34. Sneak Peek
SNEAK PEEK
BOUNDLESS: A SINGLE DAD SMALL TOWN ROMANCE
CHAPTER ONE
JESS
Welcome to Copper Ridge
The taxidermy shop isn't on my directions.
Neither is the stuffed bear in the window, frozen mid-snarl like it's judging my life choices.
I can't exactly argue. A stuffed bear in small-town Montana probably has opinions about a woman from Connecticut who quit her job, ended her engagement, and drove three thousand miles based on a letter from my dead great-aunt.
I put my Honda in park and stare at the GPS. You have arrived at your destination.
"I really haven't," I mutter.
Copper Ridge, Montana. Population 2,847. I've been here approximately four minutes and I'm already lost.
Not that I mind the detour. The main street looks like a postcard come to life.
Brick storefronts with hand-lettered signs.
American flags hanging from old-fashioned lamp posts.
Flower boxes overflowing with red geraniums. A diner called Mae's with a hand-painted sign promising the best pie in the valley.
Two old men sit on a bench outside the hardware store, watching my dusty car like it's the most interesting thing that's happened all week.
It probably is.
I grab my scribbled directions and squint at my own handwriting. Turn left at the old lumber mill. Go 2.3 miles. Cottage on the right, yellow mailbox.
I don't remember passing a lumber mill. I don't remember much of anything except mountains, fields, and a single cow that stared at me like I was trespassing on its planet.
The two men are still watching. One wears a John Deere cap. The other has a faded baseball hat that might have been red once. They're not even pretending not to stare.
Here goes nothing.
I climb out and the August heat hits me—warm but edged with something cooler. The air smells different here. Cleaner. Like pine trees and possibility, if possibility had a scent.
My ballet flats—completely wrong for this terrain, I'm realizing—crunch across the gravel as I approach the bench.
"Hi." I offer a small wave. "Sorry to bother you, but I'm looking for the old Margene cottage. My directions say turn left at the lumber mill, but I don't think I passed?—"
"Burned down," John Deere cap says.
"Back in '87," the other adds, shaking his head slowly. "Whole thing went up in one night. Kids playing with matches, they said. Never did prove it."
Of course it burned down. Of course the one landmark on my directions has been gone for nearly forty years.
"So how do I?—"
"You Margene's kin?" John Deere squints at me, his eyes sharp despite the wrinkles. "Got a look about you."
"Her great-niece." I step closer and extend my hand. "She left me the cottage. I'm Jess. Jess Bennett."
His calloused grip swallows mine, strong and warm. "Earl Hutchins." He nods toward his companion. "That's Frank Dooley. We've been holding down this bench since before you were born."
"Longer than that," Frank says, tipping his cap. "Margene was good people. Real good people. Used to bring us pie from Mae's every Sunday after church. Apple in the fall. Cherry in the summer."
My throat tightens unexpectedly. "She never mentioned that."
"Wouldn't have." Earl releases my hand. "Wasn't the type to talk about her kindnesses. Just did 'em."
I blink hard. I will not cry in front of two strangers on a bench. I will not.
"You staying long?" Frank asks. There's no judgment in it. Just curiosity.
"I—" The honest answer is I don't know. The honest answer is I fled my entire life with two suitcases and a dying phone and no real plan beyond get to the cottage. "I'm not sure yet."
Earl nods like this is a perfectly reasonable answer. Maybe in Copper Ridge, it is.
"Well." He points a gnarled finger back the way I came.
"Head north out of town. Quarter mile past the church with the blue roof—you'll know it when you see it, only church with a blue roof in fifty miles—you'll see a gravel road on your left.
Take that up into the foothills. Two, maybe three miles. Yellow mailbox, can't miss it."
"She always did keep that mailbox painted," Frank muses. "Bright yellow, every spring. Kept that whole place looking sharp. Real proud of it, she was."
"Thank you. Really."
"Welcome to Copper Ridge, Miss Bennett." Earl's weathered face creases into something warm. "You need anything—anything at all—you come find us. We're here most days."
"Most days," Frank confirms. "Nothing better to do."
I laugh. A real one. The first real laugh I've felt in weeks.
I wave as I head back to my car. They lift their hands in unison, like they've been practicing the move for decades. Something tells me they have.
See? I tell myself as I pull away from the curb. Friendly. This is friendly. This can work.
The church with the blue roof appears exactly where Earl said it would—a white clapboard building with a steeple that stretches toward the massive sky and a roof the color of a robin's egg. A sign out front reads Copper Ridge Community Church. All Are Welcome. Yes, Even You.
I smile at that and take the left onto gravel.
The road winds upward, leaving town behind. Pavement gives way to packed dirt and loose stones that ping against my undercarriage. My little Honda wasn't built for this terrain, but it soldiers on, loyal as ever.
The mountains rise ahead of me. I've seen mountains before—the Berkshires, the Catskills, once a trip to Colorado with Garrett that mostly involved ski lodges and wine bars.
But these are different. Bigger. Wilder.
They don't care that I'm here. They've been standing since before humans existed and they'll be standing long after we're gone.
A dusting of early snow frosts the highest peaks. Summer's first whisper that fall comes fast in Montana.
The afternoon sun paints everything gold—the fields, the fence posts, the dust cloud rising behind my car. It's beautiful in a way that makes my chest hurt.
When did I stop noticing beautiful things?
The answer comes quick and unwelcome: somewhere around year two with Garrett. Somewhere between the engagement party I didn't want and the wedding venue I didn't pick and the life that was closing around me like a fist.
I shake off the thought. I didn't drive three thousand miles to think about Garrett.
Then I see the mailbox.
Yellow. Cheerful. Standing straight and proud at the end of the drive, freshly painted sometime in the spring before Gigi passed.
And beyond it?—
Oh.
Oh.
The photos the attorney emailed didn't do it justice.
The cottage sits nestled against the foothills like it grew there, a two-story farmhouse with white clapboard siding and a wraparound porch.
Blue shutters frame every window—not faded or falling, but the deep true blue of a summer sky.
A stone chimney climbs one side. Window boxes wait for flowers, empty now but clearly loved once.
It's bigger than I expected. More solid. More real.
The only sign of neglect is the garden. Two months without Gigi's hands, and it's starting to show. Weeds have sprouted between the flower beds. The grass is a little too long. The roses look parched, their blooms faded and wilting, begging for water no one's been here to give.
But the bones are beautiful. The bones are perfect.
You should sell it.
The thought surfaces out of habit, my mother's voice wrapped around it like a bow. But for the first time, it doesn't stick.
I'm already out of the car.
The gravel crunches beneath me. The air fills my lungs—clean and sharp and nothing like Connecticut. A bird I can't identify calls out from somewhere in the trees, and another answers. I'm going to need new clothes. Boots. Jeans that aren't designer. The kind of things that make sense out here.
I stand in the overgrown driveway of my dead great-aunt's cottage and tip my head back.
The sky goes on forever.
Huge. Blue. Streaked with clouds that look like someone dragged white paint across a canvas. The mountains anchor the horizon, solid and ancient and completely unconcerned with my problems.
And the silence.
God, the silence.
No traffic.
No sirens.
No neighbors arguing through thin walls.
No Garrett asking if I remembered to pick up his dry cleaning in that tone that made it sound like a question but felt like an accusation.
No mother sighing heavily every time I enter a room.
No sister asking when I'm going to "get my life together" like my life is a mess she has to step around.
Just wind in the grass. Birds in the trees. My own heartbeat slowing for the first time in months.
Something loosens in my chest. Some knot I've been carrying so long I forgot it was there.
"Okay, Gigi," I whisper to the empty air. "Let's see what you left me."
The porch steps are solid under my feet. The front door is painted the same deep blue as the shutters, and the key the attorney mailed me turns smoothly in the lock.
Inside, the cottage smells like dust and old books and something floral. Lavender, maybe. Dried herbs hang from a rack in the kitchen doorway, their scent faded but still present.
The front room is bigger than I expected—a proper living room with hardwood floors and a stone fireplace.
Built-in bookshelves line one wall, stuffed full.
Books about gardening and geology and Greek mythology.
Romance novels with shirtless cowboys on the covers.
A thick biography of Eleanor Roosevelt marked with a receipt from 1994.
A crocheted blanket drapes over a worn velvet couch. Smooth stones line the windowsill. A pair of reading glasses with purple frames sits on an end table, waiting for hands that will never pick them up again.
Gigi lived here for forty-three years.
She'd visited us in Connecticut a handful of times over the years—never staying long, never quite fitting into my mother's pristine world.
But she called me every birthday without fail.
Sent postcards of Montana sunsets and letters that smelled faintly of lavender, full of stories about the garden and the mountains and the life she'd built three thousand miles away from everyone who told her she was crazy.
Forty-three years of being exactly who she wanted to be.
A coffee mug on the bookshelf catches my eye. I pick it up and read the text.
I'm Not Arguing, I'm Just Explaining Why I'm Right.
I laugh. It comes out watery.
I explore the rest. A dining room with a farmhouse table that could seat eight.
A kitchen with vintage appliances that somehow feel intentional rather than outdated—the kind of kitchen people pay designers to recreate.
Two bedrooms upstairs, one clearly Gigi's and one set up for guests who probably never came.
A bathroom with a claw-foot tub and black-and-white tile.
This isn't a cottage. This is a home.
Back in the kitchen, I notice the counter isn't cluttered. Gigi was always fastidious—even when she visited us in Connecticut, she'd reorganize my mother's cabinets when Mom wasn't looking. A cluttered counter is a cluttered mind, Jessie.
The counter is bare except for a flour canister, a ceramic chicken that probably holds sugar, and?—
I stop.
There's an envelope.
White. Yellowed at the edges. Sitting in the exact center of the counter like it was placed there deliberately. Like someone knew exactly who would find it.
My name is written across the front in handwriting I'd know anywhere. Loopy and elegant, with a little flourish on the that filled every birthday card and letter she ever sent me.
Jessica.
Not Jessica Bennett. Just Jessica. Like she knew I'd be the one to walk through that door.
My hands tremble as I pick it up.
The envelope is heavier than it looks. More than just a single page.
I stare at my name in Gigi's handwriting, and something shifts in my chest.
Whatever's inside this envelope, it was meant for me. Not my mother. Not Lauren. Me.
The last light of sunset spills through the kitchen window, painting everything in shades of rose and gold. Outside, the mountains have gone purple against the darkening sky. The first stars are beginning to appear.
I'm three thousand miles from everything I've ever known, standing in a dead woman's kitchen, holding a letter that might change everything.
Or nothing.
There's only one way to find out.
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