The prize was fifty thousand dollars. I stood on Bobbi’s bandstand with a check that was almost certainly ceremonial, holding it for photos while the festival crowd clapped and the mountains turned purple in the fading light, and I looked past all of it to the edge of the crowd where Ridge was standing.
He’d come down the mountain.
He was at the back, half-hidden by the shadow of a maple tree, his hands in his pockets, his beard and long hair making him look like a man who’d wandered out of the wilderness and wasn’t sure he belonged among people. But he was here. He’d left his cabin and his quiet and his self-imposed exile, and he was standing at the edge of a crowd watching me, with an expression on his face I could read from fifty feet away.
Pride.
And something deeper. Something that looked like a man seeing dawn after a very long night.
I found him after the crowd thinned, walking toward him with my ceremonial check and my sprained ankle and my heart in my throat.
“You came down,” I said.
“I told you. I’m done hiding.”
I kissed him in front of the festival grounds, in front of Bobbi’s bandstand, in front of anyone who cared to look. Hekissed me back with both hands in my hair and the kind of thoroughness that made the remaining bystanders either cheer or politely look away.
When we broke apart, Evan and Dash were standing ten feet away, looking at Ridge like they’d seen a ghost. “About time,” Dash said.
Evan didn’t say anything. He just walked up and pulled Ridge into the kind of hug men give each other when words aren’t enough and contact is the only language that’s left. Ridge hugged him back, his face pressed into his best friend’s shoulder, and I watched seven months of isolation crack apart in the space of three seconds.
Later—after the handshakes and the congratulations and the promises to come by the Pancake House in the morning—Hartley pulled me aside. “We need to talk about Paisley,” she said.
“I know.”
“She’s pretending she’s fine, but she’s not fine. Brooklyn, I think there’s more going on with her than she’s told us. Her mom had cancer. Months of treatment. Months of recovery. That doesn’t come cheap, even with insurance.”
I’d been thinking the same thing. The way Paisley had studied those trail maps like her life depended on it. The intensity that didn’t match a “fun spring girls’ getaway.” The desperation in her eyes when her name was called near the bottom of the rankings.
“She didn’t enter the scavenger hunt for fun,” I said. “She entered it for the money.”
“Same thing I think.” Hartley was quiet for a moment. “You just won fifty thousand dollars.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got some savings from event work. Not a lot, but some.”
“Right.”
“I say we help her.” She looked at me with the straightforward certainty that made her the best event coordinator—and the best friend—I’d ever had. “We pool what we can. We don’t make it weird. We just help.”
I thought about Paisley hugging me after the announcement, holding on a beat too long, being happy for me while something inside her was breaking. I thought about her mom—a woman I’d never met—making minimum payments on a debt that was slowly eating her alive.
“We help,” I said. “But we have to figure out how. She’ll never take it if she thinks it’s charity.”
“Leave that part to me.” Hartley gave me a look that said,I plan things for a living and this is no different. “I’ll figure it out.”
We stood together in the fading light, two friends making a plan to help a third who was too proud—or too afraid—to ask for help herself. Behind us, the mountains rose dark against the first stars, and somewhere on one of those ridges, a cabin with two mugs and a quilt and a man who’d come down from the mountain was waiting for me to come home.
Home.
I’d known Ridge for two days. The word shouldn’t have felt right yet.
It did anyway.
EPILOGUE
RIDGE: 5 YEARS LATER