Chapter One #2
She opened a binder of her own — smaller than mine, held together with a rubber band — and positioned herself across from us. Cliff and I stood facing her. Governor padded in and sat at Cliff's feet as if this were, in fact, his contractual obligation.
"Now," she said, looking over her reading glasses at me. "I've married eleven Mountain Mates couples. Seven are still together, which is a better record than the locals, and I will tell you that story another time because it involves a canoe."
Cliff stood close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his arm. I hadn't expected that. That a man could radiate enough to feel from three inches away, or that I would notice, or that noticing would make it harder to focus on what was happening.
"He's nervous," Barbara said, not looking up from her binder. "He does that thing with his jaw."
I glanced at Cliff. His jaw was, in fact, tight.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't fine. I said you were nervous. Both things can be true, hon." She turned a page. "Let's begin."
Barbara had a cadence worn smooth from repetition, but she paused at certain lines the way a person does when they wrote them.
"I added that part myself," she said after a flourish about geese mating for life.
"The state version puts people to sleep.
" I watched the grandfather clock because looking at Cliff while saying the word forever seemed unwise. The ceremony took eleven minutes.
"Do you, Cliff Masterson, take this woman —"
"Yep."
She stared at him for three full seconds over her reading glasses. "I'm going to need the whole sentence, hon."
"I do."
"That's the one." She shook her head, just barely, in my direction. "Every time."
Governor chose the vows to headbutt Cliff's hand.
He scratched behind the cat's ears without looking down, his attention still on me, and I watched his thumb move gently over the cat's head while Governor leaned into it with his eyes half-closed.
That was just how his hands worked when something small pressed against them.
I felt it in my stomach.
"Do you, Nell Chambers —"
"I do." My boardroom voice. Steady, measured, the voice that had closed seven-figure consulting contracts. It sounded absurd in this room and I knew it and I couldn't find a different one.
"Good," Barbara said quietly. "You two are going to be interesting."
He opened the ring box. A simple gold band from the app's concierge service.
But his fingers were warm when he took my hand, and his thumb pressed against my knuckle as the ring slid on, and the gold carried the heat of his pocket, and for two seconds that ring and the pressure of his hand were the only things in the room.
I gave myself two seconds. Then I straightened my shoulders and leveled my chin and reminded myself that this was a transaction.
She offered pie. We declined. At the door, Barbara squeezed my arm and looked at Cliff.
"He forgets to eat when he's working. You look like you won't let that happen." Then, louder: "Bring her back."
"I will."
"He will forget. You remind him."
I liked Barbara. Liking anyone in Cedar Bluff wasn't part of the plan, which was the first of what I suspected would be several miscalculations.
We got back in the truck. The road climbed past the last houses and into forest, and the landscape shifted.
The light was lower now, amber, and shadows pooled in the valleys below.
We were inside the mountains, not approaching them.
The river I'd heard earlier was beneath us, its sound reaching up through the trees.
My husband was driving. I turned the word over and it didn't fit anywhere comfortable. I looked at the ring on my left hand, resting on my knee, and felt the lingering warmth of his thumb on my knuckle.
Cliff pointed through the windshield at a ridge where snow held on against dark rock. "That's Sawtooth. Ice comes off in another couple weeks."
It was the most he'd volunteered in one sentence. I added it to the gray eyes and the callused hands and the way he'd scratched a cat's ears during his own wedding. The list was getting longer than I wanted it to be.
The cabin appeared around a final bend and I stopped expecting what I'd expected.
I'd pictured a shack. A hunting cabin with a woodstove and questionable plumbing, because that was the version of "mountain man" my research had prepared me for.
What I saw was a timber-frame house with a pitched roof and a stone chimney, a covered porch with two wooden chairs facing the river, which ran wide and fast thirty yards below.
An outbuilding sat fifty yards up the slope.
I could see gear racks through the open door, which matched what I knew from his profile.
Wilderness guide. This was where he worked.
But the cabin itself was a home.
Inside: an open main room, kitchen along one wall with a butcher block counter, a cast-iron pan on a hook, herbs in small pots on the windowsill catching the last light, two stools at the counter.
A small wooden table near the kitchen window with two chairs, made by hand or chosen with care.
The living area had a woodstove, bookshelves with cracked spines, a wool rug in deep reds.
Windows on three sides let the mountain in.
"Signal comes back here," Cliff said, tapping a small device near the ceiling. "Cell booster for the business. Internet's satellite, router's by the bookshelf."
A short hallway led to the bedroom on one side, bathroom on the other. The bedroom door was open.
One bed. A handmade quilt in deep blues and greens, and the colors were so close to the landscape outside the window that I stopped in the doorway. The stitching was uneven. Someone had worked by hand, making decisions row by row. The blues shifted. The greens were all different greens.
"Who made this?" I asked.
"My mother." He said it simply, from behind me in the hallway, with no story and no elaboration. I could tell from his voice alone that I shouldn't ask more. Not yet.
The quilt was beautiful. I stood there longer than I meant to.
"There's one bed," I said.
"Section four addresses —" I started.
"I'll take the couch."
The couch was visibly too short for him by at least six inches, and I felt a pang that wanted to argue. But arguing about sleeping arrangements on the first night of a fake marriage to a man whose hands I couldn't stop thinking about seemed inadvisable.
He cooked dinner. Salmon in the cast-iron pan, butter, half a lemon, herbs stripped from the windowsill.
I offered to help and he shook his head, so I sat on one of the counter stools and watched him move through his kitchen.
He was looser here. The careful stillness he'd worn all afternoon had fallen away behind the counter, and what replaced it was a man moving without thinking, reaching for the butter before looking for it, adjusting the flame by sound.
He'd done this a thousand times, and the ease of it, his hands working without hesitation, his shoulders dropped and unhurried, made my mouth go dry for reasons that had nothing to do with salmon.
I set two plates on the table while he finished at the stove. We sat across from each other. It was small enough that our knees nearly touched underneath, and I tucked mine back, which he either noticed or didn't, and I had no idea which was worse.
The salmon was excellent. I told him so and he nodded, which I was beginning to understand was how he accepted compliments.
The conversation came in short exchanges.
Where I'd flown from. San Francisco. How long the drive had been.
Long. Whether I'd eaten on the way. A granola bar, which earned me a look I couldn't read but that seemed close to disapproval.
"You renovated this?" I asked. The kitchen was too well-made to be original, and I was curious, and he was sitting across from me in the low light and I needed to say words before the silence made me stare at his forearms resting on the table edge.
"Wasn't much when I got here. Took about a year."
"By yourself?"
"Mostly."
I looked at the kitchen. The herbs, the butcher block, the bookshelves visible through the wide doorway, the care in all of it.
Then I looked at him. The gap between the man in the Mountain Mates profile and the man sitting across from me with salmon grease on his thumb was getting wide enough to be a problem.
He stood to clear the plates. I picked up the dish towel and dried while he washed, side by side at the sink, his arm brushing mine when he passed a plate.
The river was audible through the window.
Neither of us said anything. I hung the cast-iron pan back on its hook and he watched me do it, and the domesticity of the moment, the running water, the clean plates, his hip close to mine, felt more intimate than the ceremony had.
I went to my briefcase.
"There's something I'd like to go over." I set the binder on the table where our plates had been. "It covers household logistics, communication protocols, scheduling, and a conception timeline."
He sat back down across from me. He opened the binder.
"Forty-seven pages."
"It's comprehensive."
He flipped to a tabbed section. "There's a conception schedule."
"Organized by optimal timing windows, yes."
He turned another page and stopped. "You footnoted the conception schedule."
"Citing your sources is basic due diligence."
He closed the binder. He held it with both hands and looked at me over the top of it, and I waited for mockery and didn't get it.
His expression had shifted into something I didn't have a framework for — like he was recalibrating, adjusting to ground that had turned out to be different than he'd planned for. Which made two of us.
"What's your favorite color?" he asked.
It was so far from any response I'd prepared for that I answered before I could filter it.
"Navy."
"Navy's just blue being uptight about it."
I surprised myself by laughing, a real one, not the polished laugh I used at client dinners. "And green before sunrise is just a man who wakes up too early."
His eyes held mine across the table. "Green. The dark kind. On the trees right before the sun comes up."
The specificity stopped me. Not green. A green that required waking before dawn and paying attention to what the light did to the trees before anyone else was awake.
A green that lived in one specific minute of one specific morning, and he'd noticed it, and he'd kept it, and the distance between us across this table felt closer than it had been ten minutes ago and I hadn't authorized that.
"I'll read it," he said, picking up the binder. "The forty-seven pages. Tonight."
"You don't have to —"
"I'm a slow reader. I'll need the head start.
" He said it the same way he said everything else, carrying the binder to the couch, and I added it to the growing list of things about Cliff Masterson that did not fit the model.
The list was getting long enough that the model was starting to look stupid.
Goodnights were brief. He took the couch. I took the bedroom, closed the door, and did my routine in the bathroom — face wash, moisturizer, teeth. The same steps I did in my San Francisco apartment, except the mirror was smaller and the silence outside the door was absolute.
I got into bed. The blanket was heavier than I expected. I pulled it to my collarbone and lay still.
The silence arrived — not empty, but textured.
The river ran underneath everything, constant and unhurried.
Wind moved through old trees. Wood settled in the walls.
No traffic, no sirens, no neighbor's TV through the wall — just the dark and the weight of the blanket and a quiet so complete it felt physical.
Through the wall, faintly, through the hallway and the closed bedroom door, the couch creaked. A muffled shift. Then another. I couldn't see him, but I could hear enough to know his feet were hanging off the end and he hadn't said a word about it.
I lay in the dark and my imagination did what my plan had not accounted for.
His body on that too-short couch. The binder open on his chest. His gray eyes reading my conception schedule, my communication protocols, my neatly tabbed timeline for making a baby with a stranger.
His hands turning the pages, the same rough, warm hands that had slid a ring onto my finger and scratched a cat's ears with equal gentleness.
The ring hadn't cooled on my finger. I turned it with my thumb.
I had Marcy's number in my phone. I'd email her in the morning, confirm the timeline.
Married. Cedar Bluff. Phase one complete.
I closed my eyes. Everything was going according to plan.