Chapter 1
Jenna
“So let me get this straight,” I say, pressing the phone tighter against my ear. “You’re telling me a full-grown cow walked through a screen door.”
“She didn’t walk through it.” A pause. The kind that means he’s smiling. “She leaned. Real committed-like. The door just happened to lose the argument.”
I bite back a laugh, but my mouth curves up without permission whenever Ethan Sutton talks.
The regional LandCorp office is empty. I’m sitting cross-legged in my desk chair, shoes kicked off, a cold cup of coffee growing a skin beside my keyboard, and I am so absurdly happy that I could cry.
My whole spine softens. Six months of this. This thing where I reorganize my entire evening around the sound of his voice while pretending I don’t. It started with emails from January through March, then daily phone calls starting in April, and my body still registers his voice like a physical touch. Which is stupid. We’ve never met. Never exchanged photos. Never evenasked for them. Just words and voice and the slow, terrifying magic of letting someone know you before they see you. An unspoken agreement that started with my shyness and somehow became sacred.
Because I’m in love with a voice,hisvoice, and I’m starting to wonder if that makes me the protagonist of something beautiful or a cautionary tale. How is it even possible? While I don't know the answer, I also don't have another word to describe the emotions that bloom inside me whenever I speak with Ethan Sutton.
I found Marlie’s Angels six months ago during a flare so bad that my forearms looked scalded. I was sitting in the dark, scratching my wrists raw, scrolling because sleep wasn’t coming and loneliness was swallowing me like thick cotton wool. A matchmaking service for ranchers. I almost laughed. But I filled out the profile honestly because who lies at two in the morning? And I checked the box for correspondence only, no photos.
I wasn’t looking for love. I was looking for a way out—proof that the world was bigger than my apartment, my flares, and a job that was eating me alive. I had no expectations. Maybe a few awkward emails that would fizzle into silence. I never expected to meet a man who asked about my day and actually listened, who signed his emails with just his initial—E.—like he was rationing himself but still couldn’t stop reaching out.
“Was the cow okay?” I ask.
“Cow’s fine. Screen door’s in the afterlife. Daniel, my older brother, is pretending he’s not mad about it, which means he’s real mad about it.”
“And you’re pretending you didn’t find the whole thing hilarious.”
“I would never.” Another pause. Then, lower: “She looked real surprised, though. The cow. Just standing in the living room like she’d been invited for dinner.”
A robust laugh escapes, filling the empty office. I clamp a hand over my mouth because laughing like this in the LandCorp building feels like a violation of an unwritten rule. Everything in this building is beige and measured. Nothing about the way Ethan makes me feel is beige.
“You’re still at the office,” he says. Not a question.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I can hear the fluorescent buzz. Also, you always sound tired when you’re there. Different tired than when you’re home.”
I turn my chair toward the darkened windows, the city lights spreading below like scattered coins. “That’s creepy, Ethan.”
“It’s not creepy. It’s paying attention.”
God. When he says things like that, in that low register he uses when he’s being serious, I feel it in my chest. In my thighs.
I bite my nail and taste copper—a habit I can’t break, especially here.
“You eaten?”
I glance at the granola bar wrapper on my desk. “Define ‘eaten.’”
“It’s almost ten. How many people are still in the building?”
I look down the corridor of cubicles with their gray fabric walls, a dead Ficus by the water cooler. “The cleaning crew finished an hour ago.”
“Go home,” he says.
“Can’t.” I press the phone closer, as if I can pull him through the handset and into my heart. “I need to finish these reports.”
Late nights don’t bother me. I don’t have much to go home to. For now, it’s a serviced apartment during this job at the regional office.
“Jenna.” Ethan’s tone shifts, and something deeper resonates beneath his calm. Not quite worry, but more like a man who’s listened carefully for six months and heard what I’m not saying. “I want you to—” He stops. Exhales. Starts again. “Come to me.”
