When she was sixteen, Libby had announced she’d be following her boyfriend out to work at Yellowstone for the summer, and Mom and I had howled with laughter. If there was one thing all Stephens girls had in common—aside from our love of books, vitamin-C serums, and pretty clothes—it was our avoidance of the great outdoors. The closest we ever came to hiking was a brisk walk in Central Park’s Ramble, and even then, there were usually paper bowls filled with food truck waffles and ice cream involved. Not exactly roughing it.
Needless to say, Libby dumped that guy two weeks before she was supposed to leave.
I tap the final line on the list: Save a local business. “You do realize we’re only here for a month.” Three weeks of just the two of us, and then Brendan and the girls will join. We’ve gotten a steep discount by staying so long, though how I’ll make it past week one, I have no idea.
The last time I traveled, I went home after two days. Even letting my mind wander toward that trip with Jakob is a mistake. I jerk my focus back to the present. This won’t be like that. I won’t let it. I can do this, for Libby.
“They always save a local business in small-town romances,” she’s saying. “We literally have no choice. I’m hoping for a down-on-its-luck goat farm.”
“Ooh,” I say. “Maybe we can get the ritualistic sacrifice community to band together in dramatic fashion to save the goats. For now, I mean. Eventually, they’ll have to die on the altar.”
“Well, of course.” Libby takes a swig of tomato juice. “That’s the biz, baby.”
* * *
Our taxi driver looks like Santa Claus, down to the red T-shirt and the suspenders holding his faded jeans up. But he drives like the cigar-smoking cabbie from Bill Murray’s Scrooged.
Little squeaks keep sneaking out of Libby when he takes a corner too fast, and at one point, I catch her whispering promises of safety to her belly.
“Sunshine Falls, eh?” the driver asks. He has to shout, because he’s made the unilateral decision to roll all four windows down. My hair is flapping so violently across my face I can barely see his watery eyes in the rearview mirror when I look up from my phone.
In the time that we were deplaning and collecting our luggage—a full hour, despite the fact that our flight was the only arrival in the dinky airport—the number of messages in my inbox has doubled. It looks like I just got back from an eight-week stranding on a desert island.
Nothing makes a coterie of already neurotic authors quite so neurotic as publishing’s annual slow season. Every delayed reply they get seems to trigger an avalanche of DOES MY EDITOR HATE ME?????? DO YOU HATE ME?? DOES EVERYONE HATE ME???
“Yep!” I shout back to our driver. Libby has her head between her knees now.
“You must have family in town,” he screams over the wind.
Maybe it’s the New Yorker in me, or maybe it’s the woman, but I’m not about to announce that we don’t know anyone here, so I just say, “What makes you say that?”
“Why else would you come here?” He laughs, whipping around a corner.
When we slow to a stop a few minutes later, it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into applause like someone whose plane just made an emergency landing.
Libby sits up woozily, smoothing her gleaming (miraculously untangled) hair.
“Where . . . where are we?” I ask, looking around.
There’s nothing but shaggy, sun-blanched grass on either side of the narrow dirt road. Ahead, it ends abruptly, and a meadow slopes upward, riddled with sprays of yellow and purple wildflowers. A dead end.
Which begs the question: are we about to be murdered?
The driver ducks his head to peer up the slope. “Goode’s Lily Cottage, just over that hill.”
Libby and I duck our heads too, trying to get a better look. Halfway up the hill, a staircase appears out of nowhere. Maybe staircase is too generous a word. Wooden slats cut a path into the grassy hillside, like a series of small retaining walls.
Libby grimaces. “The listing did note it wasn’t wheelchair accessible.”
“Did it also mention we’d need a ski lift?”
Santa has already gotten out of the car to wrestle our luggage from the trunk. I clamber out after him into the brilliant sunlight, the heat instantly making my all-black travel uniform feel stiflingly thick. Where the dirt road ends, there’s a black mailbox, Goode’s Lily Cottage painted in curly white on it.
“There isn’t another way?” I ask. “A road that goes all the way up? My sister’s . . .”
I swear Libby sucks in, trying to look as un-pregnant as possible. “I’m fine,” she insists.
I briefly consider waving toward my four-inch suede heels next, but I don’t want to give the universe the satisfaction of leaning into the cliché.
“?’Fraid I can’t get you any closer,” he replies as he climbs back into the car. “An acre or two back is Sally’s place. That’s the second-closest road, but still a good ways further.” He holds his business card out the window. “If you need another ride, use this number.”
Libby accepts the scrap of paper, and over her shoulder, I read: Hardy Weatherbee, Taxi Services and Unofficial Once in a Lifetime Tours. Her bark of laughter is lost beneath the roar of Hardy Weatherbee’s car reversing down the road like a bat out of hell.
“Well.” She winces, hunching her shoulders. “Maybe you should take your shoes off?”
With all our luggage, it’s going to take more than one trip, especially because there’s no way Libby’s carrying anything heavier than my heels.
The climb is steep, the heat sweltering, but when we crest the hill and see it, it is perfect: a winding path through shaggy, overgrown gardens to a small white cottage, its peaked roof a lovely burnt sienna. Its windows are ancient, single-paneled, and shutterless, and the only accent on the wall visible to us is a pale green arc of vines painted over the first-floor window. At the back of the house, gnarled trees press close, forest extending as far as I can see, and off to the left, in the meadow, a gazebo twined with wild grape stands within a smaller copse of trees. Sparkling glass-shard wind chimes and cutesy bird feeders sway in the branches, and the path cuts past a row of flowering bushes, curving onto a footbridge and then disappearing into the woods on the far side.
It’s like something out of a storybook.
No, it’s like something out of Once in a Lifetime. Charming. Quaint. Perfect.
“Oh my gosh.” Libby juts her chin toward the next few steps. “Do I have to keep going?”
I shake my head, still catching my breath. “I could tie a bedsheet around your ankle and drag you up.”
“What do I get if I make it to the top?”
“To make me dinner?” I say.
She laughs and loops her arm through mine, and we start up the final steps, inhaling the softly sweet smell of warm grass. My heart swells. Things already feel better than they have in months. It feels more us, before things amped up with my career and Libby’s family and we fell into separate rhythms.
In my purse, I hear my phone chime with an email and resist the urge to check it.
“Look at you,” Libby teases, “stopping to smell the literal roses.”
“I’m not City Nora anymore,” I say, “I’m laid-back, go-with-the-flow N—”
My phone chimes again, and I glance toward my purse, still keeping pace. It chimes twice more in quick succession, and then a third time.
I can’t take it. I stop, drop our bags, and start digging through my purse.
Libby gives me a look of wordless disapproval.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her, “I’ll start on being that other Nora.”
* * *
As different as we are, the second we start unpacking, it could not be more obvious that we’re cut from the same cloth: books, skin care products, and very fancy underwear. The Stephens Women Trifecta of Luxury, as passed down from Mom.