Chapter 4
Tess
The Switchback Café smells like cinnamon and butter, and something warm I don’t have a name for yet. By the time I make it three steps past the door, someone says my name.
“Tess, right?”
I pause with my hand on the strap of my bag, like if I don’t move, maybe I can rewind the last ten seconds and walk back out before this becomes a thing.
“Sweetheart.” A woman with a silver-streaked braid and flour dusted up both forearms leans across the counter as if she’s been expecting me all morning. “You’re the new girl on Rosa’s ridge.”
“News travels fast here,” I say because it feels like the safest possible response.
She smiles, slow and satisfied. “News doesn’t travel here. News is born here.”
That should feel like a joke.
It doesn’t.
“Mae Whitlock. This is on the house.” She sets the mug in front of me like she’s closing a deal. “Sit.”
I slide into the booth by the window because saying no would require more backbone than I currently possess at nine in the morning in a café where the owner is acting like she knows me.
The vinyl seat sighs under me. Outside, Hollow Peak is bustling: four trucks, a man in a red plaid jacket loading something into a tailgate, a woman walking a small dog. A church bell from somewhere down the valley makes a single, soft chime.
Inside, I’m being assessed.
Mae pours coffee, watching me over the rim as if she’s waiting for something specific to show up on my face. “How’s the cabin?”
I wince. “Standing.”
“Optimistic. I like it. You eaten?”
“Um, I had a cinnamon roll at five this morning.”
“You need more than that, sweetheart,” Mae says fondly. “I’ll bring you breakfast.”
The pancakes that show up are bigger than my face. A second mug of coffee shows up alongside them, and then Mae slides into the booth across from me without invitation.
“All right.” She folds her hands on the table. “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
She gives me a look that says she’s had this conversation a hundred times and always wins. “What brings someone your age up to Rosa’s ridge to live in a cabin that should’ve been condemned in 1998?”
I wrap my hands around the mug. It’s too hot, but I don’t let go. “My aunt left it to me.”
“Mm.” She nods. “And what made you keep it instead of selling it sight unseen the way most kids do?”
There’s a right answer here. A normal one. Something about opportunity or fresh starts or always loving the mountains.
“I…” I look at her. Her eyes are blue and patient and kind. “I don’t know.”
“Mm.” She nods again. “That so.”
I shrug as if it doesn’t matter.
“The cabin’s a wreck,” she says.
I sigh. “Yeah.”
“You got any people?”
There it is again. Not, where are you from? Not, what do you do?
Who has you?
“I have me.”
I say it lightly. Like it’s a joke.
It isn’t.
Mae studies me for a beat too long, like she’s deciding whether to push.
Before she can, a voice cuts in behind me.
“You got tools?”
A woman in coveralls has appeared at the end of the booth.
She has tattoos down both forearms, purple streaks in dark hair, and grease in the creases of her fingers.
She’s holding a coffee mug in one hand and a piece of bacon in the other.
She is enormously pretty and looks like she would happily fight someone in a parking lot.
“I have a yoga mat, a handsaw, and a tack hammer.”
Mae laughs out loud, big and surprised, as if she’s been waiting all morning to be entertained. “Sweetheart, you’re the best thing that’s happened to this café in weeks.”
“Agreed,” says the woman in coveralls. “June Vega.” She swipes the bacon under her arm to free up her hand. “Vega’s Auto. Up the street, past the firehouse. You can’t miss it. It’s the only building with a neon mountain. Heard you were up on Rosa’s ridge.”
“Oh my God, yes,” I say. “Hi. Sit. Sit, sit.”
She sits next to Mae. Mae passes her a napkin like a relay baton.
“You met Mercer yet?”
And just like that, the air shifts.
I try for casual. “You mean Sullivan?”
“Mm-hmm,” Mae says gleefully.
“He fixed my porch step yesterday.”
Silence. The loaded kind.
June leans back. Mae leans forward. They look at each other. Then back at me.
“Huh,” they both say in unison.
I frown. “Don’t both ‘huh’ me at once. I’ve known you for what, nine minutes?”
Mae reaches across the table, quick and matter-of-fact, and taps the back of my hand.
“That man has sat in my café three times a week since February and spoken maybe a dozen words total. I counted. He does not fix things for people.”
“He fixed yours,” June adds.
“With cedar,” I say, because that suddenly feels important.
Another look passes between them. Sharper this time.
My cheeks heat. “He saw me fall through it,” I add quickly. “It wasn’t… He was just being—”
“A neighbor?” June supplies, not even pretending to believe it.
“Yes.”
Mae tilts her head. “Honey, Sullivan Mercer is a haunted house with a no trespassing sign. People don’t just wander in and get repairs.”
I take a sip of coffee so I don’t have to answer that.
“He’s good?” Mae asks quietly.
I look up. The question is genuine. Not gossip, not nosing, but a woman who runs the café checking in on one of hers.
I think about his steady hands on the broken wood and how he didn’t look at me until he had to. Even standing right there, it felt like he was somewhere else entirely.
“He looked tired,” I say slowly. “He looked—” I search for it. “Like he hasn’t been around people in a while. Like he’s making peace with it.”
“Mm.” Mae’s mouth softens. “Yeah. That tracks.”
“He didn’t take the cinnamon roll right away,” I say. “But he took it.”
June chokes on her coffee. “You gave Sullivan Mercer a cinnamon roll?”
“I threw it at him.”
“Tess.” June is laughing. “Tess. You threw it at him.”
I nod. “In a Tupperware.”
Mae wipes her eye. “You’re going to be very good for this town, sweetheart. You’re going to be very, very good.”
I leave the café at eleven with a paper bag containing two more cinnamon rolls, a small jar of orange marmalade Mae pressed into my hand “for breakfast tomorrow,” and a list on the back of a receipt of every business in town that will not rip me off.
At the top of the list, in Mae’s looping pen: VEGA’S AUTO—for everything mechanical, for any tow at any hour.
At the bottom of the list, very small, almost an afterthought: Mountain Rescue—Eli Donner. If anything ever, ever goes wrong on the ridge.
I stop at a hardware store where the owner helps me find lag bolts, a real hammer, and a battery-powered drill that’s on sale because the case is scratched. I’m loading everything into the truck when a voice comes from behind me.
“You out at Rosa’s place?”
I straighten up. The man is in a sheriff’s uniform. The badge says GRANGER. His thumbs are tucked in his belt loops, and his hat is tipped just enough to see my face under the brim.
“I am. Tess Carter.”
“Sheriff Cal Granger.” He nods. “I knew Rosa. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
“Switchback four gets greasy in a melt. Take it slow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything goes wrong up there, you call.” He doesn’t say if, he says when. “And if nothing goes wrong”—he pauses and looks at me from under the brim of his hat—“you can still come down. We don’t expect folks to wait for an emergency.”
“Yes, sir.”
He touches the brim of his hat and is back across the street before I can think of anything else to say.
I leave town with my new tools, a coffee thermos, and a feeling I don’t recognize.
It takes me until I’m in the truck, winding up the switchbacks toward the ridge with a bag of cinnamon rolls on the passenger seat, to figure out what the feeling is.
I’m being looked after by strangers.
I’ve lived twenty-four years in a family that loved me out of obligation and corrected me out of love, and in one morning, four people I don’t know have decided I belong to them.
I press my hand flat against the steering wheel. For ten inappropriate seconds at fifteen miles an hour, I let myself cry.
By the time I get back to the cabin, the sun is high enough to make everything look more forgiving.
The third porch step holds. I check it twice and apologize to it for thinking ill of it.
I unload the truck, properly this time, into the front room of the cabin, which has the smell of an unloved space and the bones of a beloved one.
Wide pine plank flooring. Stone fireplace, working.
A kitchen that is one good cleaning and a new sink away from being cute.
Two small bedrooms upstairs with sloping ceilings, one of which has a clear view of the ridge above me.
Where I know without looking that there’s a man at the window.
I unpack quietly. I don’t sing. I don’t talk to the cabin. I don’t wave.
Around two, I hear footsteps on my porch. Heavy and deliberate. They stop at the door.
“Tess.”
Just my name through the wood. Not loud. No knock.
Something in my chest answers before I do.
I open the door.
Sullivan is standing on my porch, holding the empty Tupperware in one big hand, and the edges of his mouth are doing the geological-precursor thing again.
“Cinnamon roll was good.”
Relief flickers through me, quick and stupid. “Thank you.”
Handing me the Tupperware, he looks at the cabin behind me like he can see its bones the way a doctor sees a chest x-ray. “Your front window. By the stove. You get a draft when the wind turns east?”
I blink. “Yes.”
“Casement’s separated from the frame. I’ll bring caulk.”
Of course it is.
“You don’t have to—”
“It needs caulking,” he repeats, as though the decision’s been made and he’s waiting for me to catch up.
I tighten my grip on the Tupperware. “Why? You don’t even know me.”
His eyes come back to mine, steady and unreadable, but not empty. “I know where you are.”
I’m not invisible up here, no matter how hard I try.
I swallow. “That’s… not the same thing.”
“No,” he agrees.
I wait for him to say more, something that explains him. Perhaps a hint about why this feels like standing on a clifftop, too close to the edge.
He nods as if the conversation has reached its natural end without consulting me and steps back. “I’ll come by tomorrow.”
I open my mouth to offer coffee, another cinnamon roll, something to keep him here one minute longer, but nothing comes out.
Then Sullivan’s off my porch and heading back up the trail.
I didn’t come here to connect with people who notice or for a man who considers my house his problem.
Still, I linger in the doorway, cold air slipping in around my ankles, waiting for him to turn back and say one more thing.
He doesn’t.
I huff out a quiet laugh and push off the door, crossing the room to set the Tupperware on the counter.
“He’s just being helpful,” I tell the empty cabin.
And maybe he is.
But helpful shouldn’t feel like something I’m already looking forward to.