Chapter 1
Why was the cow in the middle of the road? No, this wasn’t the beginning of a dad joke. This was my life.
“Hey, Siri.” I tapped my fingernails on my steering wheel. “Call Stephanie.”
“Hannah, babe,” Steph chirped after two rings. “How’s the drive?”
“Oh, fine,” I said, still tapping. “Long, but very pretty. A couple things though… One, where on god’s green earth are you sending me? I’m thirty miles from the Canadian border.”
“You brought your passport, right?”
“Jesus, Steph. No, I did not bring my fucking passport—”
Her laughter trilled through the speakers. “Chill. I’m not sending you to Canada. Just about as close as you can get without having a meet cute with a Mountie. What’s the other thing?”
“Well.” I rolled my window down, waving my arm in the air while the cow chewed its cud. Its big black eyes stared straight into my soul. “There’s a cow in the middle of the road. A whole ass cow just standing there.”
Steph chuckled. “Open range is a trip, huh?”
“How do I move this thing? Do I need to call someone?”
“Who? The cow police?” Papers rustled across the line. “Have you tried honking?”
“I have. Twice.”
“Yes, but did you honk with intention? You must mean it, Hannah.” She muttered something to someone, and I clearly heard the words incident report and intervention.
“Are you still at work?” It was already seven o’clock in western Montana, six in Sequim. “Steph, it’s Friday night. Get out of there.”
“Can’t.” She sighed. “We just found a veritable brick of weed in a sophomore’s locker. Seriously. We could build a house from it. Just drive. It’ll get out of your way.”
“The weed?” I joked.
She snorted. “That weed isn’t getting out of anyone’s way. The cow. Just drive.”
“I’m not driving into a cow! What if it kicks my car or head butts a headlight? I don’t think free-range bovine damage is covered under the rental insurance.”
“Hannah. It’s a cow. The worst it’ll do is take a dump on your hood.”
“Pretty sure that’s not covered either.” Taking a deep, fortifying breath, I put the car back into drive. “Okay, I’m moving.”
“It’s like losing your virginity,” she said. “Inch by inch, babe. Inch by inch.”
“Don’t remind me,” I muttered as my tires popped across the dirt road. “Jimmy Conway. He cried the entire time.”
Steph gave me an “Oof,” while the cow swished its tail, mooed with a mournful disdain, and finally pivoted out of my way. Not, however, before giving me a thoroughly unimpressed look through the driver’s side window.
“I’m through,” I said.
“Proud of you,” she cheered. “And it’s good you called when you did, because if you’re that close to Canada, you’re probably about to lose cell service.”
“What, for like a few miles?” I looked around at the trees, the mountains, since that’s all there was up here.
“Uh, sure,” she hedged. “Well, maybe a bit more than a few.”
The beginnings of a shiver tickled my neck. “Steph?”
“Actually, you will not have cell service for the rest of the miles. And…for all the miles surrounding your cabin.”
“What?” It came out as a shrill yelp.
“Don’t panic. I’ve already told William and everyone at the office that you’ll be off grid for the next few days.”
“Off grid?” I looked in my rearview, ready to turn around, but the damn cow was blocking the road again like some domesticated livestock Gandalf. “What do you mean ‘off grid’?”
“You know,” she said. “Off grid. As in the opposite of on grid. As in not reliant on public utilities like water or electricity.”
Panic flared in my chest. “Please tell me you aren’t sending me to a fucking cabin in Middlefuck, Montana, alone, without electricity.”
“Okay, I won’t.” A pause. “Even though that’s what I’m doing. And it’s called Balsam Ridge. Not Middlefuck. But you’re very funny.”
I groaned.
“Hey, you asked me for this, remember? You sat me down and asked for my help. You told me, your favorite coworker in the entire world, that you needed somewhere to ‘disappear’—your words not mine—for a few days. And this is it. This is where you disappear. Jane and I stayed in the same cabin last year, and it changed our lives. That’s not hyperbole, by the way. PeePaw’s Hideaway is so cute and cozy—”
“PeePaw’s?” I cut in.
She ignored me—“and you are going to love the little town and the mountains and the sky and stars if you just unclench your spleen for five seconds and take a breath.”
“My spleen is not clenched,” I said through a jaw that most definitely was. “And it looks like it’s about to rain, so I don’t know about seeing any stars.”
“Hannah, you need a fucking break. You agreed to trust me, so trust me.”
I blew out a heavy breath. She was right. I did need a break, and I had agreed to let her plan this trip. But still… “No cell service? At all?”
“Ugh, fine. The Merc has Wi-Fi.”
“The what?”
“It’s like a general store. But I strongly encourage you not to spend the entire weekend there downing coffee and doomscrolling.”
“I don’t doomscroll,” I lied. “I just like to watch reels of babies eating their lunches. It calms me.”
“Let everything go for a few days, even the babies eating their lunches. I promise, it will all still be here when you get back.”
Actually, it wouldn’t all be there when I got back.
And that was the problem. Because William was gone.
He was gone, and being alone was, apparently, not my strong suit.
Which was something I hadn’t really known about myself until last week, when I’d woken up, walked down the stairs, and stood in the middle of a house so catastrophically silent it felt less like an empty nest and more like an abandoned tomb.
“Okay,” I said, hauling myself together with a sharp sniff. “You’re right. This is exactly what I asked you for. Even if I never imagined that road-blocking cows would be involved.”
Steph snorted.
“I’ll give it a chance.”
“Good. Oh, and make sure to…if you…charge—”
“Steph?” My voice rose in a panicked dart as hers faded. “You’re breaking up.”
“Follow…directions,” she said, ghostlike through the static. “Make sure…look…stars.”
And then she was gone.
In ten more zero-bars miles, I reached the town of Balsam Ridge. If you could call a dirt road, a saloon, and a general store—the infamous Merc—a town. But I had to give it to Steph, it really was beautiful here.
Mountains towered into the moody gray sky, their rocky peaks covered in larches and aspens, leaves just starting to change as the deep green of summer gave way to the golden russet of fall.
The sight of kids playing volleyball in the middle of a group of cabins while their parents sat at picnic tables, drinking beer and eating burgers, sent a pang through me.
It was like looking at a painting, a memory, an entire life moving away from me while I could only stand there and watch it go.
Thunder rumbled overhead, and I followed Steph’s hand-drawn directions, turning left at the ‘big ass tree’ three dirt roads past the Merc, then another left at the ‘Prince purple’ mailbox, and then a quarter mile down a tree-lined driveway toward my final destination.
As I navigated the deeply rutted road, two words corkscrewed through my mind, twisting something deep in my chest: Off grid.
Until this moment, I’d only known the words as a theoretical concept. But there was nothing theoretical about PeePaw’s Hideaway—so designated by the wooden sign swinging on its hinges at the end of the drive.
Rustic with a capital R, the small, two-story cabin was covered in weathered cedar siding, topped by a roof so mismatched it looked like it had been installed in stages over the years, and the rickety front porch was probably a great place to pick up tetanus.
When I parked the car and opened the door, silence swept in all around me.
But then, little by little, sound arrived.
Birds chirped, crickets sang, and a creek running through the property burbled gently.
A steady breeze blew through the cabin’s open windows, ruffling gauzy white curtains.
Because why wouldn’t the windows be open all the way out here?
In a place where cows outnumbered people?
Where families played volleyball while surrounded by unspoiled beauty? Where birds chirped and creeks burbled?
Pulling my bag from the backseat, I made my way gingerly up the warped porch steps, punched in the combo for the lock box by the door, and frowned when I flipped the lid open and found nothing inside.
“Fuck.”
After checking the ground for the key and not finding it, I took my phone out of my purse to call Steph. Which, of course, I couldn’t do because there was no service.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
A dog barked. It sounded close, but there were no other cabins nearby. When it barked again, very close this time, my head whipped back to the door.
“Hello?” I knocked softly. “Is someone in there?”
Paws clicked in an excited scramble, followed by the thud of heavy footsteps. And then, like a scene from a movie, the knob turned, the door swung open, and a man appeared.
Tall, was a word my mind managed to pull from a sea of white noise. More words arrived shortly thereafter: curly wet hair, broad shoulders, a bare chest. A white towel clinging to strong, capable hips.
“Can I help you?”
His voice was deeper than it had any right to be. His eyes bluer. Jaw more defined. Silvery stubble fresher. Like he’d left his razor at home because a clean shave had no purpose in a place like this.
“Oh, um...” My gaze sank from the patch of dark hair covering his pecs to the line of it shading the valley between his abs. A soft whine drew my attention further down, between the man’s slightly spread legs, where I found the dog sitting at his bare feet.
It was a scruffy little thing. Some kind of pug mix maybe with a coarse black and silver coat, an adorably smushed face, and enormous round eyes that stared hopefully up at me. They reminded me of William when he was a toddler. When he’d look up at me like that and ask, “Carry you, me?”