Chapter Two
Cliff
I WOKE UP AT FIVE WITH a dead leg and a crick in my neck and a woman’s forty-seven-page manual open on my chest.
The couch was six inches too short. I’d known that going in.
I’d also known that offering to take it was the decent thing to do when your wife of twelve hours was standing in your hallway looking at you with eyes that kept doing math I wasn’t supposed to notice.
So I’d taken the couch, read thirty-one pages of the most aggressively organized document I’d ever held in my hands, and fallen asleep somewhere around the section on preferred ambient temperature ranges during conception attempts.
I sat up. My back popped in three places. The cabin was cold and gray, first light just starting through the east windows, and through the hallway the bedroom door was still closed.
I got up, started coffee, and stood at the counter while it brewed. Black. Same way I’d been drinking it since I was nineteen and too broke to buy creamer.
The poker game had been eleven days ago.
I could still see Drew’s face across the table, the exact moment he realized I’d bet everything I had on a hand that wasn’t there.
Fifty thousand dollars. My entire down payment on the property I’d rebuilt from a wreck into the only place I’d ever wanted to stay.
The old man who owned the land had died in January, and his kids wanted to sell, and I had sixty days to come up with a hundred grand or lose the place where I’d put myself back together after prison.
Drew, being Drew, had felt terrible about it for roughly forty-five seconds before seeing a business opportunity.
Download Mountain Mates. Find a match. Get married within thirty days and prove it’s real.
At the thirty-day mark, the debt gets forgiven—fifty grand, gone.
Stay married a full year, and he’d pay me another fifty on top of it.
A hundred thousand total. Enough to buy the land outright.
I’d told him his dating apps were bullshit.
He’d told me his dating apps had a sixty-three percent successful-marriage rate across all platforms and that I was statistically more likely to find lasting love through his algorithm than through any decision I’d ever make on my own.
Which, given my track record, was probably true.
So I’d downloaded the app. Matched with a fintech consultant from San Francisco who had sharp eyes and a plan for everything.
Did one video call where I answered her questions about the property and she answered mine about her timeline, and neither of us tried very hard to be charming, and I’d thought: this could work. A year of pretending. I could do that.
What I hadn’t planned on was the vasectomy being a problem.
I’d gotten it the year I got out. No kids, no plans for kids, no plans for anything that required me to think past next month.
It was the most permanent decision I’d ever made, which was ironic coming from a man whose entire identity was built around not being permanent.
But Nell Chambers had a conception schedule.
Footnoted. And I was a man who could not get her pregnant if my land depended on it, which it did.
She didn’t know. About the vasectomy, about the bet, about any of it.
She thought I wanted a wife and a family and a life on this mountain with her.
And I was going to let her keep thinking that for as long as it took to save my property, which made me exactly the kind of man I’d been trying not to be since I walked out of Monroe Correctional three years ago.
The coffee was ready. I poured a cup and took it to the porch.
The river was running high, snowmelt still feeding it this late in May.
The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge yet but the sky was going blue above the tree line, and I stood there in the cold and drank my coffee and tried not to think about the fact that my wife was asleep in my bed twenty feet away and her hair had been down when she’d said goodnight and I’d noticed, and my hands had gone still on the mug.
I went back inside.
She emerged at seven fifteen, and I almost dropped my mug.
I’d seen her yesterday—polished, put-together, every hair where it was supposed to be.
This morning she’d done her routine because she could have stepped out of a magazine ad for expensive face cream, but she was wearing silk pajama pants, a cashmere sweater that had no business being on a mountain, and slippers that would’ve been destroyed by the porch.
Her hair was up in a twist that had clearly taken effort.
For seven fifteen on a Tuesday in the Cascades, she was absurdly overdressed. For standing in my kitchen with morning light coming through the window behind her, she was a problem I was going to have.
“Good morning.” Her eyes went to the coffee pot. “Is that French press?”
“Just coffee.”
“I can work with that.” She poured herself a cup, took a sip, and her expression went polite—restraint I recognized. She reached for the sugar I kept in the cabinet above the stove.
“Manual’s in the binder,” I said. “I got to page thirty-one.”
“Section three, subsection C?”
“If that’s the one about kitchen protocols.”
“It is.”
“Then that’s where I fell asleep.”
She set her coffee down and opened the cabinet next to the stove.
Then the one below it. Then the drawer beside the sink.
She was looking at my kitchen the way I’d once watched a structural engineer look at a condemned building—assessing damage, planning renovation, calculating the cost of bringing it up to code.
“Your spices aren’t alphabetized,” she said.
“No.”
“And your dry goods are mixed in with your canned goods.”
“They’re all food. They get along.”
She was already moving the oregano. By the time I’d finished my second cup, she’d reorganized the spice shelf, separated my pantry into what she called “logical clusters,” and was studying the utensil drawer with an expression that suggested it had personally offended her.
I leaned against the counter and watched.
She was close enough that I caught whatever she’d put on that morning — warm, expensive, nothing I could name, and it cut straight through the coffee and the firewood smell of the kitchen.
Her hands moved with a focus that was almost hypnotic, quick and certain, and her sweater had slipped off one shoulder and she hadn’t noticed.
I noticed. The line of her collarbone, the small hollow at the base of her throat, her frown at my spatula placement.
My cock stirred, which was not the reaction I’d planned on having to a woman rearranging my pantry.
I turned away. Poured a third cup of coffee.
“You don’t have a garlic press,” she said.
“I have a knife.”
“A knife is not a garlic press.”
“A knife has been pressing my garlic just fine for three years.”
She looked at me the way you’d look at someone who told you they did their taxes by hand. Which I did, but that was a conversation for another day.
My phone buzzed at noon. I checked it in the kitchen while she sat at the dining table with her laptop, doing whatever consultants did on computers.
She’d been working since nine, fingers moving fast, occasionally murmuring numbers to herself, and I’d gone out to the outpost to check gear for a client group later in the week and come back to find she hadn’t moved.
Drew’s name on the screen. I stepped onto the porch.
“How’s married life?”
“Not even a day.”
“That’s enough time for initial data. How’d she sleep? How’d you sleep? Any preliminary compatibility indicators I should log?”
“Drew.”
“I’m coming tomorrow. Quick check-in. Fly in, see you guys in your element, fly out. Easy.”
It wasn’t easy. Nothing about him was easy. He showed up to things the way weather showed up—suddenly, with enthusiasm, and without much concern for whether you were prepared.
“Drew Kepler,” I told Nell after I hung up. “Old friend. He built the app. He’s coming tomorrow, and we need to look like a couple.”
She closed her laptop. “A verification visit.”
“He calls it checking in. I call it a pain in my ass, but yeah.”
She nodded once, and I caught the shift behind her eyes—the same look she’d had when she opened my cabinets this morning. Problem identified. Solution in progress. “What does ‘in our element’ look like for you?”
“Outdoors. A hike, probably.”
Her gaze dropped to her slippers. Then back at me.
“I don’t suppose there’s a flat one.”
“Not on this mountain.”
“Of course not.”
Drew arrived the next afternoon in a rental car that was too clean for the road, wearing hiking boots that still had the tags on the inside and a jacket that had never seen dirt.
He’d flown in that morning from Seattle—forty-five minutes by private jet to the nearest airstrip, then an hour’s drive he’d probably spent on the phone telling someone about engagement metrics.
“Cliff.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me into one of those back-slapping hugs that he’d started doing after he got married and discovered physical affection. “You look good. Domesticated. Is that a new shirt?”
“It’s the same shirt.”
“It looks different. Happier.” He was already looking past me.
Nell had come out to the porch, and I watched his whole face brighten—she might as well have been a positive quarterly report.
“Nell. Hi. It’s so great to meet you in person.
The algorithm flagged you two as a ninety-one percent compatibility match, which is the highest Mountain Mates has produced since we launched the platform. ”
“That’s flattering,” Nell said. “For both of us and your algorithm.”
He beamed. I could already tell this was going to be a long day.
The hike was my idea, which meant it was my fault.
I’d picked a moderate trail—nothing technical, good views, about four miles round trip.
What I hadn’t accounted for was that Nell’s definition of hiking footwear was a pair of leather flats she’d swapped for the slippers, and her idea of trail-appropriate clothing was dark trousers and a cream-colored blouse that would’ve worked great at a restaurant with a waitlist.
She didn’t complain. That was the thing I kept coming back to.
The trail was steep enough in places that she was grabbing tree roots to pull herself up, her flats slipping on loose rock, a branch catching her sleeve and leaving a smear of pine sap on the cream fabric, and she just kept going.
Her commentary was the only concession she made to the difficulty.
She stopped where the trail pitched upward. “This seems vertical.”
“It levels out.”
“When?”
“Another half mile.”
“Wonderful.” She hauled herself over a root step and mud splashed across her ankle. “I want you to know I’m having a great time.”
Drew, walking behind us, laughed. I glanced back at Nell—flushed, breathing hard, pine sap on her shirt and mud on her shoes and her hair coming loose—and felt my mouth pull into a grin I couldn’t stop.
She caught it. “Don’t.”
“Didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I think a lot of things.”
“I doubt that.” But she was almost smiling, and she was still climbing, and he was watching us with the satisfaction of a man whose algorithm was proving him right.
We made the overlook. Nell sat on a rock, examined the blister forming on her left heel, and looked out at the view. The valley opened below us, river winding through it, the peaks going white against the sky. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Just looked.
“This is where you live,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“This is where I live.”
She nodded. Something in her face I couldn’t read.
Drew spent the last quarter mile walking next to me while Nell picked her way down in front of us, moving carefully on the descent, one hand on the rocks when the trail steepened.
“She’s good for you,” Drew said, quiet enough that she couldn’t hear.
“You’ve known her three hours.”
“The algorithm knew her in forty-five seconds.” He adjusted his pristine hiking boot on a rock. “The way you look at her, man. That’s not data I need to analyze.”
“I look at everyone.”
“No, you don’t.” He clapped my shoulder. “Thirty days. You can thank me later.”
I didn’t answer. Nell had stopped ahead to shake a pebble out of her shoe, hopping on one foot, swearing under her breath, and I watched her catch her balance against a cedar trunk and flip the shoe upside down with an expression of absolute personal betrayal, and something moved in my chest that felt a lot like trouble.
Drew left an hour later. Standing by his rental car, he shook my hand and pulled me close.
“Your algorithm matched me with a woman who brought a forty-seven-page manual to a mountain,” I said.
“Exactly.” He grinned. I’d made his point for him. “The algorithm doesn’t lie.”
I stood in the yard while he drove away, stayed there until the sound of his engine faded and the quiet came back.
That evening, Nell sat on the porch with her feet propped on the railing, a bag of frozen peas pressed against her heel.
The light was going soft across the valley, doing that thing it did in late May where everything turned warm and slow and the shadows stretched long across the meadow below the tree line.
I brought her a mug of tea without thinking about it and set it on the wide arm of her chair, then grabbed a beer for myself.
“Thanks,” she said, surprised.
I shrugged and sat in the other chair. We didn’t talk. The river filled the silence, and somewhere in the trees a bird was repeating the same three notes over and over, patient and unbothered.
Her hair had given up. Whatever she’d built that morning had come apart on the trail, and it hung loose around her shoulders, damp at the temples, tangled where a branch had caught it.
Her blouse had a green streak across the sleeve and her trousers were muddy at the hem and she was pressing the peas to her foot with both hands, and she looked nothing like the woman who’d stepped out of that white Prius yesterday.
I liked her better this way.
The thought landed before I could stop it.
The gold light caught her face and she was just sitting there, watching the sun drop behind the ridge, completely still, and my whole body went quiet the way it did before a bad drop on a rapid — that half-second where you know the fall is coming and your hands stop gripping and your breath catches and there’s nothing to do but go.
I took a drink anyway.