Page 5

“Take a breath,” Becca said softly.

She took one.

She looked at the valley, at the thin line of Main Street catching the light, at the steeple, at the smoke, at the way the whole town nestled against the lake like it had been there for a hundred years and intended to be there for a hundred more. She thought about the job board at eleven at night. The cursor hovering. Her own hand moving to the mouse before she had decided anything.

She thought about the apartment she’d packed into boxes. The city that had never quite looked back at her.

She thought about being thirty-four years old and realizing she had built a life that fit her the way a coat fits someone else, close enough to wear, not quite right anywhere that mattered.

Then she looked at the lake again.

“I think,” she said slowly, “I might actually be okay.”

A silence. The good kind.

“Yeah?” Becca said.

“Yeah.”

She put the car in drive. The knock from under the hood resumed its steady rhythm. The GPS recalculated one final time and then settled, the blue line reforming itself toward the valley below with what felt, she thought, almost like relief.

The road wound down in long, gentle curves, and with every turn the mountains rose a little higher on either side and the town below grew a little closer and the lake, even through a windshield with a crack in the lower left corner she’d been ignoring since April, caught the light like it knew she was watching.

She rolled down her window.

The air that came in was different. Cooler. Cleaner. It smelled like pine and something else she couldn’t name, something almost sweet, like the air itself was trying to tell her something she didn’t quite have the language for yet.

The GPS went quiet again.

In one mile, your destination is on the right, it said.

And then said nothing else.

She drove the last mile without it. The first buildings of Main Street came into view through the windshield, a hardware store with a faded sign, a café with flower boxes in the windows, a bookshop she couldn’t quite read the name of yet. All of it golden in the late-afternoon light. All of it quiet in the way of a place that had been there long enough to stop proving itself.

A sign at the edge of town read: Welcome to Merrybrook, Montana. Population 2,341.

Someone had drawn a small star next to the population number. In pen. She couldn’t tell when.

She drove past it slowly.

The car knocked once.

Then, for the first time since Missoula, it went quiet.

Chapter 2

Welcome to Merrybrook

The Juneberry Inn sat on a small rise at the north end of town, just where Main Street curved gently away from itself and the road lifted slightly, like it was trying to get a better look at the lake.

Allison almost missed the turn.

She caught the sign at the last second, The Juneberry Inn, est. 1961 in dark green letters on a cream background, weathered at the edges but legible, and turned in carefully, her car’s tires crunching over a gravel drive lined on both sides by something low and flowering that she couldn’t name in the fading light. The drive curved around a stand of spruce trees and then the inn appeared, and she stopped the car again without entirely meaning to.

It was not a large building. Two stories, white clapboard with dark green shutters, a wraparound porch that ran the full length of the front and disappeared around both sides. Window boxes under every window, still blooming in late August with something purple and cheerful. A porch swing at the far end, moving slightly in a breeze she couldn’t feel from inside the car.

And beyond it, framed perfectly between two spruce trees as though someone had planned it that way, Clearwater Lake caught the last of the evening light and held it.