Reunited with the Mountain Man (Second Chances in Silver Ridge #1)

1. Grace

one

Grace

The highway narrows an hour outside of Kelowna.

That's when Silver Ridge starts to happen to you.

The mountains crowd in on both sides, the sky gets smaller, the trees get bigger, and you remember — without wanting to — that this place has a specific weight to it.

Not heavy exactly. More like the feeling of someone's hand on your shoulder when you weren't expecting to be touched.

I haven't been back in four years. Before that, I came home for Christmas every other year — presents under the tree, my mother's cooking, thirty-six hours maximum before I invented a reason to leave. I got efficient at that. I'm good at managing exits.

This visit I have no efficient exit. My mother called in July, and she used the tone she reserves for the moments she knows she'll win.

The festival is this week, Gracie. August. Your aunt is flying in.

I haven't asked you for anything in two years.

All of it delivered in that careful, moderate voice that is somehow more devastating than yelling. I booked the flight the same day.

So: five days. The Timber Festival runs through Saturday. I'll be back in Vancouver before the weekend closes, with my professional life intact and my careful distance reinstated, and this will have been a small, manageable disruption in an otherwise orderly August.

I tell myself this as I turn off the highway onto the main road into Silver Ridge.

The town looks identical. That is genuinely unsettling.

I work in event management, so I understand how much infrastructure changes in a decade, how spaces evolve, how even beloved institutions get updated, refreshed, rebranded.

Silver Ridge apparently received none of those memos.

The wooden storefronts on Main Street have the same paint.

The banner poles have the same weathered curve to them.

There are new Timber Festival banners strung between the lampposts — bright yellow, 60th Annual printed large.

I pass the hardware store, the credit union, the bakery with its hand-lettered chalkboard sign visible from the street. I pass Juniper's Diner.

I don't stop at the diner. I take my bags to my mother's house first, which is what I should do, what makes sense. My mother's house is six blocks off Main Street on a quiet residential road. I'm prepared to bet that it has not changed in any appreciable way since I was seventeen.

She's on the porch when I pull in. She looks good — fit and tan from her garden, hair shorter than I remember, reading glasses pushed up on her head. She hugs me the way she always has, both arms, no hesitation, and she smells like sunscreen and rosemary.

"Hello stranger. Good to see you. It’s been what? Four years?" she says.

"Hi, Mom."

"I'm not saying it as a guilt trip. I'm saying it because I missed you."

"I know."

I carry my bags inside.

She has the guest room ready — fresh sheets, a small vase of flowers from the garden on the dresser.

It looks cared-for. I set my bag down and stand there for a moment and feel the decade of distance collapse to something much smaller, more manageable, which is not what I wanted.

I wanted the distance to feel like armor.

It mostly feels like a long time to have been away from a room this tidy.

My mother is making dinner. I tell her I'll walk to the diner for coffee and to get the lay of the land, which is how I talk when I'm performing casual.

She looks at me over her reading glasses. "The festival prep starts tomorrow. They've already got vendors setting up on the grounds."

"Okay."

"Owen Mercer is running the competition setup again this year."

The silence that follows is approximately three seconds long. I know because I count them.

"Okay," I say again.

She holds my gaze for one moment and then goes back to her cutting board. She is not subtle, my mother. She is also not wrong that I needed warning. I'm grateful in a way I don't intend to examine.

Juniper's is four blocks from the house.

I walk it in the warm August evening with my sunglasses on and my posture doing the thing it does in the city — upright, intentional, the deliberate bearing of a woman who has somewhere specific to be.

In Silver Ridge this reads as amusing. A man loading a pickup truck outside the hardware store nods at me with the open friendliness of someone who doesn't recognize me yet, and I nod back, and for a second I'm twenty-two years old and the whole town knows my name.

The diner bell rings when I push the door open.

The smell is exactly right — coffee and bacon grease and the faint sweetness of the pie case by the register.

Most of the tables are taken; it's the dinner hour and the festival prep has brought people in early.

I hear men's voices from a back table, talking about timber tonnage and the log-rolling setup.

Someone laughs too loud. The waitress — not Darlene, a younger woman I don't know — is carrying three plates at once and barely looks up.

I start for the counter.

Owen Mercer is sitting on the far stool with his back half-turned, a coffee mug in front of him, talking to someone two stools down.

I register him before I realize. The shape of him.

The width of his shoulders. The angle of a man who is completely comfortable in his own body in a way most men never quite achieve.

He's changed. Of course he's changed. He was twenty-four when I left and he's thirty-four now and it shows — not in a bad way, in the way of a man who has been doing hard physical work for a decade and has settled into it.

His beard is heavier than it used to be.

His hands on the counter are rougher than I remember.

He's wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up and he looks, objectively, like he belongs exactly here, in this diner, in this town, in this version of August that has nothing to do with me.

Then he turns.

Our eyes meet for exactly one second. Maybe two. I am close enough to the counter now that there is no walking this back, no pretending I was aiming for a table.

He looks at me the way you look at something you've been expecting and dreading in approximately equal measure. No surprise. No performance. He takes me in — the city clothes, the haircut, all of it — and something in his face settles into a careful, contained stillness.

"Grace," he says.

One word. My name. His voice is lower than it used to be, rougher.

I open my mouth.

He puts money on the counter, stands up and walks out.

The bell above the door rings.

I sit down on the nearest stool because my legs need a moment to consult with my brain about what just happened. The waitress appears and sets down a coffee without being asked, the way Silver Ridge does things, and I wrap both hands around the mug and stare at the counter.

The diner went briefly quiet when he left. At least no one stopped mid-sentence, no one turned to stare at me. It was the briefer, subtler quiet of a room full of people who grew up here and know exactly what just happened and are politely pretending they don't.

Silver Ridge remembers.

It remembers everything.

I drink my coffee. My hands are steady. I am a professional. I am not twenty-three years old anymore. I am not the woman who sat in her car outside this town for twenty minutes the summer she left, trying to convince herself she was making the right choice.

I finish the coffee and leave a ten on the counter.

Outside, the August evening is still warm, the mountains pink at the tops.

Down the block I can see the festival grounds, the yellow banners, the first vendor tents going up.

The town is full of that pre-event energy — work trucks, voices, the smell of sawdust from wherever they're building the competition platforms.

How the hell am I going to manage this?