Chapter 1
Zoey
“Cheers!”
Five glasses slammed together with more enthusiasm than coordination. Liquid sloshed over the rims. Someone missed and hit knuckles. Jamie swore. Morgan laughed louder than necessary.
I smiled, which felt suspicious on principle. Smiling in a group was how cults started, and this place had enough charm to qualify as a gateway drug.
I kept my guard up.
The tavern was a surprise. When I’d heard the wordrustic, I had pictured two stools, maybe a moose head, and beer that tasted faintly of punishment. Instead, it was a lovely, low-ceilinged room carved into the main floor of the equally charming bed-and-breakfast where we were staying, all dark wood and iron fixtures with a bar that, unlike most things in my life, looked permanent.
The lights were low but warm—warm enough to evoke feelings, which I had not consented to.
I had come here to drink and emotionally metabolize workplace trauma, not to experience ambiance.
A few locals sat at the bar, acting like they weren’t listening to us while absolutely listening to us. I respected their technique. There was a scarred dartboard against one wall, a chalkboard menu written by someone who hated lowercase letters, and a fireplace that looked like a liability.
The whole room felt solid and lived in, which should have been reassuring. Instead, it made me wonder if I could trust my surroundings.
Alex was midway through an impression of our former boss, and it was unsettling how accurate it was. Same cadence. Same pause before saying something stupid. Same way he used people’s names like weapons.
He always said your name right before ruining your afternoon. Sometimes your week.
“‘I just don’t think you’re being a team player,Alex,” Alex said, leaning back smugly. “And honestly, it’s fucking concerning.”
Jamie made a choking sound.
Morgan slammed her palm on the table. “Stop. I can feel my blood pressure rising. I think I’m getting fucking hives.”
Cris wiped her eyes. “You even did the head tilt!”
I took a sip of my drink and watched Alex continue the performance. We had survived two years of that man. And now, we had documented him into unemployment. That was a sentence I would like embroidered on a throw pillow.
So here we were, celebrating it in a tavern in the woods like emotionally repressed adults on a budget.
I hadn’t planned on enjoying this.
I resented that I was.
I sat there, amused and a little stunned, looking around the table at women I had technically known for years without ever really seeing them. We had never sat across from one another. We had never known who was tall or short, or what someone’shands looked like wrapped around a glass, or that every single one of us had been making the same quiet calculation in the background of our work life. And we had never known we were all women, which, in retrospect, explained several things. The competence, for one. The exhaustion, for another.
That revelation had happened over dinner earlier that week, after the firing of our asshole boss became official. We had decided a celebratory dinner was a must. We’d spent the rest of the workday organizing and met up that same night for the first time.
I had sat there, blinking, realizing that every single one of us had used a gender-neutral name in our fully remote workplace. I went by Zee, which made me sound efficient and unthreatening in a help-desk queue. We knew each other by our Slack handles, our text-only avatars. No profile pictures. We had all protected ourselves in the same way without discussing it. No one had said it out loud, but we had all known.
The plan for a girls’ weekend had come together fast, fueled by margaritas and adrenaline and relief. A quiet bed-and-breakfast in the woods an hour north of Albany. There’d be no work tickets there, no escalations. It was the kind of plan people made when they’d survived something stupid and wanted to commemorate by being temporarily irresponsible.
I had found Pine Hollow months earlier while researching towns in the southern Adirondacks. I had lived in Albany most of my life, on the same streets, near the same grocery store, inside the same version of myself that showed up whenever my mother called and needed something handled. I told people I wanted a change, which was true in the same way “I need oxygen” was true. What I really wanted was space. Space from her. Space from the routines I had mistaken for identity. Space from a life that had calcified around me so gradually I hadn’t noticed until I started trying to breathe inside it.
So, I had started looking north.
The towns in the southern Adirondacks had that specific balance I craved. One main road with a hardware store and a coffee shop that closed early enough to tell me the people here had boundaries. A lake nearby, with mountains in the background. It felt structured but not suffocating. Quiet without being empty. The kind of place where you could be known slowly instead of immediately and anonymously categorized.
The apartment I found was twenty-five minutes from Pine Hollow, right in town. Walking distance to the grocery store. Close enough to the hospital to satisfy my practical brain, but far enough from my mother that dropping by unannounced would require planning and stamina.
And I was moving in this week. I could not be more excited.
