For Jazz, it was a wedding photography career shadowed by an ex-boyfriend who didn’t understand the word “boundaries.”
Sloane had walked away from a fiancé with a family fortune and all the ugly expectations and control that came with it.
And Paige, sweet, optimistic Paige, had simply wanted an adventure with her cousin Jazz, after seeing the mean side of social media.
As for her, that “before” had been six years as Seattle’s most sought-after matchmaker.
Here was the thing almost nobody knew about Mia Chester: she was, in the most secret and least convenient way for herself, a romantic.She’d grown up that way.Saturday afternoons on the couch with her mother and a stack of rented rom-coms, the two of them mouthing the good lines in unison.Bedtime stories where the princess always, always found her prince.
And, this was the part that had done the real damage, she’d grown up with parents who made it all look not just possible but ordinary.The natural course of the universe was to lead you to your soulmate.Right?
Her mother and father had loved each other in the unremarkable, bone-deep way that a child simply breathes in, the way a child absorbs the idea that the floor will hold.They danced in the kitchen.They sang to each other.Her father left notes in her mother’s coat pockets for her to find.
To young Mia, they hadn’t just been a love story.They’d been proof; tangible, walking, note-leaving, kitchen-dancing proof that the fairy tale was true and that one day, naturally, it would come true for her, too.
Then her father went to the hospital with a stomach ache and did not come home.Then her mother sat down on the kitchen floor and, in every way that counted, did not get up for a very long time.
Mia, at twelve years old, learned that the fairy tale had a second half nobody read aloud.The part where a husk of a woman couldn’t feed her own children because her prince was dead and her heart was broken.Mia’s days of playing house ended the winter she had to actually run one.
So, she became a matchmaker.She had never let herself look too squarely at why, but if she had, she would’ve seen it plainly enough.It was as close to love as she could bear to stand.
Six years, she’d sat in a warm, lamplit office by the floral district, asking strangers the tender questions, watching their faces open like windows, arranging the meeting and choosing the restaurant, and then going home alone while the people she’d matched drove off into whatever came next.
She got to keep the warmth of the thing and none of the risk.She was the understudy who knew every line and never once stepped on stage.And the job had taught her, six years running, exactly why the understudy was the wise one to be.
Because far too often, the wrong people won.She watched a careless, glib client who’d ghosted three women in as many months land softly, effortlessly, in a happy marriage.And afterward, she drove home alone.That was the small ache, the daily one.
Six years of watching shallow, self-absorbed clients choose spouses because they had the right cheekbones or the right bank account or the right way of laughing at unfunny jokes.Six years of watching genuinely good people, kind people, people who deserved happiness more than anyone, get their hearts trampled because they weren’t pretty enough or wealthy enough or whatever arbitrary quality the universe had decided mattered that week.
She’d had a client, a kindergarten teacher named David with a gentle smile and a passion for birdwatching.He just wanted to find someone who’d go hiking and birdwatching with him on weekends and appreciate his terrible puns.Someone real.
Mia had matched him with a woman who seemed perfect on paper: outdoorsy, funny, looking for something genuine.Three months later, the woman had ghosted him for a tech bro with a boat.The teacher had cried in Mia’s office, and all she could do was hand him tissues and wonder why she’d ever believed love was anything more than a cosmic slot machine, randomly dispensing jackpots to people who didn’t deserve them.
That was two years ago.She’d kept working after David because bills didn’t pay themselves.But something had slowly but surely broken inside her.Some essential optimism she’d needed to do her job well had faded away.
Once in a blue moon, someone good found the true love they were looking for, but it wasn’t enough to keep alive the hope that had gotten her into matchmaking.
Even worse were the romantics and dreamers.The ones like her, the lovers of a good love story, who came to her office with their hearts already half unwrapped, handed them over, and got them back in pieces.Watching them did not make her feel braver about trying to love herself.It made her feel like a woman watching swimmers, one after another, get pulled under with no life guard on duty to rescue them when the undertow took them.
But the worst, the genuine worst, the thing she’d never said out loud to a living soul, was how she felt when she matched two people as starry-eyed and hopeful as she’d once been.
They fell in love, married, and everyone wept at the wedding while Mia sat at the back table and clapped ...and could never, ever fully kill the small cold voice that said she hadn’t given them a gift.She’d handed them a fuse.Somewhere down the line one of them would stand at a hospital desk, or sit down on a kitchen floor, and died inside.
And she would be the one who walked them, smiling, onto a path leading inevitably to that tragic end.
That voice was why she kept her own door shut, her heart closed to romance in every way a heart could be closed.Not because she’d stopped believing in love.That was what nobody understood, what she scarcely understood herself.She believed in it utterly and completely.
She had simply decided, somewhere along the way, that believing in a thing and surviving it were two entirely different undertakings, and that she would only ever be brave enough for the first.
So, she’d chosen a fresh start in a new state, and a new mission: a rescue, where the loving was simpler.
Animals let you care for them with your whole soul and never once asked you to be brave back.A dog would press its head into your hand and need you and never hand you a surprise.Everyone knew you loved animals for their whole life, and they only loved you for part of yours.No one promised forever, the here and now was the promise.
That promise was a promise she could understand, could bear the ending of.You could pour everything into a frightened, three-legged stray and stay, somehow, perfectly safe.
She knew, dimly, that a woman who had to arrange her loving this carefully was revealing something telling about herself.She chose, as she always chose, not to listen too closely to the small voice in her head doing the revealing.
“There it is,” Riley announced, slowing the truck.“Haven Valley.”
