Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Audra
Not just with tonight’s crisis—something about orchids being the wrong shade of ivory for tomorrow’s Upper East Side wedding—but with all of it.
The constant fires to extinguish, the brides who treat me like their personal therapist, the vendors who think “deadline” is a suggestion.
My chest tightens with that familiar sensation I’ve been ignoring for months: the feeling that I’m suffocating in my own success.
I sit up in my Tribeca loft, the city lights bleeding through my floor-to-ceiling windows, and make a decision that would horrify my mother, my clients, and probably my accountant.
I’m leaving.
Not forever—I’m too practical for that kind of dramatic gesture—but for a week. Maybe two. However long it takes to remember how to breathe without feeling like each inhale comes with a price tag and an expectation.
My fingers move across my phone screen, bypassing the familiar hotel chains and luxury resorts that usually host my client events. I need the opposite of luxury. I need... nothing. Silence. Space.
Ashton Family Lodge - A rustic mountain retreat in the heart of the Adirondacks.
Ashton. The name tugs at something in my memory, but I’m too exhausted to chase the thought. The website is refreshingly simple. No spa packages, no curated experiences, no Instagram-worthy infinity pools. Just log cabins, mountain views, and—blessed relief—limited cell service.
I book it before my rational brain can interfere.
My phone buzzes with a text from Emily, my best friend since we were first-year analysts at different firms, bonding over terrible hours and worse bosses.
Drinks tonight? That place with the good martinis?
I text back: Taking a sabbatical. Heading upstate for a couple weeks. Don’t worry, not having a breakdown. Just need space.
Since when do you take sabbaticals???
Since now. Will call when I get there.
If you’re not murdered by mountain people.
That’s reassuring, Em.
Love you too. Be safe.
I turn off my phone before she can interrogate me further. Emily means well, but she’d want to analyze why I’m running, and I don’t have the energy to explain what I don’t understand myself.
* * *
The drive north feels like shedding skin.
With each mile marker, another layer of Audra Gabriel, Elite Event Planner, falls away.
My phone, relegated to the glove compartment, stays mercifully quiet.
The playlist I’d usually find insufferably folksy—all acoustic guitars and wistful harmonies—suddenly sounds like freedom.
By the time I turn onto the gravel road leading to the lodge, that nagging familiarity has grown stronger. Ashton Family Lodge. Why does that sound so—
Oh.
Oh no.
The lodge sprawls before me like something from a storybook—weathered logs and stone, smoke curling from a chimney, wildflowers growing with cheerful abandon along the front path.
It’s exactly as he described it, all those years ago in our dorm’s common room, when we were supposed to be studying for our business finals but instead talked until dawn about our dreams.
“My family has this lodge in the Adirondacks,” Reese had said, his eyes bright with passion. “It’s been in our family for three generations. Someday, when I’m done with all this corporate bullshit, I’m going back there. Running it properly. Making it something special.”
“Sounds lonely,” I’d teased, nudging his shoulder with mine.
“Only if you’re there alone,” he’d replied, then blushed furiously and changed the subject.
I should leave. Turn around right now and find literally any other place to have my existential crisis. Because if this is Reese Ashton’s family lodge, then—
The front door opens, and ten years collapse into nothing.
“Audra?”
He’s frozen on the porch, looking like he’s seen a ghost. Which, in a way, maybe he has.
The boy I knew at Cornell has become something else entirely—broader shoulders, deeper tan, laugh lines that weren’t there before.
The floppy business major haircut has given way to something shorter but still unruly.
He’s wearing flannel now instead of the button-downs he always looked uncomfortable in, and it suits him in a way that makes my chest tight.
“Reese.” It comes out as barely a whisper.
For a moment, we just stare at each other. Ten years of carefully maintained distance, of roads not taken, of that one almost-kiss the night before graduation that we never talked about—it all hangs between us like morning mist.
Then his face breaks into that crooked smile I used to dream about, and I’m twenty-one again, hopelessly in love with my best friend.
“Audra Gabriel,” he says, descending the porch steps with an easy grace the gangly boy I knew never possessed. “What are the odds?”
“Apparently better than I calculated.” I aim for light, casual, the tone of someone whose heart isn’t currently attempting to escape her chest. “Your SEO needs work, by the way. I had no idea this was your place when I booked.”
“Would you have come if you’d known?”
The question lands between us with unexpected weight. We both know the answer. We both know why.
“I’m here now,” I say instead.
Something flickers across his face—relief, maybe, or disappointment that I didn’t answer directly. Classic us, still dancing around the things that matter.
“Let me grab your bags,” he says, already moving toward my car. “Unless you want to make a run for it? I’d understand.”
“I don’t run anymore.” The words surprise me with their honesty. “That’s actually why I’m here. To stop running.”
He pauses, my suitcase in hand, and really looks at me. Not the quick assessment from before, but the way he used to look at me across the library when he thought I was focused on my textbook. Like he’s trying to read between my lines.
“Rough year?” he asks, echoing the same gentle tone he used when I’d show up at his dorm room at 2 AM, stressed about exams or my parents’ expectations.
“You could say that.”
We walk toward the cabins, and it’s surreal how natural it feels to fall into step beside him again, even after all this time.
He points out improvements he’s made to the property, his voice warming with pride.
This is what he wanted, I realize. He actually did it—walked away from the investment banking job everyone expected him to take and came home to run the family lodge.
“You seem happy,” I observe.
“I am.” He glances at me sideways. “Most days. Today’s been a bit complicated.”
“Because I’m here?”
“Partly.” He sets my suitcase on the porch of a charming cabin. “But also because of this.” He pulls a folded paper from his back pocket—legal letterhead, official-looking. “Estate stuff. My great-aunt Mildred passed last year, left me the lodge officially, but there are... conditions.”
“Conditions?”
He laughs, but it’s strained. “She was a romantic. Had very specific ideas about what kind of person should run a family lodge.” He shoves the paper back in his pocket. “But that’s my problem, not yours. You came here to relax.”
“Reese—”
“Dinner’s at seven,” he interrupts, that same deflection tactic he used in college when conversations got too real. “My sister Taylor does the cooking now. You’ll love her. She’s everything I’m not—organized, punctual, actually knows how to use Excel.”
“You hated Excel.”
“Still do. That’s why I have Taylor.”
We’re both trying so hard to keep this light, to pretend that seeing each other again isn’t shifting something fundamental.
But I can feel it in the air between us—all those unfinished conversations, that careful distance we maintained after graduation when we both chose our careers over. .. whatever we might have been.
“I should let you settle in,” he says, but doesn’t move.
“Reese?” I hate how vulnerable my voice sounds. “Are we okay? I mean, can we be okay? I know we didn’t exactly—”
“We’re okay, Audie.” The old nickname slips out, and his ears turn red. “We were always okay. We just...”
“Wanted different things.”
“Yeah.” But the way he looks at me suggests maybe that wasn’t entirely true. “Anyway, you’re here now. That’s what matters.”
He leaves before I can respond, and I escape into the cabin, my heart racing like I’ve run a marathon.
The space is perfect—cozy and simple, everything my complicated life isn’t.
I unpack slowly, trying to process the impossible reality that of all the places I could have run to, I’ve run straight back to Reese Ashton.
My phone, forgotten in my purse, buzzes with another client emergency. I turn it off without looking.
By the time seven o’clock rolls around, I’ve changed clothes three times, finally settling on jeans and a soft sweater—casual, but the sweater’s the same green I wore to that last college party, the one where Reese spent the whole night looking at me like he wanted to say something important.
The dining room is warm and inviting, filled with the comfortable chatter of other guests. But I only see Reese, standing by the stone fireplace, gesturing animatedly as he tells a story to an elderly couple. He’s in his element here, I realize. This is who he was always meant to be.
He looks up mid-sentence, finds me in the doorway, and stares. The elderly woman follows his gaze.
“You must be Audra,” she says as I approach. “Reese mentioned you were an old friend from college.”
“Cornell, right?” the woman’s husband chimes in. “Reese says you two were quite the pair. Study partners, wasn’t it?”
“Something like that,” Reese says, his gaze not leaving mine.
Study partners. Is that what we’re calling it? Three years of being inseparable, of everyone assuming we were dating, of that constant will-they-won’t-they tension that we never quite resolved.
“Let me introduce you to Taylor,” Reese says, guiding me with a light touch on my back that feels both familiar and electric.
His sister is a whirlwind of energy, with Reese’s dark hair but a sharper, more mischievous smile.