Chapter 20
Eight months later, Alex pulled into the same mountain driveway with considerably less panic in her chest than the first time around.
The house looked exactly as she remembered it, the same reclaimed wood and glass, the same wall of windows facing the same mountains, though this time the trees were green instead of buried in snow, and this time she wasn’t white-knuckling the wheel after a storm-shortened drive, just easing the rental car to a stop beside a familiar SUV that definitely hadn’t been in the driveway when she’d texted Cass an hour ago.
“That’s their car,” Dani said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield, already grinning.
“That’s their car.”
They found the front door unlocked and voices coming from the kitchen, and walked in to find Cass elbow-deep in a suitcase on the counter, Marisol beside her holding up two different sunhats with the particular indecision of someone who’d clearly been at this for a while.
“You’re here!” Cass abandoned the suitcase immediately, crossing the kitchen to pull Alex into a hug, then Dani right behind her, warm and unbothered by the fact that she was, apparently, still very much in the middle of packing for her own trip.
“We were going to be gone before you got here, I swear, our flight got pushed back a whole day and I did not think to call you.”
“You’re still here?” Alex glanced between the suitcase, the sunhats, the general chaos of a departure clearly still in progress. “I thought you said you’d be long gone by the time we got in.”
“I did. Then the airline had other plans.” Cass gestured helplessly at the mess spread across the counter. “So now we’re doing the thing where we’re both still here when you’re both already here, which, I realize, might be a little weird”
Marisol looked up from the sunhats, something slow and delighted spreading across her face as she took in the scene, Alex and Dani standing there hand in hand, clearly not strangers anymore. “Well. Look at that.”
“Look at what,” Cass said, still elbow-deep in the suitcase.
“Our little matchmaking scheme. Worked out pretty well, didn’t it.” Marisol set the sunhats down, crossing her arms with the satisfied air of someone accepting an award she hadn’t actually earned.
“It was not a matchmaking scheme. It was a scheduling mistake.”
“That’s what I said. Matchmaking scheme.” Marisol grinned, unbothered by the correction, pointing between Alex and Dani with real pride. “I’m taking full credit, by the way. Officially. For the record.”
“You didn’t do anything except forget to tell me you’d already hired someone.”
“And look what it produced.” Marisol gestured at the two of them with the flourish of a woman presenting evidence in her own defense. “You’re welcome, both of you. Truly.”
Alex caught Dani’s eye across the kitchen, and something warm and familiar passed between them, the exact echo of that very first morning, minus the yoga pants, minus the confusion, minus anything resembling a weapon improvised from a TV remote.
“For what it’s worth,” Alex said, “we wouldn’t change a single part of how this started. Even the folders.”
“Oh, the folders.” Cass brightened, already digging through a drawer. “Speaking of, I actually made you one this time. Seemed wrong not to, given the history.”
She produced a single manila folder and set it on the island, the same island where two separate folders had once sat at opposite ends like place settings at the world’s strangest dinner party.
This one had both their names written across the front in Cass’s familiar, loopy handwriting, ALEX & DANI, no distance between them at all.
Dani picked it up, turning it over with a soft, disbelieving laugh. “One folder.”
“Felt like the right call.” Cass shrugged, entirely pleased with herself. “You’re not exactly two separate house sitters anymore, are you.”
“No,” Alex said, pulling Dani in against her side, the mountain view spread out gold and green through the windows behind them, an entirely different season than the one that had started all of this, though the feeling in her chest was exactly the same. “I suppose we’re not.”
Marisol, watching the whole exchange with visible satisfaction, picked her sunhats back up and tossed one to Cass. “Come on. Let’s get out of their house before we accidentally cause a third act.”
“It’s still our house.”
“Not for the next three weeks, it isn’t.
” Marisol grinned, already herding Cass toward the door, throwing one last look back at Alex and Dani standing together in the kitchen, hands linked, a single folder resting on the counter between them.
“Try not to fall in love with anyone else while we’re gone. We’d hate to make this a trilogy.”
The door closed behind them a few minutes later, gravel crunching under tires as the SUV pulled away down the same driveway Alex had once white-knuckled her way up in a blizzard, and the house settled into quiet around the two of them, familiar and warm and entirely theirs for the next three weeks.
Dani set the folder down on the counter and turned into Alex’s arms, resting her forehead against her shoulder, both of them smiling into the particular, hard-won ordinariness of it.
“Same house,” Dani said softly. “Different trip.”
“Same us, though.” Alex pressed a kiss to the top of her head, feeling the whole easy weight of eight months settled comfortably between them, no bracing left in her chest at all, nothing left to guard against. “I like that part best.”
Outside, the mountain sat green and warm under a clear summer sky, and inside, in a kitchen that had started as the site of an accident and become, somehow, the site of everything that mattered, two women who’d learned exactly how to choose each other stood wrapped together, in no hurry at all, with three whole weeks and nowhere they’d rather be.