Chapter One
“You have free will, free time, and flight benefits, and you’re choosing to go to Wisconsin?”
Ivy thumbed at the perspiration gathering on the stem of her martini glass. “Why do you say ‘Wisconsin’ like that?”
Brad shrugged daintily and sipped his happy-hour margarita. If there was one thing off-duty flight attendants could be counted on to do, it was find the closest happy hour to any layover hotel on Earth.
“Because all I know about the place is cheese, the Green Bay Packers, snow, and your tragic adolescence. How am I supposed to say it?”
Ivy considered his argument. “I guess like that.”
She couldn’t blame her best friend for having a bad opinion of Wisconsin.
She hadn’t given her home state glowing reviews, and there wasn’t much to recommend a place she hadn’t been back to since she left for college.
But she had just turned twenty-seven, and as much as she was leaning into her 2005 Pride and Prejudice Charlotte Lucas aesthetic, it was time to face her fear and go home one last time.
“How did you even get most of December off?” Brad asked. “I was so focused on Paris that the rest of my schedule is crap. I don’t think I could give it away wrapped in Tiffany blue.”
“Bribery. A little crying.” She picked at the edge of her damp cocktail napkin. “And all those people who weren’t paying attention to their hours all year and want health insurance next year.”
Brad laughed. “You didn’t cry.”
“No, but the rest of it is true.” Ivy squeezed his forearm. “Don’t worry. I kept our trip.”
“Together in Paris for Christmas in two weeks.” Brad put a hand over his heart. “It’s so romantic.”
Ivy grinned. She’d sat next to Brad in flight attendant training seven years ago, and they’d stuck together like supercharged magnets ever since.
They had the same taste in men—tall and emotionally constipated—so there had been a lot of layover wine nights where they cried and cursed.
He was her rock, the person she shared everything with.
“You’re the best relationship I’ve ever had,” she told him, and pinched his cheek like a doting aunt.
Brad blushed, which made his freckles stand out more against his pale cheeks. “Which is a shame, because you’re a catch.”
“We are, forever and always, Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding.”
“Bring back the ninety-minute nineties romcom, Hollywood. I’m begging you. Pleading.” He looked across the bar, furrowed his brow, then whispered, “Blue shirt. Rolled sleeves. My team or yours?”
As casually as she could, Ivy scanned the other side of the lobby bar for the man Brad was looking at. Clean-cut, classically good-looking in a frat bro kind of way. There was one just like him at every major hotel chain located near an airport across America.
“Outwardly mine, inwardly yours,” she decided after she saw the fading summer tan line where his wedding ring should have been. “Probably has two kids, a dog, and a mortgage.”
Brad wrinkled his nose. “I’m more of a cat person.”
“You’re a catch, too, you know,” Ivy told him, giving him a gentle nudge with her shoulder.
“It just feels like I’m never going to meet the right guy,” he lamented, his posture deflating like a parade balloon. “I’m so sick of hookup culture. I want the man, the house, the cat. I’d even be open to”—he shuddered—“kids if he had them or really wanted them.”
“If you can’t find Prince Charming, there’s no hope for the rest of us.”
Brad leaned his head on her shoulder. “You’re too sweet to me.” He looked up at her with soul-searching brown eyes. “I don’t understand how you’re still single.”
“And on that sappy note, I think we’ve hit our happy-hour limit.”
“When was your last date?”
Ivy took the check holder from the bartender and studiously avoided Brad’s question by pretending to do tip calculations.
“So long ago you can’t remember, or are you hiding a secret fiancé?” he prodded.
“So long ago I can’t remember,” Ivy mumbled, tucking her credit card into the slot. “The apps are a hellscape.”
“God, don’t I know it.”
“I’ve seen how your apps go wild everywhere we land. Don’t start with me.”
“Quantity doesn’t equal quality,” Brad reminded her, signing his own slip. “But the greater the quantity, the more chances I have for quality.”
They rode the elevator together, confirmed with each other their ridiculously early pickup time, and blew lots of kisses as they walked backward in opposite directions down the hallway to their rooms.
Ivy touched her key card to the pad and opened the door when the little light flashed green.
She went inside, then locked and bolted the door behind her.
The motion was so automatic that when she’d gone on a girls’ trip a few years ago, she and her flight attendant friends kept accidentally locking each other out of the room with the safety latch.
Another day, another bland hotel room in a city she didn’t care to see.
It all ran together lately. The shine had worn off the job and it was just that: a job.
A much more senior flight attendant had told her when she was brand new that years seven through fifteen were the hardest, but it seemed that she was hitting her seven-year itch a little early.
Ivy would often search career ideas on the jumpseat during long flights, but she didn’t feel qualified to do anything.
When was the last time she’d sent an email? Or made a spreadsheet?
Then she’d talk to her friends from college who worked for universities, nonprofits, or corporations, and they’d complain about their jobs and the stress of deadlines and the tedium of meetings, and that sounded as appealing as getting her asshole tweezed one hair at a time.
Ivy pretended she didn’t see the gym clothes she’d laid out on the bed when she’d arrived and been naively optimistic about visiting the hotel gym, and instead dug into her never-quite-unpacked suitcase to find her pajamas.
They’d stayed at happy hour for so long that she only had time to eat dinner, watch a few hours of TV, and go to sleep. When could she possibly fit in the gym?
The mini fridge hidden in the TV console held all the food she’d meal prepped for the trip.
Twenty-five dollars for a cold bag of Taco Bell should be criminal, but she’d definitely paid for it before because it sounded better than the “Chipotle dupe” chicken burrito bowl she’d made for herself several days prior.
God, she was sick of chicken burrito bowls. Why did she keep making them?
There wasn’t a microwave in her room. There never was at a “nicer” hotel.
But unlike the vast majority of hotels she stayed at, where she had to lug herself down to the lobby to use the microwave in the convenience store, this hotel had one next to the ice machine.
It was the small victories that made life worth living.
Except that as she stood next to the hot, humming ice machine and watched the seconds tick away on the microwave like it was a bomb she needed to defuse, panic curled around her chest. Was this her life?
Was she going to be fifty, standing next to an ice machine, microwaving a meal she didn’t love in pajamas she’d owned since she started flying, in a city she didn’t give two shits about, only to fly home to an empty apartment?
Maybe she should be the one to get a cat.
The microwave beeped several times, and Ivy used the bottom half of her long shirt as a pot holder. The tips of her fingers got hotter and hotter as she rushed back to her room.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she whisper-cursed, trying to juggle the hot glass Tupperware with one hand while she fished in her pocket for her room key with the other.
Why were women’s pants pockets inadequately sized until something urgently needed to be found, and then they were black holes?
This was an untapped area of study for physicists.
Ivy finally grasped her key card, tapped it against the pad, then ran into her room, depositing her food on the nightstand. She shook her hands, trying to cool her fingers. Maybe she should ask for tiny pot holders for Christmas.
Christmas in Coeur-de-Lac. It had been so long.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. After digging through the black hole yet again, Ivy fished it out. Her mother.
“Hey, Mom,” Ivy said, crossing the small room to the desk where she’d placed her lunch box. The top compartment was filled with pilfered condiment packets, plastic forks and spoons, napkins, random pieces of candy, and tea bags. So many tea bags. “What’s up?”
“Which airport are you flying into?” her mom, Sophie, asked.
“I don’t know yet. Chicago and Minneapolis both look good, but I’d rather fly into Milwaukee. Less driving for Dad.”
The joys of flying standby.
“Don’t worry about your dad. We’re both so excited you’re going to be here that we’d drive to Boston and back to get you.”
The familiar pinch of guilt made her wince.
The past ten years couldn’t have been easy on them.
Ivy had seen her parents often since she left home for college.
She’d gone to school near where her grandparents lived, so college holidays were spent surrounded by extended family.
For spring break, they’d go on vacation, and in the summers, she got a job at a summer camp.
Ivy had found every excuse she could think of not to return to Coeur-de-Lac.
Was it cowardly? Yes.
But she felt nauseous every time she thought about returning to that town, to that neighborhood, to that street—to the site of her greatest humiliation.
Once, she’d tripped over her own feet in O’Hare the Sunday after Thanksgiving, landing on her face and flinging her iced coffee everywhere in the crowded airport while in uniform, and she would rather relive that one thousand times over than face Grant Underwood again.
But it was time.
“Do you have an entire itinerary of activities, or are we actually going to pack up the house?” Ivy teased.
Guilty silence seemed to echo on the other end of the call.
“Mom,” Ivy began, keeping her tone gentle and even, “do you want to sell the house or not? Because we’ve been talking about this since August, and you haven’t made any progress.”
“We still have time,” Sophie protested weakly.
“You said you wanted to get the house on the market by October. It’s December.”
“We got busy. When you realize it’s going to be the last time you get to do something, you want to savor it.”
“You don’t have to move if you don’t want to,” she pointed out.
“No, it’s time. Once your dad retires, we can move somewhere he doesn’t have to shovel snow.”
“Do you even know where you want to live?”
“We figured we’d move closer to you, since it’s so hard for you to visit us in Coeur-de-Lac.”
Ivy knew her mom wasn’t trying to be passive aggressive, but the woman had grown up in the South, and that was damn close to a “bless your heart.”
“It snows in Boston, Mom.”
“But are you going to be staying there? You keep saying you don’t like it, and you’ve never stayed at a base for more than a few years anyway.”
You’ve never had a reason to stay in one place for long. She didn’t say the words, but they both heard them. One hit after another. Mom was out for blood tonight.
“Weren’t you talking about Seattle?” Sophie Weaver had never met a silence she didn’t have the urge to fill. “We could handle the Pacific Northwest. Trade in our parkas for ponchos.” She laughed at her own joke.
“I’ve been thinking about it, but I don’t know if my caffeine dependency can handle having that much access to coffee.”
“So…you’ll be staying in Boston?”
Ivy sat on the empty bed. Was she going to stay in Boston?
That same restless, indecisive feeling she had about her job had attached itself to her current address.
Maybe a change of scenery was what she craved.
Maybe those mild imitations of seasons that defined the climate of the Pacific Northwest were what she needed.
She hadn’t found the sense of peace and belonging she was looking for anywhere else.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe we could decide together— Oh! If we were all in the same city, you could live with us instead of wasting money on renting a place you’re never at. And then we could see you more—”
“Mom,” Ivy interrupted, smiling and shaking her head at her mother’s enthusiasm and delusion respectively, “I need to eat dinner and get to bed. I love you. I’ll see you soon.”
“Don’t forget to let us know where you’re flying into!”
“I won’t. Bye, Mom.”
“I love you. Sleep well. Fly safe.”
Ivy settled into her spare bed, the one she reserved for eating, and turned on the TV.
It was comforting to know that wherever she went, Forensic Files was probably on.
She scrolled past news and sports, not interested in either, then cooking competition shows and whatever weird reality TV program was on the History channel—was it even about history anymore? —until something caught her eye.
More specifically, someone.
Austin Underwood.
It was a bit part in a long-running sitcom, but it had been his start.
Her parents told her there had been watch parties all over Coeur-de-Lac when his first episode aired.
The Super Bowl and the Olympics got less attention than Austin’s ten minutes of fame.
According to her mom, the entire block was bursting with pride to have lived so close to a celebrity, all memories of his childhood terrorism fading into nothing.
The small parts came in rapid succession after that, because casting loved his Midwest boy-next-door charm.
And then the big role came: a major character on a streaming drama, Kaleidoscope Falls.
Austin played a small-town cop who had his shirt off an inexplicable amount.
The show was, objectively, crap, but she’d seen every episode multiple times.
Austin was an old habit that refused to die.