Love at First Loaf (Ashwood Falls #4)

Chapter 1

Gabby

This is fine. Everything is fine.

I shift sideways—carefully, because waking a stranger who’s drooling on your cardigan feels like a level of confrontation I’m not equipped for at eleven p.m.—and press my forehead against the window.

Below, Alaska stretches out in every direction like the earth didn’t know when to stop.

Mountains. Trees. More mountains. More trees. Not a single Whataburger in sight.

I’d said yes before the lawyer finished explaining the terms. I was sitting in my car outside an apartment I couldn’t afford, eating gas station peanut butter crackers, and moving to Alaska felt like the only direction left.

That was the plan. Sixty days, sell the bakery, use the money to start over somewhere—anywhere—that isn’t Austin.

Austin, where Marco and Valentina are probably having brunch right now in the café we used to go to, sitting in our booth, eating our pastries, living the life that was supposed to be mine.

Marco, my ex-husband, who I built a bakery with from nothing.

Valentina, my best friend, who I told everything to—including, apparently, the exact vulnerabilities Marco needed to destroy me efficiently.

I didn’t see it coming. That’s the part that keeps me up at three a.m. Not the affair. Not the divorce. The fact that I had no idea. I stood in my own kitchen and smiled at both of them and never thought something was wrong.

If I couldn’t read the two people closest to me, how am I supposed to trust myself to read anyone?

Short answer: I’m not. Hence Alaska. Where there are apparently more moose than people, and you can’t betray someone you never get close to.

The plane jolts. 14B snorts awake, blinks at me like he’s never seen a human woman before, and resettles with his full weight against me like we’ve upgraded to long term.

“Cool,” I whisper. “This is great.”

The Anchorage airport at midnight is a fever dream of taxidermy and gift shops selling shirts that say Alaska: Where the Odds Are Good but the Goods Are Odd.

My luggage did not make the connection in Seattle.

All of it. Gone. Every bag, every carefully packed item, every practical shoe I own—vanished into the airline’s void, probably sitting on a carousel in Minneapolis right now, going around and around with nobody to claim it.

What I have: one carry-on. Inside the carry-on: another sundress (because I packed for the Austin weather I was leaving, not the Alaska weather I was entering), a phone charger, a toothbrush, and my rolling pin.

The rolling pin is a Matfer Bourgeat, French, solid maple.

It was the first professional tool I ever bought with my own money.

I’ve had it longer than I had my marriage.

It survived a grease fire, two moves, and a divorce.

It is the one thing I would grab in a house fire, and when the airline told me to choose what went in the carry-on, it wasn’t even a question.

My mother would say this is symbolic. My mother says a lot of things, most of them unhelpful.

I rent a car from a man named Gerald who looks like he’s been awake since the Eisenhower administration and who hands me the keys to something that might be a Jeep, or might be a large metal insect, and tells me Ashwood Falls is “about three hours if you don’t hit a moose.”

“Hit a moose,” I repeat.

“They stand in the road,” Gerald says, like this is a totally normal traffic hazard. “Big ones. Just lay on the horn.”

“And if the horn doesn’t work?”

Gerald considers this. “Drive around ‘em.”

“And if I can’t drive around them?”

“Wait.” He shrugs. “They move eventually.”

“Eventually,” I say, and Gerald nods like eventually is a perfectly acceptable timeline for a roadblock caused by a thousand-pound animal, and this is my life now—I’ve traded Austin traffic for moose traffic, and I’m not sure which is worse, but at least the moose aren’t texting.

“Great. Thank you, Gerald.”

“Welcome to Alaska.”

The drive is dark, endless, and deeply unsettling in the way that only total wilderness can be when you’re a city person who considers “nature” to be the potted fern in her apartment.

The road narrows from highway to two-lane to something that’s less a road and more a suggestion, winding through forests so thick the headlights barely punch through.

No streetlights. No other cars. Just me, the maybe-Jeep, and the growing certainty that I have made a catastrophic error in judgment.

Which tracks. My judgment has been garbage lately. Exhibit A: my marriage. Exhibit B: trusting Valentina with every secret I had. Exhibit C: agreeing to move to a state I’ve never visited based on a legal document from a dead woman I’ve never heard of.

The GPS—which has been growing increasingly uncertain for the last forty-five minutes, recalculating like it’s having a personal crisis—announces that I’ve arrived at my destination.

I stop the car.

There’s a cabin. It’s dark. It’s small. It sits at the end of a dirt road surrounded by trees that look like they’ve been here since before Alaska was a state.

And there’s something on the porch.

Something large.

I squint through the windshield, and the something shifts, and clarity hits me—the kind that only comes in the middle of the night in the Alaskan wilderness. A moose stands on my porch chewing the railing.

Not near the porch. Not beside the porch. On the porch, like he owns real estate there and is making home improvements with his teeth.

He’s enormous. Every nature documentary I’ve ever watched did not adequately prepare me for this.

His antlers—do moose have antlers in the summer?

I don’t know. I don’t know anything about moose, or is it meese.

I don’t know anything about anything right now—are wider than the porch railing he’s systematically destroying.

I grip the rolling pin in my lap because it is the only weapon I have, and I am a five-foot-four pastry chef from Austin, Texas, in a sundress and heels, and I’m going to die on my first night in Alaska, killed by a porch moose while holding French bakeware.

“Okay,” I say to the empty car. “Okay. This is—this is happening. This is a moose. On my porch. At one in the morning. And I’m talking to myself because there is literally no one else to talk to.”

I’m going to have to get out of the car.

I’m going to have to walk past the moose.

I’m going to have to go inside the dark cabin that belongs to a dead woman I never met and sleep there alone in the wilderness with a moose outside my door and no luggage and no working phone and absolutely no idea what I’m doing with my life.

I open the car door, then stop. Gerald said to lay on the horn.

I close the car door and hit the horn.

The moose pauses, jaw mid-chew. He turns his massive head and looks at the car with the profound indifference of an animal that has never once been inconvenienced by anything.

He resumes chewing.

“Great,” I say. “Very helpful, Gerald.”

I open the car door again. The gravel crunches under my heels like it’s announcing me to every predator in a three-mile radius. The moose and I make eye contact.

“Hi,” I say, because what else do you say to a moose? “I’m Gabby. I’m going to live here for sixty days, apparently. Please don’t kill me.”

The moose chews the railing and does not respond, which is the most productive conversation I’ve had with a male in about six months.

“I have a rolling pin,” I tell him, and my voice comes out thin and high and absolutely not threatening. “It’s French. It’s very expensive. I will use it.”

The moose blinks and resumes chewing totally unimpressed with me.

And that’s when a voice comes from the tree line—low, quiet, and completely unbothered.

“That’s Morris.”

I spin so fast I nearly twist my ankle in the heels—the heels, God, why am I wearing heels in Alaska—and a man is standing at the edge of the clearing.

He’s tall. Very tall. Broad like someone who carries heavy things for fun.

Flannel shirt. Work boots. Dark hair under the shadow of the trees. He looks like the forest made him.

“Morris,” I repeat, because my brain has apparently decided to work exclusively in echoes tonight.

“The moose.” He takes a step closer, and into the porch light, catching the angles of his face. Strong jaw. Dark eyes. An expression that lands somewhere between mildly inconvenienced and exists in permanent stoicism.

He looks at Morris. Morris looks at him.

Some kind of negotiation happens between them that I’m not a party to—a long beat of silent eye contact, one man to one moose—and then the man makes a low sound. Not a whistle, exactly. Not a word. Just a sound, deep in his chest, like a rumble of disapproval from the earth itself.

Morris turns, steps off the porch with a grace that seems impossible for an animal his size, and lumbers into the darkness like this is a routine he’s performed a hundred times.

The man watches him go, then turns back to me.

I’m standing in the dirt driveway in heels and a sundress, holding a rolling pin, my hair wrecked from fourteen hours of travel, mascara probably under my eyes, looking like a disheveled pastry chef who has been personally victimized by the airline industry.

He takes me in for exactly one second. Maybe less.

“Welcome,” he says. Or grunts. It’s hard to tell if it’s a word or just a sound his body produced involuntarily.

And then he turns and walks back toward the tree line, disappearing down what looks like a trail that cuts through the woods behind the cabin. Gone. Like he was never there.

I stand in the driveway, alone, holding my rolling pin, staring at the empty porch where the moose was, then at the dark trail where the man was, then back at the cabin that apparently belongs to me for the next sixty days.

A breeze comes off the mountains, and I shiver hard enough that my teeth click together.

It’s June. It’s June and I’m freezing. In Austin right now it’s ninety-two degrees and Marco is sleeping in the bed we bought together and my bakery—my bakery, the one I built—has Valentina’s name on it now, and I’m standing in the Alaskan wilderness holding a rolling pin and wondering what I’ve done with my life.

The cabin is dark. The silence is massive. Somewhere in the trees, something howls—or hoots, or screams; I can’t tell—and I flinch so hard the rolling pin slips out of my grip and clatters onto the gravel.

I pick it up.

I walk to the porch.

I try the door. It’s unlocked, because apparently in Alaska you don’t lock your doors, which is either charming or terrifying, and I haven’t decided which.

Inside, the cabin smells like old wood and dust and something faintly sweet—cinnamon, maybe, or vanilla. Like someone baked here once, a long time ago, and the memory of it soaked into the walls.

I find a light switch. A single overhead bulb flickers on, casting a jaundiced yellow glow that turns everything sepia.

There’s a kitchen—small, outdated, with a cast iron stove that looks like it predates electricity.

A living room with a couch covered in a quilt.

A bookshelf stuffed with paperbacks. A window that looks out at nothing but darkness and trees.

No Wi-Fi. No cell service—I’ve plugged in my phone, and it has one bar that keeps disappearing like it’s shy.

No working oven that I can see beyond the cast iron beast, which squats in the corner of the kitchen like a dragon that’s been asked to do domestic labor and resents it.

No sign that anyone has lived here in at least two years.

There’s a photograph on the wall by the bookshelf.

A woman—dark hair, big smile, flour on her cheek—standing in front of a building with a hand-painted sign that reads Sugar & Flour.

She’s laughing at whoever’s holding the camera.

She looks like she belongs here in a way I can’t imagine ever belonging anywhere again.

Edna.

The quilt is thick, and the couch is soft enough, and when I sit down the springs sigh under me like the cabin has been waiting for someone to come back.

I set the rolling pin on the coffee table next to a stack of mail addressed to Edna Flores.

Great-Aunt Edna. The black sheep. The woman who ran away to Alaska for some man, according to my mother, who said it like running away for love was the most irresponsible thing a person could do.

I pull the quilt up to my chin and stare at the ceiling and listen to the silence, which isn’t silent at all—it’s full of wind and creaking wood and distant water and whatever that animal was howling in the trees.

Sixty days.

I can survive sixty days.

I survived Marco. I survived the look on Valentina’s face when I walked in on them.

I survived signing divorce papers in a Starbucks because my lawyer said, “somewhere neutral” and I didn’t have the energy to argue.

I survived packing my life into a storage unit and sleeping on my sister’s couch for three weeks and eating gas station crackers in my car and saying “I’m fine” to everyone who asked until the words lost all meaning.

I can survive Alaska.

I close my eyes. The cabin settles around me like it’s making room.

Outside, something large snaps a branch—Morris, probably, circling back to finish destroying the railing—and I pull the quilt tighter and press my face into the pillow that smells like cinnamon and dust and someone else’s life.

Tomorrow I’ll figure out the bakery, the clause, the oven, the moose, the silent man from the trees, and the sixty days stretching out ahead of me like a sentence I don’t know how to finish.

Tonight, I need to not cry.

I almost make it. The tears come somewhere around two-thirty in the morning, quiet and uninvited, and I let them. Then I sleep.