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I declined.

I’d already sold Grandma’s house, packed everything I owned into my car, and married the man. Everything I owned fit into a twelve-year-old Corolla with room left over for Grandpa’s thermos and the ugly ceramic rooster that sat on Grandma’s windowsill for thirty years. Two things that had become so familiar, they’d nearly been part of the walls. I almost didn’t bring them along.

The fact that everything I owned fit into a small sedan probably should have told me something. Moving into his house without him there seemed relatively minor in comparison.

And honestly, if I’d stayed one more night in that empty house, listening to the furnace kick on for no one, I’m not sure I’d have been brave enough to leave at all.

Besides, the entire purpose of the marriage was for Shiloh.

And Shiloh was home.

So now I live in an enormous stone house outside Big Woods with my four-year-old stepson and a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Mrs. Mercer, who has worked for Maverick for nearly twenty years and informed me approximately thirty seconds after my arrival that I am to call her Dottie.

The house sits at the end of a long gravel drive, tucked against the side of a mountain like it grew there. Gray stone, dark timber beams, windows taller than I am. The first night, I stood in the foyer with a duffel bag over each shoulder and counted four fireplaces before I gave up. It’s the kind of house that makes you lower your voice without meaning to.

I mean I knew he had money. The income I’ll be earning told me enough about that. But I guess I hadn’t realized what that kind of money actually looks like.

Dottie is about five feet tall, with a cap of silver curls and reading glasses on a beaded chain that she never actually uses.

“You’re too young to Mrs. Mercer me,” she’d said.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how age works, but I didn’t argue. Mostly because she was holding a wooden spoon at the time.

It’s been four days, so far, and marriage is going well.

I think.

My husband and I have exchanged eleven text messages.

Ten of them have been about Shiloh.

The eleventh was Maverick telling me the security code for the wine cellar.

I don’t drink wine.

Still, it’s nice to know.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I twist the ring around my finger and try to picture the man who metaphorically put it there. It’s a plain platinum band, heavier than it looks. No separate engagement ring. Which makes sense considering there was not an actual engagement.

We signed the papers in a conference room with lawyers on both ends of a video call, and the ring arrived afterward by courier in a velvet box, with a typed card that said only: For Mrs. Kane.

I’ve looked at that card more times than I’d ever admit.

My phone buzzes against the butcher-block counter while I’m cutting the crust off Shiloh’s grilled cheese.

The kitchen is my favorite room so far, mostly because it’s the only one that feels lived in. Copper pots hang over the island. There’s a scuffed step stool by the sink and a crayon drawing of what I believe is a horse, or possibly a dog, magneted to the fridge. Dottie has something simmering on the stove that smells like onions and thyme, and the windows over the sink have gone blue and fogged at the edges as the sun drops behind the ridge.

I look down.

Maverick: Did Shiloh eat dinner?

I glance across the island. Shiloh is sitting on a stool, dinosaur pajamas buttoned wrong, bare feet swinging a foot above the rungs, solemnly dipping the corner of his sandwich into ketchup.

Apparently this is a thing. It looks gross to me, but I’m choosing my battles.

Me: Hello to you too, husband.

The three dots appear almost immediately. Disappear. Reappear. Disappear again.