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Chapter 1
Nobody prepares for catastrophe. I mean, let’s be real. It’s not like anyone wakes up one day and says, “Today is the day I get ready for my life to hit a brick wall going a hundred miles per hour,” and acts accordingly. Because––my two cents here––whether we’d like to admit it or not, most of us hope for the best even though we often get the worst.
Fundamentally, the human species is a tragically optimistic lot. It’s what keeps us moving, evolving, thriving. Myself included, even though personal experience has taught me that life doesn’t give notice. Good and bad happen, for lack of a better description, out of the blue.
In the corner of my left eye, Jess’ white BMW 3 Series comes into view. It’s traveling toward me at a high rate of speed, blowing with nary a pause past the Harris Ranch sign, which has been hanging at the end of the driveway since this place was built close to a hundred years ago.
In fact, I’m absolutely certain she just hit the gas. The car fishtails and kicks up a cloud of red dust. It’s a scene straight out of a Mad Max movie.
“Uh oh…”
My feelers immediately perk up because the immutable facts are as follows:
Fact number one: Jess works in Beverly Hills as a junior agent at one of the big three talent agencies, a good hour and half away from the furthest reaches of Ojai where the Harris Ranch is located.
Fact number two: Jess hates anything remotely rural. You’d have to drag her by her perfectly flat-ironed hair to any place that isn’t covered in concrete.
Fact number three: It’s Jess, so this is going to be bad no matter what it is.
I’ve never been great at math, but in this moment, I am Isaac freaking Newton calculating every variable from wind speed to the ground distance I need to cover to get to the farmhouse. Unfortunately, I determine that even my personal best isn’t good enough to save me. In other words, I don’t have the time to run and hide. Which I could argue is a good general description of my life thus far.
“Brace for impact, Billy.”
Billy, the one-eyed dwarf goat we rescued from a neglectful petting zoo, squints at me with his one good yellow eye but otherwise remains by my side next to the feeder. Little man loves to eat. The problem is, with the heat index hovering somewhere between convection oven and hot-as-the-deepest-corners-of-hell, the grain mixed with flax seeds sours quickly and this batch needs to be dumped. All in a day’s work when you run a rescue which includes multiple regular-sized horses and two elderly Percherons, three mini horses, two sheep, four goats, two mini donkeys, one lamb, one llama, and a couple of chickens. No partridge in a pear tree yet.
Dropping the shovel on the rain-thirsty summer ground, I tip up my baseball cap and wipe my sweaty face with the collar of my faded Raiders t-shirt, because hunched over a pile of rancid, leftover grain isn’t how I want to have this conversation.
The BMW comes to a hard stop in front of the fence I’m standing behind and dirt billows up around me. It lands and sticks to every exposed, sweaty surface of my body. Excellent.
The car door swings open and the red sole of my best friend’s black Louboutin high heel hits the ground hard.
“Mierda,” she growls. Pushing her black Tom Ford sunglasses to the top of her head, she inspects the dirt covering her pumps with an expression of pure disgust.
“Hey…” My voice comes out strangely high and thin, shooting up on the last vowel like it does when shit’s about to get real. “What are you doing here…” I ask, sliding out between the slats of the paddock fence to face whatever reckoning’s coming, “in your work clothes… in the middle of the day?”
To understand the question, you’d have to understand my BFF. Jess is the person who rings your doorbell unannounced at 1:00 in the morning holding an overnight bag because she decided a trip to Vegas is suddenly absolutely essential. I once went seventy-four hours without sleep because she insisted on driving to Texas to see a Beyoncé concert. We were sixteen at the time. Her parents were not amused that we “borrowed” their car without permission.
Jess is the most spontaneous person I’ve ever met. And that’s saying a lot because I used to be pretty spontaneous myself. But there’s good reason to be on guard whenever she shows up for an unscheduled visit. Because there’s a very good chance that an arrest warrant awaits you at the end of that journey.
Her brown eyes drag from her expensive kicks to me, and for a split second, there’s a heavy dose of guilt in them that only a rare few who know her well would detect.
