Only a Chance (Kasper Ridge book 5) - Sneak Peek

CHAPTER ONE

EMILY

When I was a little girl, my mom watched reruns of this show called Leave it to Beaver. (When I was eight, I understood nothing about the potential innuendo such a title might carry. But now I was willing to put good money on there being several adult films made off the back of that singular name.)

Anyway, Mom said she liked watching it because it let her live vicariously through someone else’s perfect childhood, seeing how her own hadn’t been ideal.

“That’s why your dad and I will do everything in our power to make sure you and your brother grow up in the happiest way possible.” She’d said it all the time.

And we had been happy. For a lot of years.

My brother was a star student, got an engineering degree at UCLA, and went on to become a pilot.

I followed him to college and started my writing career soon after graduation. Less illustrious, sure—Dad didn’t have a sweatshirt that proclaimed he was a proud writer dad the way he had one for the navy. But whatever. They were proud all the same. Of both of us. And that had felt good.

Even once we were adults, there had been family dinners, group texts, and weekend trips when we could, when Jake was around . . . we were happy. We were perfect. Just like Beaver and his family.

Until we weren’t.

The last memory I have of us being that picture-perfect family was right before Jake died. We had dinner at a restaurant in San Diego just before his squadron deployed on the boat. I had crab legs.

Now just the mention of crab turns my stomach.

***

“You’re coming for dinner, right?” My mother’s voice over the phone now sounded urgent, pressurized.

“I always come for dinner on Sundays, Mom.”

She sighed on the other end of the phone. With relief? Frustration? It was hard to tell.

Sometimes I felt like she lived for these dinners together because it was the only time all week that she got to share some of the pressure of being in my father’s presence. I understood how bearing it alone would be exhausting.

Dad had become something of a shadow in my life. Less stressful a figure than he was in Mom’s, but no less upsetting. Where there had once been the hearty laugh and legitimate interest in my latest assignment or book idea, now there was the stern silent man with haunted eyes that looked past me. He wore a vacant grimace most of the time, as if he preferred to live the news of my brother’s death over and over in his head to interacting with those of us still living and breathing around him.

The accident hadn’t been easy for any of us to accept, but Jake had known the risks when he’d taken orders and accepted his assignment to fly jets. Nothing in life was without risk, anyway. It could as easily have been a freak accident that killed me. Or Mom. But it wasn’t.

And now the golden boy was gone, and Dad couldn’t get past it. So none of us had.

The worst nights were the ones when he came back to life like someone had suddenly plugged him into the outlet, and the vitriol and hate spewed from him, fresh as the days after the accident had occurred. A “mishap,” the navy called it, a word that felt purposeful in its minimalization of reality. A crash was what it had really been. A horrible accident. Two multi-million-dollar jets destroyed, and a young life lost in the process.

***

The San Diego sunshine was exuberant as I drove from my apartment in Mission Bay to Mom and Dad’s place in Encinitas. They lived near the coast, the home I’d loved growing up, perched on a hill that afforded a partial view of the sweeping Pacific Ocean beyond. As I pulled into the driveway, I stopped for a moment out front to turn and face that wide expanse of bottomless dark blue and take a deep breath.

It was gorgeous. And I was lucky to get to be here, to breathe the salt-tinged air and see this vista whenever I wanted to.

“There she is,” Mom called from just inside the front screen. “Tom, Emily’s here.”

I turned and headed inside, leaving the glow of late afternoon for the perpetual gloom of my parents’ living room. It faced the wrong side of the house, which kept it dark in the afternoons anyway, but it was also the spot where Dad kept vigil, and it seemed he couldn’t achieve just the right level of self-pity and anger if we kept too many lights on.

As I stepped in, letting my eyes adjust, Dad rose from the leather armchair where he could usually be found, a newspaper in his lap and a pencil tucked behind his ear.

“Hey Dad, Mom.”

My mother gave me a quick hug and then headed off into the kitchen. Dad rose, waiting for me to cross the room so he could give me a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Honey.”

I waited a moment, just in case this would be one of those occasions where Dad asked about me, about my life, where he showed a little interest in the kid who was still breathing. But this didn’t seem to be one of those nights.

I sighed, giving a quick wink to my brother, who was staring down from a photo on the wall, that little smirk on his face that he used to give me to remind me that he was older and wiser, and naturally much smarter than me. I missed him too. But unlike my father, I was trying to move on.

“What are you making?” I asked my mother, relieved to step into the kitchen with its sweeping window facing out over the back patio and the ocean beyond. Light spilled in around us, immediately lifting the shroud that fell across my shoulders whenever I crossed through the living room.

“Salmon and green beans. Nothing special.”

“Everything you cook is special,” I reminded her. Mom was a classically trained chef, and when she and Dad got married, she’d been running one of the most revered fine dining restaurants in La Jolla. She’d given it up for us. I guess raising kids and running a top-notch restaurant weren’t compatible. “Wow, that smells amazing. How do you make green beans smell so good? When I do them it smells like I’m boiling a wet sock.”

Mom laughed and guilt shot through me at the sound. Mom didn’t laugh much. And I bet when I wasn’t here, she didn’t laugh at all.  

She needed me. And I was hardly ever here.

Alone with Dad, she was forced to relive and rehash the worst events of our lives over and over, mired down in his fixation over things none of us could change. My bright, vivacious mother was trapped here. And even though I watched her lighten and shine when I was here, my presence alone enough to lift the curtain for a couple hours, I didn’t come often. Not often enough.

It was too hard.

“Tell me what you’re working on while you set the table, Em.” Mom handed me a bundle of silverware, and I headed down the back steps to the table on the patio. I was just below the enormous kitchen window, which was always open, so Mom and I could continue chatting easily while I worked.

“A couple things,” I told her, happy for her interest. “The editor I’ve worked for a few times at the travel magazine wants a roundup of San Diego hotels. Kind of an off-the-beaten path thing where we focus on activities not everyone would expect, like this little place that offers pie-baking lessons out in Julian while you’re there.”

“Oh, that sounds interesting. It’s so nice that you can write travel pieces without actually traveling.”

I blew out a laugh. “I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t mind traveling now and then. But you’re right. I’m lucky to be in a place most people want to visit.” The assignments came regularly, thanks to my location and my insider knowledge of my hometown. 

“What about the book?” Mom had been encouraging me to follow my passion and explore longer-form work. I wanted to write a novel. I just wasn’t quite sure where to begin with the effort. I had multiple abandoned drafts on my laptop, and still hadn’t come upon the thing I really wanted to write.

“It’s still churning in the back of my head,” I told her, pausing to look up at her through the window. The warmth in her eyes encouraged me to tell her more. “There’s actually this conference I kind of want to go to. It’s a week of craft talks and workshops, and some really amazing writers will be presenting there.”

“Em, that sounds amazing. Is it here in town?”

I shook my head. This was the thing I hadn’t really wanted to get into. But now, with Mom looking so eager for me, I figured it couldn’t hurt. I could tell her the barest details. “It’s in Colorado.”

“Oh, how exciting,” she said. “Tell us all about it over dinner. Come get a plate and I’ll get your dad to pour some wine.” Trepidation shot through me. Dad would not be fond of the idea. Dad would revile the idea, actually. Once he found out where exactly the conference was.

Mom disappeared and I headed inside to get the plates.

When we were all settled, the Pacific creating an idyllic backdrop beyond the quasi-tropical foliage on the patio, Mom brought it up again. “Tom, Emily’s thinking of going to a big writers’ conference out of state. Isn’t that exciting?”

Dad chewed for a moment, and then lifted his eyes to me. The barest hint of interest flickered there. “That’s great, honey.”

He dropped his gaze again to his food, and I could feel Mom’s frustration like a buzz of energy around us, begging him to engage.

“She’s still toying with the idea of writing a novel,” Mom tried again.

“Mm-hmm.” Dad didn’t look up.

“I’ve been taking an online course on plotting, but I think this kind of in-person instruction could be really helpful. Plus, there should be a ton of other writers there who I could learn from. Remember my friend Christine? The one with all the romance novels? She’s going too. It would be a whole week, so hopefully I could absorb some writerly wisdom or something,” I laughed, trying to get my father to engage, if not for me, than because I feel my mother’s need for it.

“It’s in Colorado,” Mom added, a tinge of desperation in her voice.

That got Dad’s attention, and dread pooled in my stomach as he looked up at her, and then turned his attention to me.

“What part of Colorado, Em?” His tone was light, but I already knew what he was thinking about.

“A few hours from Denver.”

“Which direction from Denver?”

“Southwest,” I said, the unease in me multiplying with every word.

Dad squinted at me, then turned to Mom. “That’s where he is.”

There was emphasis on the word “he.” Because “he” was the villain in our family’s story. He was the enemy.

“Yeah, actually, the conference is at the resort,” I said, trying to keep my tone nonchalant. Might as well rip the Band-Aid off all at once.

Dad dropped his fork and Mom stared at me.

“Dad—” I began, but he was already talking.

“You’re going to Kasper Ridge? You know he’s there. He runs the place. He’s up there, building his empire like nothing even happened, and you’re going to go there? Pay for a room? Help him go on like he’s not culpable for your brother’s death? How could you even imagine being in the same town as him?”

And there it was.

I swallowed hard but pushed down the misplaced guilt trying to swamp me. There were no right answers here, but I searched for something anyway.

“They decided it was an accident, Dad.” My voice wasn’t as strong as I’d have liked.  

There’d been an investigation. The crash that killed my brother had been determined to be attributable to human error, but the other pilot hadn’t been held accountable because the error was partly Jake’s. It was bad luck, bad weather, bad decision making—a horrible combination of factors that had led to one man dying and another spending the rest of his life playing the devil in every one of my father’s waking moments.

“If it weren’t for him, your brother would be sitting here with us now.” Dad spit these words out.

There were no answers that would mollify Dad, so I didn’t offer any. Instead I ate my mother’s delicious salmon while both my parents pretended to eat, each of them drowning in their own sorrow and sadness.

As a family, we were stuck, mired in the moment none of us had actually lived, but which had changed everything. I was tired of it. I was tired of living every second in memory of my brother. It wasn’t what Jake would have wanted for us. Why couldn’t my parents see that?

“Maybe if I meet him, talk to him, it will help,” I said, my voice gaining strength.

“Help with what, honey?” Mom asked, her eyes shining with years of grief.

“Help me move on,” I said, dropping my own fork. “Maybe it can help us all move on.” I looked between them. I’d never said these words to them, but maybe it was time. “Jake is gone, and we can’t bring him back. Living every day in his memory is one thing, but living every day in grief and sadness is not what he would have wanted for us.” I shook my head, looking back and forth between my parents. Neither of them looked at me, or at each other. It was like they were locked in plexiglass isolation booths, each of them suffering alone. Needlessly.

“Maybe if I meet this man, maybe if he becomes a real person in my head instead of some evil villain . . . maybe I’ll be able to forgive him and get past this. Maybe we all can.”

Dad’s head snapped up. “Forgive him? For killing your brother?”

“Tom,” Mom said, her voice a plea.

“There is no forgiveness. He took a life, Emily!”

“It was an accident, Dad. It could just as easily have been Jake who survived, and this guy, Archie Kasper, who died.”

“If only it had been,” Dad said. His pain had gotten in the way of his humanity since the moment he’d learned the details of the accident.

“Don’t say that, Tom. We wouldn’t wish this on any other family . . .”

“He has no family.” Dad had read every detail he could find about Archie Kasper’s life. He knew that he’d inherited an old resort in the mountains of Colorado with his sister, and that against all odds, they’d managed to rejuvenate it and turn it into a sought-after destination.

I’d pitched my editor a feature to help pay for my travel to the conference: A Down-to-Earth Alternative to Aspen. He’d suggested something a little different, but had still been enthusiastic. In fact, he’d told me if I could dig up the story he wanted, he’d put it on the cover, and that would be a career-maker.

“Your brother’s at the bottom of the sea somewhere, and that guy’s living in the lap of luxury, swimming in his inherited fortune, going on like nothing ever happened,” Dad said, his plate forgotten in front of him now.

I did wonder about Archie Kasper. Had he been able to move on so easily? “Maybe I can go up there and find out if that’s true,” I suggested. “I’m sure it’s not.”

“I made a lovely almond torte,” Mom said, clearly desperate to move on from this conversation.

“None for me,” Dad said, standing. He turned and shuffled back into the house, no doubt to pick up where he left off in his ongoing mourning of my brother’s short life.

“I’m sorry, Mom.” I sank back against the chair back, exhausted. My mother sat perfectly still, staring at the spot my father had left. But where I expected to see her crumple, maybe even begin to cry, she straightened.

“No,” she said, and then her gaze snapped to mine. “You go there. I think it’s a good idea. Meet this boy. Find out the truth.”

“The truth? Mom, there was an investigation. What am I going to find out that the navy didn’t already?”

“Not about the crash. Find out the truth about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Emily, your father’s life ended the day Jake’s did. Our lives together ended that day. All because there is a man running free who your father’s been able to point all his anger at. He has someone to blame, but he can do nothing about it. Find out if that blame is deserved.”

“And if it is? If he’s a horrible person and he’s just blithely going on with his life and never thinks of Jake at all?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But at least we’ll be certain that these years we’ve spent on hating him haven’t been wasted.”

I shook my head as tears threatened, exasperated. “Of course they’ve been wasted, Mom.”

Now she slumped. “I know.”

“What could I possibly find out? Would it make you guys happy if I discover that he’s a shell of a person like Dad? How would that help us?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her voice was a spindly thread.

“Or what if I find that he’s somehow managed to move forward and make a real life for himself? Would that be any better?”

“I just don’t know.”

I stood and collected my father’s plate and my own. “I’m going to Colorado. But not because of him. I’m going because the best conference I could find to help me achieve my dream is going to be there. It’s a coincidence that it happens to be at his resort.”

“Or maybe it’s some kind of fate,” Mom said, standing and collecting her own plate.

“I don’t believe in fate.”

I turned and went inside, the lie sitting heavy on my tongue.

Of course it had felt like fate intervening when I’d learned where the conference was being held. I just wasn’t sure what fate intended by sending me there.

But it didn’t matter. I had a good reason for going. And if fate was kind, maybe my going to Kasper Ridge would be the thing to win me the cover story the editor had proposed, and maybe it would be the thing my family needed to break free from the chains we’d worn all these years.

CHAPTER TWO

ARCHIE – AKA: GHOST

“Say it again, I dare you.” Aubrey stood next to me, glaring up at me with her hands clenched into fists at her side. She was like a feral housecat—unpredictable and violent. “I dare you, Archie. Don’t think for one second that this basketball I’m smuggling under my shirt is gonna keep me from tackling you and beating you into submission.”

My sister was barely five feet tall, but her threats were legit. She was strong. And she had a couple black belts that only made her that much more dangerous. Being an adult, a pregnant one at that, didn’t seem to curb her willingness to grapple around like an alligator wrestler, either.

“Whoa there,” Wiley said, hearing her from across the lobby and striding coolly over to approach the desk. The only person on earth who could calm my sister was her longtime boyfriend, Wiley Blanchard, who was also the bar manager at our resort.

“You just don’t comment on a pregnant lady’s physique,” Aubrey sniffed, her back straightening and her chin going up in the air. To my horror, her bottom lip was beginning to wobble. I could handle my sister tough and attempting to beat the crap out of me, but I couldn’t take it when she cried. And since she’d gotten pregnant, her emotions were as unpredictable as her sneak attacks had been when we were little.

Wiley shot me a questioning look. “You didn’t insult my girlfriend, did you?”

“I didn’t, man. I don’t know much, but I do know better than to piss off my sister. Especially now. I just asked if she could move the bump off the desk for a second because I thought I left the Post-Its over there.” I pointed to the little neon pad on the registration desk where Aubrey’s baby bump had been resting a moment before. She was the exact right height to perch on the stool behind the counter and lean sideways to rest her increasingly big belly on the desk.

“Your slight was implied,” Aubrey sniffed, crossing her arms in front of her. “You have no idea how heavy this thing is. I can’t help it if I need to find unique ways to take the pressure off my back.”

“I’m sorry, sis. You know I’m excited about being an uncle. I really was just trying to find the Post-It notes.”

Aubrey stared at me for a moment, as if trying to decipher my true intentions, and then her face crumpled, and she wandered around the desk and practically fell into Wiley’s arms. “What’s wrong with me, you guys? This alien life form is taking over my entire personality.” This was a muffled moan uttered against Wiley’s chest.

“It’s okay honey,” Wiley said, wrapping her in his arms. “You’re busy building an actual human being. That’s gotta be exhausting.”

She nodded against him. “It’s awful.”

“I thought women loved being pregnant,” I said, exchanging a bewildered look with Wiley over my sister’s head. “All that glowing and blossoming?”

“Propaganda!” Aubrey moaned. “I can’t see my feet, and oh my god, the things that have been happening to my lady bits . . .”

A shiver of horror went through me, and I tried to will myself not to hear whatever was coming next. This was my sister, after all.

“And no one tells you about all the gooey stuff that comes out—”

“How ‘bout a nap?” Wiley asked her, smoothing her hair from her face as he looked down at her.

I was ridiculously relieved that she hadn’t finished that particular thought. I owed Wiley a raise.

“A nap. Yes. But no funny business. You know that’s how this happened in the first place.”

My sister and Wiley had been together pretty much since we’d begun refurbishing the Kasper Ridge Resort, which my Uncle Marvin left to both of us in his will. It had taken literal years of work, but the place was humming along now, turning a profit, and making a real name for itself as some of the best skiing and accommodations south of Aspen and Vail. And now that the resort was thriving, it was beginning to feel like maybe it was time for me to move on. I just wasn’t sure to where, and I needed to finish up one thing first.

“No funny business, I promise. I’ll just tuck you in. I have to get back down and finish inventory for this writers’ conference.” Wiley shot a meaningful look at me as he said this last bit. We’d all been a little overworked, getting the place ready for a conference that had rented almost every single room and would span a week just before the ski season kicked off.

“I heard it was mostly romance writers,” Aubrey moaned. “Don’t they know what romance leads to?”

I held in a chuckle as Wiley led my sister off toward the elevator, and reached for the Post-It notes that had started the latest close call with Aubrey’s hair-trigger emotions.

Everything seemed in order, and we were expecting the first arrivals for the conference early the next morning. Unfortunately, we were anticipating some weather during the week as well, and I wasn’t sure how that might impact the travel plans of five hundred writers, but I hoped it would all work out. It was a boon for the resort, that much was certain. Several of the guests had rented rooms that extended well beyond the week of the conference, and I’d heard that a lot of the rentable properties outside the resort were booked as well.

By that evening, we were as ready as we’d be, I figured. We had a few guests checking out the following day, but the hotel was emptier than it had been in months as the staff braced for our first big convention.

“Kitchen’s stocked, gift shop and mountain shop inventory are tapped up. We’ve got a few extra bodies for housekeeping, and maintenance is on hand for that elevator,” Antonio gave me this report as evening fell outside, draping the snow-tipped peaks of the mountains in violet shadow.

Antonio had taken on the role of general manager, and we’d been spending a good deal of time together coordinating for this event.

“We’re as ready as we’re gonna be,” I told him as we made our way out the back doors of the building to the east patio, where the firepit was roaring and familiar faces dotted the circle of Adirondack chairs around the fire.

The air was cool and crisp. We’d had a warm fall so far, but it had been punctuated with a couple of snowstorms that brough in frigid temperatures, reminding us all that this was high-altitude Colorado and the weather was the one thing you never wanted to assume you understood up here.

“Hey guys,” I said, claiming an empty chair and pulling the blanket draped over its back across my shoulders.

“What’s good, Ghost?” Sasquatch grinned at me from the adjacent chair, his dog Roscoe curled at his feet. “We ready?”

“You tell me. You have some moderately adventurous adventures teed up for our writers?”

“Yep. CeeCee’s got five or six short hikes around the resort lined up, and we’ve got some rock climbing planned if the weather holds. We’ll see what these folks are up for.” Sasquatch—whose real name was Travis—and CeeCee ran the adventure shop on the first level of the resort. The shop was a newer addition to Kasper Ridge’s offerings, but when the couple had won a national contest that gave CeeCee’s original shop in town all kinds of exposure, they expanded. Now there were two locations, and Sasquatch spent most of his time running this location.

“Planning any hikes to the backcountry cabins?” Monroe asked, giggling as she reached for the hand of the man at her side.

“Definitely not,” Sasquatch shot back. Monroe—whose real name was Annalee—had gotten caught in a snowstorm in those cabins with Mateo, whom she was engaged to now.

“The romance writers in the group might be up for it,” Mateo laughed now.

“What would you know about romance writers?” Monroe shot back. “You been reading steamy stories when I’m not around?”

Mateo chuckled, his love for her clear in the gaze he rested on Monroe’s pretty face. “Just saying, if anyone’s looking for romance . . . getting snowed in isn’t a bad way to go.”

“I don’t know how romantic it was. No heat, no indoor plumbing . . .” Monroe said.

“Getting snowed in back there is unlikely to have the same outcome for most people as it did for you,” Brainiac pointed out. 

“Always looking at the bright side of things,” Monroe said, rolling her eyes.

“I’m an optimist,” Brainiac said, managing to look offended beneath his distinguished salt and pepper scruff. He was older than the rest of us, and most of us had had to call him “Sir” back in our navy days. Now, the man whose real name was Harrison was married to Penny, and he answered more often to “Daddy,” since their daughter Maggie had begun talking.

“If you’re an optimist, I’m Tom Cruise,” Fake Tom shot back.

“In your dreams,” Monroe laughed.

“Not anymore,” he answered. “I found my dreams up here.” He wrapped his arms more tightly around the woman in his lap—Lucy Dale. The couple had been some of the first people up here with Aubrey and me, bringing in the combined construction know-how needed to rebuild this place. Fake Tom was his callsign, but his real name was Will.

It seemed like everyone had found a reason to stay here at Kasper Ridge. They’d all found the person to complete them, discovered the real treasure at the end of their own personal hunts. It was part of the reason I knew this wasn’t where I ultimately belonged, no matter what my crazy Uncle Marvin might have intended for me. The resort had always been more Aubrey’s than mine, and once she and Wiley were settled, I intended to give it to her officially.

“Hey, what’s the verdict on the hunt now, Ghost? The lawsuit?” Lucy asked.

Ugh. The lawsuit. “I don’t know.” I leaned forward and rubbed the back of my neck as I gazed into the dancing flames before me. “On one hand, I feel like it’s what Uncle Marvin wanted us to do—get him credit for all those movies he wrote that were basically stolen from him . . .”

“But?” Antonio prompted from my side.

“But something about it doesn’t feel right. Does it make sense to ask a family to pay for the sins of someone who’s not even alive anymore?” Rudy Fusterburg had been my uncle’s partner when they’d worked in Hollywood, and then he became his enemy, after Uncle Marvin had stolen Rudy’s fiancée, my Aunt Lola. In retaliation, Rudy had erased any history of their work together writing dozens of movies in Hollywood, potentially cheating my uncle out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties. My uncle had hated the man, and the treasure hunt he’d set up for us to follow as we took over the resort had led us to this knowledge. But now Uncle Marvin and Rudy were both gone. Did it make sense for us to try to exact some kind of vengeance in Uncle Marvin’s name?

“It just doesn’t seem like something Uncle Marvin would do, to be honest.” I said, giving voice to my concerns.

“You think we missed something?” Fake Tom had been one of the first to arrive in Kasper Ridge, and he’d been roped into the treasure hunt from the beginning.

I shrugged. We’d been through tunnels and hidden doors, found literal “booty” and dead ends. The hunt had been so crazy it was hard to know what my uncle’s actual intention had been. “It’s totally possible. We made a lot of assumptions based on an old pile of movie scripts.”

“He definitely wrote those,” Monroe pointed out.

“Yeah, but did he want us to prove it?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly, the firelight catching golden strands in her hair. “No idea.”

“I guess I feel like it makes more sense to let the past be the past. We’ve all made mistakes. We all have things we’d change if we could. Should we punish the living for wrongs against the dead?” The words, as they slipped off my tongue, made my guts twist inside me and I realized I’d just spoken more about my own past than my uncle’s.

Everyone around the fire seemed to realize it too, and the group fell into silence, only the occasional crackle of a log in the fire or the howl of a distant coyote breaking the heavy mantel of the night.

“You’re doing okay though, right?” Sasquatch asked quietly, leaning close. He’d been pretty clear when he’d come up here that he was worried about me. All my old squadron mates were. I wanted to tell them everything was fine, that I didn’t spend my nights fixated on the awful events of my past. But I wasn’t going to lie to my friends. Instead, I just didn’t bring up details.

“Yeah, of course. I’m okay.” And I was. I had a successful resort to run—had basically resurrected the legacy that had been so important to Aubrey and me as kids, even though it had looked impossible at the beginning. I was busy. I was surrounded by friends—a found family of my own making.

I wasn’t sure I could claim to be happy.

But I was okay. I was content enough.

Eventually, everyone drifted off to the staff housing down the hill from the resort, while I headed back upstairs with Antonio to what was starting to feel like the bachelor wing of the hotel. When we’d begun construction, one whole wing had been staff housing and it had felt a lot like old squadron days, all of us just down the hall from one another. But now it seemed like everyone had coupled off, and the family housing on the resort property was a better fit. Houses were built, and there was basically a tiny suburb of Kasper Ridge down there now—a park, a playground. Hell, they’d probably stared a homeowner’s association.

Despite the increasingly family feel of the resort, I appreciated that my friends still made a point of hanging out up here after work when they could. I didn’t have any true family besides my sister. But I had my friends, and it seemed pretty obvious they were going to have to be enough for me. They were probably more than I deserved, anyway.