Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
GRIFFIN - FIVE MONTHS LATER
“This might sound dramatic, but hear me out,” Milo says. “I think Vermont is trying to kill us.”
I snort, but… he kind of has a point.
The trip from New York to Vermont was supposed to take five hours, but we’re now crawling into hour nine after being stuck in a conga line of logging trucks, caravans of tourists scouring the backcountry of New England for autumn vibes, and people who think blinkers are optional.
My back hurts. My left leg’s cramping. My phone’s lost signal three times in the last hour, and every attempt to check my messages drains the battery faster than Milo chugs from his giant water bottle. It’s like with every mile closer to Winsome, Vermont, the universe invents a new way to test me.
And, FYI, I am absolutely failing those tests even before Milo starts tapping his foot so hard the passenger-side floorboard might give out.
I reach over and push his knee to still him. “Best friend or not, babe, if you break my car, Vermont won’t be the thing that kills you.”
Milo pouts. “The tapping distracts me from the fact that I’ve had to pee for, like, twenty minutes.”
I feel like it’s only been twenty minutes since we stopped for Milo’s last pee break, but the man insists on hydrating like a pro athlete and carrying around a pink water bottle as big as his head.
“The GPS says there’s only 1.4 miles to go, but I can pull over.” I gesture at the thick forest that lines the road.
Milo gasps. “I do not urinate in woodlands, Griffin. Besides, it’s chilly out there. I am a hothouse flower, as you know, and I only thrive in very specific climates.” He sniffs delicately. “Ideally, north of Houston and east of Bowery.”
I roll my eyes. “Yet you insisted on coming to get me settled.”
“Because friends don’t let friends do dumbass things alone!
” he fires back. “Especially when the dumbass thing is moving to Vermont, which is a serious overreaction to a… a career blip.” He pauses for effect.
“You could’ve stayed and fought, you know.
You could’ve slept on my couch. You could’ve taken your story to the media! You didn’t have to give up.”
I keep my eyes on the pothole-riddled road and grind my teeth.
I’m well aware that Milo thinks my retreat from Manhattan was a mistake.
My ears are still ringing from his screech when I told him I’d be moving north for a while.
And I don’t know that he’s wrong. I’ve spent months wondering if I could have done something different. Could have fought harder.
But the moment the Rise Athletics billboard dropped, I stopped being Griffin Mercer, rising star in Manhattan’s corporate marketing community. I became Griffin Mercer, unemployable walking punchline.
The guy who trusted the boss’s nepo-baby son and got burned.
The guy who learned the hard way that your job doesn’t, as my moms had tried to warn me, love you back.
No marketing company in New York will touch me now, and I know this because I’ve contacted them all, even the rinky-dink ones I wouldn’t have given the time of day last year.
The people I thought were my friends—all those former classmates and coworkers, people whose weddings and dinner parties I’ve attended—stopped returning my texts.
And my moms and Milo have tried to keep my spirits up by distracting me with cat memes (and, in Milo’s case, shockingly awful television shows), but if I have to see one more kitten clinging to a rope, reminding me to just hang on, I might scream.
At a certain point, just hanging on felt an awful lot like drowning.
So when I got a letter two weeks ago saying I’d inherited a cabin in Vermont… well, let’s just say it felt like the universe might be doing me a solid for the first time in ages.
Giving me a belated thirtieth birthday present or something.
If not saving me from drowning, then at least showing me which way to swim.
“I’m not giving up,” I tell Milo now. “I’m getting out of range of the firing squad long enough to fucking reload. Three months in Vermont to regroup and figure out my next steps. It’ll be great.”
He sighs.
“Which one of your mindfulness gurus always says the hardest part of any decision is making it? Well, I’ve made a decision. And now, things’ll get better.” I push at his knee, inviting him to see the humor. “Vermont can’t actually kill us.”
The moment the words are out of my mouth—literally, the very second I utter them—a moose lumbers into the road directly in front of us like Vermont is saying, “Bet.”
“Shit!” I yell, getting both hands on the wheel and yanking left.
I swear, the enormous beast has the audacity to side-eye me as we whiz past.
“Oh my fuck. Vermont, we are so sorry,” Milo moans, clutching the oh-shit bar.
I let out a shaky breath as adrenaline courses through my body. “Fuck that. Victory over the moose invasion! Vermont is gonna have to try harder if—”
Before I can even gasp, a big-ass red pickup barrels around the curve ahead. It blasts its horn, and I manage to swerve right just in time to avoid an accident.
“What the fuck?” I yell at the truck’s taillights in my mirror.
We bounce onto the gravel shoulder, directly into the pottiest of potholes, and the car lurches violently. One of the brand-new tires I’d bought as an investment in reliability gives up the ghost and starts making a thwack-thwack noise, and the car decides it doesn’t want to steer.
Well, fuck. So much for victory.
We limp to a stop.
“You need to stop pissing Vermont off,” Milo warns.
I massage my forehead with one hand and reach for my phone with the other. “We’re fine,” I tell Milo firmly. “Totally, completely fine. This is why I paid for the auto care package. A tow truck will come and get us. Easy peasy.”
But it turns out that with only one bar of cell service, it’s neither easy nor peasy.
“You owe me… so huge.” Milo pants as we push my car the remaining half mile to our destination.
The air is damp and chilly, despite us working up a sweat.
“When you get sucked into some flannel-wearing cult, marry a lumberjack, and adopt four children—as you inevitably will—you’re henceforth required to call them Miletta, Milolo, Milon, and…
” He stops pushing to consider the question.
“Milo,” I say.
“Eh.” He shakes his head, walking beside me as I push. “Nah. Too obvious.”
“Milo.”
“Well, if you insist, but won’t it get confusing when—”
“Milo!” I yell. “We’re nearly there. Run and turn the steering wheel so we can steer the car into the driveway, huh?”
“Yeesh. Okay, okay. And we’re sure this is your driveway?” Milo wonders.
“Positive,” I say. “It’s right there on the map the lawyer’s office sent over with the key and the letter from my uncle.”
Though at this point, I don’t blame him for verifying, because impossible as it sounds… I’m starting to think he might be right about Vermont having an axe to grind with me.
From what I found online regarding trusts, there’s a whole bunch of paperwork missing in the packet I received, but with Uncle Jim’s lawyer out on medical leave, I’m picking my battles.
What I know for sure is that seventeen acres of land and a one-bed, one-bath, seven-hundred-square-foot house are definitely mine…
and that’s all I really need to know, right?
We end up leaving the car at the end of the driveway, grabbing our suitcases and Milo’s beloved drinks cooler, and covering the rest of the distance on foot.
The path to Jim’s house branches off from the paved driveway, a hundred feet of moss and rocks that lead to a shadowy clearing. But there’s still enough light for me to see that there were definitely a couple of additional things I needed to know.
I stare at the vision before me, not sure if I want to laugh or cry.
“It’s a… it’s a treehouse,” Milo breathes.
It is indeed. And not like a child’s backyard treehouse. This thing is adult-sized, two stories tall in spots, and appears to have crash-landed in the middle of an oak tree, straight from Middle Earth.
“This isn’t… your uncle’s place?”
I nod. It definitely is, exactly where the map said it would be. And the way my luck’s been running, this feels somehow on-brand.
The treehouse is chaos incarnate. Like the blueprints I’d draw in the margins of my notebooks as if a little kid went on an ayahuasca retreat.
There’s a whole patchwork of different types of wood and twisty railings, strewn with glittering stained glass windows—a moon, a star, a mushroom, a…
fuck, is that a dildo? But the pièce de résistance is an enormous…
turret-type thing… shaped like a whiskey barrel that’s cantilevered on the edge of the roof, complete with a small pine tree growing from its roof and a rope bridge disappearing into the trees.
“Holy shit! There’s a mailbox on a pulley!” Milo drops his luggage and runs ahead, eyes glowing with rare, unironic excitement. “Griffin! I used to daydream about having a place like this!”
“I… I did too,” I admit. “I was obsessed with stories about running away to live in the woods. No moms making me go to bed on time. No school. No chores.”
Of course, all of that went away when I became an adult. Before I learned that going to bed on time is the linchpin of adult happiness. Before I learned the difference between fantasy and reality.
Then again, my reality’s been less than stellar lately.
I climb the steps more slowly, dragging my luggage, and find Milo chortling to himself as he inspects a line of carved and painted wooden mushrooms that guard the window at the top of the stairs.
“Griff,” Milo says, turning his head to look at me. “This dead uncle of yours… how much recreational drug use are we talking?”
I exhale a huff of laughter and try to dredge up memories of the old neighbor I used to call Uncle Jim… but there’s not a whole lot there, honestly. Which feels shitty, considering he left me his, ah, house-type structure.