and wanted a divorce, the day wouldn’t have been notable at all.
Before that, it had been boring. Mundane, even. The weather had been cool, but not cold. Cloudy, but not so much that you couldn’t see the sun. She had just finished packing the last of her things for the big cross-country move with her husband to start their new life in Oregon.
Brooklyn to Oregon was a pretty big move, but they needed a big move. It wasn’t like she thought everything wasgreat.
She knew that it wasn’t. But they’d been working on it. The point of the move wasworkingon it.
And while she had known that there was distance growing between them, she hadn’t ever believed that meant…
She and Aiden had always been friends. They’d always had a lovely, companionable relationship. They’d known each other since high school. They’d taken a responsible amount of time away from each other during college, and then theyfound their way back to each other, had a long engagement, and got married. They knew each other. They were on the same page. Mostly. And when they weren’t, they talked about it. That was how they were.
Their friends were jealous of them.
They’d been on adventures together. Running a B&B in Maine, working on and living in vacation cottages at a working farm in Vermont. For the last three years, they’d been in Brooklyn managing a bar with upstairs rooms for rent, and live bands that played five nights a week. They’d always had a fantasy of living in New York, but then the fantasy had proven to be expensive and chaotic. Which might have just been the late-night hours the bar demanded.
Marlowe had blamed the bar hours for all that distance.
But apparently, it wasn’t the bar.
She wanted it to be. She wanted to rail at a building that she didn’t love, not the man who had promised to love her, and had gone out and slept with someone else.
Worse even than that, was in a relationship with someone else.
A night of sex after closing up the bar? She might have been able to forgive that. Maybe. After fifteen years of loving him, it was possible.
Not this, though.
Not that an offer for continuing the marriage had been on the table.
He’d confessed everything while she was packing the coffee maker. She’d taped the box up, and he’d looked at her and said: There’s someone else, I’m not going with you.
He’d gotten her packed to move her out of the apartment, out of the marriage, all while thinking she was packing to go into a new life with him.
She’d been devastated, but the devastation almost wasn’teven the worst part. It was wondering how long she’d been living with a stranger.
Wondering how long he’d been planning to do that.
Had taking the job been a lie the whole time? Had it all been a plan to get Marlowe to agree to end the lease at the apartment, to get her to pack all of her things? To separate their belongings – easier for unpacking, of course – so that all he’d have to do was find his boxes, and put them in a different truck?
So that he could take his things, already carefully boxed, and move only a few blocks away to his mistress’s house, while he could safely send Marlowe across the country.
She had packed his underwear for him. To take to another woman’s house.
Well, maybe she wouldn’t go.
Maybe she would move into his attic and howl like an appropriately scorned woman. Maybe she would haunt his every step and make him sorry he’d wasted fifteen years of her life.
The issue was that it wasn’t only she and Aiden who were supposed to go. It was Cara. Cara, her sister-in-law, who was a sister to her in every way. She had sold her house and was also packed up and ready to go on this adventure.
She couldn’t do that to Cara. But she’d been sitting in her shock for two days, unable to move, call anyone, or make a decision.
Not about anything.
The moving company had come to pick her things up, and she had gone to a hotel. She was supposed to fly to where her sister-in-law lived in Vermont, in the town she and Aiden had grown up in, and then they were going to make their way to Oregon together, in Cara’s car.
But without Aiden would she even still have a job offer? Because thetwoof them were supposed to runthe new Mustang River resort that was opening on a ranch in the small town of Mustang River, Oregon, and the two of them running it had been a big selling point.
