Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Everett
I'm going to kill my best friends.
The business partner ones.
All three of them.
Slowly.
With my bare hands.
“This boulder is where Jedediah Morgan allegedly conceived his seventh child.”
I read the words off the faux-aged plaque that's been bolted to a rock I've walked past my entire life.
The plaque that was definitely not there yesterday. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Caleb appears at my elbow, grinning like the charley horse mid thrust he’s rapidly becoming.
“Great, right? Roman found this company that does custom plaques with next-day shipping. We got twelve of them.”
“Twelve?”
“Scattered all over the mountain. It's a scavenger hunt. People find them, take selfies, post with the hashtag. Whoever gets the most wins a prize.”
“What's the hashtag?” I ask, already dreading the answer.
Caleb's grin widens. “MountainDaddyTour.”
I close my eyes.
Take a breath.
Remind myself that despite my earlier declaration, murder is illegal and would create a lot of paperwork.
“My great-great-grandfather is rolling in his grave.”
“Probably, but you know Grammie Bea is cackling with glee,” Caleb agrees cheerfully. “Because your great-great-gdad is also trending. Check it out.”
He shoves his phone in my face. The #MountainDaddyTour hashtag already has over two thousand posts.
People take pictures with the plaques, posing suggestively with the boulders, and make TikToks about the Morgan family “stamina.”
One of the most-liked posts is a video of two women reading the plaques aloud and losing their minds laughing.
“'The Morgan men have been known for their stamina on these slopes since 1887,'” one of them reads out loud, wheezing. “I'm DEAD. I'm actually deceased. This is the best thing I've ever seen.”
It has forty thousand views.
In three hours.
“What do the rest of them say?”
Caleb hands me a stack of images and my gut bottoms out.
The spot commemorating where my great-great-grandfather surveyed the original property lines? That fucking plaque.
“Jedediah didn't have seven children,” I say through gritted teeth.
“He does now,” Caleb replies cheerfully. “For marketing purposes.”
By the time they're done, the mountain is littered with “historical” gems.
“This beam was hand-selected for its... girth” and “Feel free to test the sturdiness of our equipment.”
The Morgan family crest has been “reinterpreted” with a plaque that just says: “You know what it looks like.”
I do know what it looks like.
I've never noticed before.
I will never un-notice.
“This is humiliating,” I say.
“This is marketing.” Caleb pockets his phone. “The bar's packed. The restaurant has a waitlist. We've had six people book rooms for next weekend just in the last hour.”
I want to argue.
I want to point out that this is NOT what my ancestors built.
This isn't the legacy my family poured their hearts into for a hundred years.
But he's not wrong.
People are here. They're laughing. They're staying.
They're spending money.
And just yesterday, we had seven people on the heritage walk. One of whom was asleep.
“Fine,” I grind out. “But if my father sees these plaques—”
“Already handled. Nolan's running interference. Your dad thinks this is a 'historical walking tour with enhanced atmospheric elements.'”
“What the hell are enhanced atmospheric elements?”
“Torches,” Caleb clarifies. “And Jake.”
“Who the hell is Jake?”
Caleb points down the torchlit path, where a man built like a Greek statue is leading a group of very attentive women toward the next plaque. He's wearing jeans, work boots, and suspenders.
Just suspenders.
No shirt.
In December.
“Jake's from Roman's crew,” Caleb explains. “He agreed to do the shirtless lumberjack guide thing for an extra hundred bucks and unlimited hot chocolate.”
“It's thirty-two degrees.”
“He's got excellent circulation. Also, abs. Have you seen his abs? Because everyone else has seen his abs. There's a whole Instagram story series dedicated to Jake's abs.”
I watch as Jake stops at a plaque, reads it aloud in a voice that carries through the trees, and the crowd of women bursts into delighted shrieks.
“'According to lodge legend,'” Jake reads, flexing unnecessarily as he gestures to the sign, “'this very spot was the site of three marriage proposals, two elopements, and one particularly memorable game of strip poker during the blizzard of 1962.'”
More shrieks. Cameras flash. Someone yells “MARRY ME, JAKE.”
This is what my life has become.
My great-grandfather's legacy, reduced to fake plaques about strip poker and a shirtless man named Jake.
I spot Sierra under the old maple.
Of course she's standing under the old maple. Just stab me in the fucking heart already and get it over with.
It’s the place I had her meet me after our first kiss.
No doubt she thought I planned to apologize.
Apologize. Rewind the kiss. Pretend it hadn’t happened.
But I’d replayed that moment on the lift a hundred times.
And not once did I regret it.
So no—I didn’t meet her to say sorry.
I met her to do it again.
My fingers tangled in hair I’d never be able to resist again and I kissed her harder than I meant to.
Slower than I should have.
And when I finally stopped, I said, “I’m not sorry, Sierra. And I’m sure as hell not done.”
Now she's using the spot as a vantage point to document my humiliation.
Her camera's up. Her armor's on. She's doing the thing she always does when the world gets too sharp—putting glass and distance between herself and whatever's hurting her.
I know that move. I've been on the other side of that lens more times than I can count as she honed her talent.
Back then, it felt like intimacy. As friends, and then as more.
Now it just feels like evidence.
Women giggling as they pose with Jake.
Click.
The “Morgan stamina” plaque.
Click.
A couple making out against the boulder where my ancestor allegedly conceived his seventh child.
Click.
Jaw set and shoulders rigid, she does her job—documenting the event, capturing content for the festival—but every line of her body screams that she'd rather be anywhere else.
This was supposed to be her thing. History. Preservation. Respect for what came before.
And her brothers turned it into a circus.
At least I thought it was a circus. Four hours in though? That became the real tipping point.
Hour one, I flinched every time someone yelled “Mount Me Everett.”
Hour two, I stopped flinching and started drinking.
Hour three, I watched a woman propose to a boulder and thought, Yeah, that tracks.
Hour four?
Hour four, I realized I'd gone numb. The jokes didn't land anymore.
The absurdity had flattened into white noise.
Someone called me “Mountain Daddy” to my face and I just..
. nodded. Like that was my name now. Like Everett Morgan, fifth generation lodge owner, had been absorbed into a hashtag and there was nothing left to fight for.
That was the real tipping point. Not the chaos—the surrender.
Word didn’t just spread. It exploded—because there’s nothing people love more than a mess that isn’t theirs.
“brEAKING: Hot mountain men giving tours in various states of undress. GPS coordinates attached.”
The parking lot fills. Then overfills. People park on the access road. Someone abandoned a Prius in a snowbank.
“Interactive demonstrations” of “traditional mountain skills” have been added, which somehow all involve flexing:
The wood-chopping station. (Shirtless.)
The “proper climbing form” wall. (Shirtless, with gratuitous stretching.)
The “how settlers stayed warm” demonstration that's basically a cuddle puddle with consent forms.
Someone hung a banner over the gift shop that reads: “THE PENETRATION STATION.”
I don't know what's being penetrated and I’m afraid to ask.
As if none of this was bad enough, right when I find a guy doing pushups during the chapel history segment my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I’d give my left nut to not have to look, but I’m the owner so I do.
My mother.
Deep breath one.
Deep breath two.
And go.
“Hey mom.”
“Everett James Morgan, why are my church friends sending me videos of some shirtless man in suspenders explaining the 'fertility ritual stone'?”
“Mom, I can explain—”
“There is no fertility ritual stone, Everett. I would know. I've lived on this mountain for thirty-five years.”
“It's for marketing—”
“Helen Purnell called me. She asked if she could book the stone for her granddaughter's wedding.”
“Mom—”
“She wants to 'harness the energy.' I had to tell her there is no energy, Everett. There's just a rock your father peed on in 1987.”
With that parting shot, the line goes dead.
I hang up and stand there, phone in hand, staring at nothing.
Fertility ritual stone.
My father peed on that rock in 1987. Now people want to book it for weddings.
The laugh that escapes me isn't funny. It's the sound of something snapping I never knew could break.
I drift toward the fireplace, my hand going straight to the mantel. Wood sourced right from this mountain by people so determined they started with nothing but a few handsaws and their bare hands because they believed in something worth building.
They didn't build it for hashtags.
They didn't build it for shirtless lumberjacks named Jake.
They built it for family. For legacy. For the kind of love that puts down roots and refuses to let go.
And here I am, fifth generation, watching it all become a punchline.
#MountainDaddyTour.
#MorganStamina.
“Mount Me Everett.”
The worst part? It's working.
This is what survival looks like.
Grammie Bea would understand. She was practical like that. She'd probably laugh at the fertility stone and make some filthy joke about Jedediah's legacy living on.
But she'd also see what it's costing me to stand here and smile while everything my family built gets turned into content.
I grab the whiskey bottle from behind the bar.
Tonight, I'm not pouring glasses. Tonight, I'm drinking straight from the source.