Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
brIGGS
Five in the morning, and I'm standing in my kitchen staring at the tree line between my property and hers.
Tinsel sits at my feet, chin on my boot, waiting for the signal that it's time to start the day. He's patient. Bernese mountain dogs are good at waiting. I'm less good at it, especially when my brain won't stop replaying the look on Margot Hemmings's face when she realized who I was.
Hemmings. She took her maiden name back. Which means the marriage is done, the husband is gone, and whatever brought her to a cabin she bought sight unseen in a town where she knows nobody was bad enough to drive her three hundred miles in the wrong direction.
Except it isn't the wrong direction. It's mine.
I pour coffee into a thermos and grab the work gloves off the counter.
Outside, the air is sharp, the mountains dark against a sky just starting to lighten at the edges.
September on the farm means shearing the Douglas firs, checking the balsam for blight, running equipment maintenance before November hits and every weekend turns into controlled chaos.
The cut your own season brings families from Reno, Carson City, sometimes as far as Sacramento.
Mom runs the wreath barn. Dad helps on weekends, bad hip and all. It's a good life. Quiet. Useful.
Lonely, if I'm being honest, but I've stopped noticing. Same as a scar. Give it enough years and it becomes part of the landscape.
Tinsel and I walk the rows. He trots ahead, sniffing for rabbits, occasionally looking back to make sure I'm still coming.
Two hundred acres of Douglas fir, balsam fir, and noble fir in various stages of growth.
Some saplings knee high, planted last spring.
Others taller than I am, seven years in the ground, branches filling out.
The biggest ones are almost ready for their last season.
A Christmas tree takes seven to ten years from planting to harvest. You learn patience on a farm, or you don't survive.
My hands move through the routine on autopilot. Check the irrigation lines. Inspect the shearing on the south block. Make a note about the three balsams showing brown tips along the fence line, possible fungal issue, needs treatment this week. Normal morning. Steady work.
But my head is forty feet through the trees in a cabin with a broken porch and a woman who hates me.
Margot Vance. Margot Hemmings now. Twenty years old the first time I saw her, walking into Ryan Prescott's dorm room with a stack of books and a laugh that made me forget what I was saying mid sentence.
Brown eyes, auburn highlights, glasses she was always pushing up her nose.
She wore oversized cardigans before that was a thing, read three novels a week, and had opinions about everything that came out of her mouth fully formed and impossible to argue with.
Ryan didn't deserve her. I knew it within a month.
My best friend. My roommate for three years.
The guy I shared notes with, ate dining hall food with, watched bad football with every Saturday.
And behind closed doors, behind Margot's back, he was sleeping with anyone who looked twice at him.
I watched it happen. Heard him brag about it when she wasn't there.
Saw the texts he didn't bother to delete because he knew she'd never check his phone.
She trusted him completely, and he treated that trust with less care than he gave his laundry.
What was I supposed to do.
I couldn't tell her. She'd have asked how I knew, and the answer was that my best friend told me, in detail, because he didn't think it was a big deal.
Telling her meant betraying him. Keeping quiet meant watching her get betrayed.
So I did the worst possible third thing.
I tried to make it end without saying why.
Showed up at their dinners. Made comments.
Created enough friction that maybe, I thought, she'd get tired of the drama around Ryan and walk away on her own.
She didn't walk away from Ryan. She walked away hating me.
And Ryan, who watched me take the fall for trying to protect the woman he was screwing over, chose her side publicly, cut me loose, and moved on.
I lost my best friend. Lost any chance of being believed.
And Margot left college with a story about the jealous roommate who couldn't stand to see Ryan happy.
I carry that. Every day. Fifteen years of knowing I did the right thing in the worst possible way.
The sun clears the ridge and pours gold light across the farm. I finish the south block, make my way back toward the barn, and that's when I hear it. A truck. Big one. Diesel engine grinding up the shared access road that splits between my driveway and hers.
The moving truck.
From the barn I can see her gravel drive. A rental box truck parks at an angle because her driveway wasn't built for anything that size. The driver gets out, checks his clipboard, looks at the cabin, and his face does something close to a wince.
Welcome to the club, buddy.
Margot comes around the side of the cabin.
She's in jeans, a flannel shirt that's too big for her and definitely not one she owned yesterday, work boots that look brand new.
Her hair is pulled back in a clip, and she's got a bandage on her right shin from where the porch cut her last night.
She's talking to the driver, gesturing at the side door, and I can tell from here she's running the operation with the precision of a woman who spent a decade managing other people's timelines.
She'll be fine. She doesn't need me. She said so. Twice.
I go back to the barn and sharpen the shearing blades. The grinder hums. Steel screams against the wheel. Tinsel settles in the doorway, monitoring the truck activity next door with the focused attention of a dog who takes his neighborhood watch duties very seriously.
Twenty minutes pass. Thirty. The driver carries boxes. Margot carries boxes. They stack them through the side door because the front porch is still a death trap. It's efficient. She's got a system. Labeling, color coding, the whole thing.
Then the truck driver leaves, and she's alone with a cabin full of boxes and a building that needs more work than she probably realizes.
I keep sharpening blades. Get through the full set. Start on the chainsaw chain.
A sound carries through the trees. Water. Running water. And then a word, loud enough to reach my barn with all the force of a woman at the end of her rope.
"Fuck."
Tinsel's ears go up.
Mine too.
I put down the chainsaw chain. Tell myself it's none of my business. She made that clear. She doesn't want my help. She specifically said so. Loudly. With feeling.
Another bang. Then nothing. Then a low, frustrated sound that might be crying or might be swearing, hard to tell from fifty feet through pine trees.
I'm already walking.
Around the back of her cabin, the kitchen door is propped open with a box. Water is pooling on the floor. The pipe under the kitchen sink has cracked, and cold water is spraying in a fan that's soaking the cabinet, the floor, and the bottom of three boxes labeled BOOKS in red marker.
Margot is on her knees in the puddle, both hands on the pipe, trying to hold it together through sheer force of will.
Water sprays through her fingers. Her flannel is soaked.
Her face is soaked. Her cat is sitting on the counter watching with the detached interest of a creature that lives above the flood line by design.
"Shutoff valve is under the house." I'm in the doorway. Didn't knock. "Crawlspace access is on the east side. I can have this off in thirty seconds."
Her head whips toward me. Wet hair across her face, murder in her eyes. "I didn't ask you to come over."
"You didn't ask for a burst pipe either, but here we are."
"I have it under control."
"You're holding a broken pipe with your bare hands while your books get ruined."
Her eyes dart to the boxes. The BOOKS boxes. Three of them, the bottom already dark with water. Something crosses her face that's closer to grief than frustration, and her jaw tightens.
"Where's the crawlspace?"
"East side. Green panel. I'll show you."
She lets go of the pipe. Water sprays freely across the kitchen floor, and she follows me outside without another word, which might be the closest thing to cooperation I'll ever get from this woman.
The crawlspace panel is stuck. Swollen from years of moisture. I get my fingers under the edge, pull hard enough that my shoulders burn, and it pops loose. Inside: dark, dirty, and smelling of damp earth. The shutoff valve is six feet in, visible in the light from my phone.
I belly crawl under the house without discussion. Find the valve. It's corroded, stiff, but it turns with enough force. The hissing from the kitchen stops.
When I back out, Margot is standing with her arms crossed, dripping on her own lawn, looking at me with an expression caught halfway between relief and resentment.
"Thank you." She says it fast, tight, aimed at my boots.
"You're gonna need a plumber. The galvanized pipes are shot. Whole system should've been replaced years ago."
"I'll call someone."
"Tom Parker's got a list of contractors. Tell him what happened, he'll send someone good."
"Fine."
We stand there. Me in the dirt from her crawlspace. Her in the water from her kitchen. The mountain air is cold on wet skin, and I notice her shivering even though she's trying to hide it by keeping her arms locked tight.
"You should change into something dry."
"Thank you for the suggestion."
"Your books might be salvageable if you get them out of the boxes and stand them up to dry. Fan the pages. Don't use heat."
Her arms loosen slightly. "You know how to dry books?"
"My mom worked at the library in town for twenty years. Pipe burst in the storage room when I was fifteen. We spent three weekends saving everything we could."
A beat. She processes this. Then she nods once. "Okay."