Chapter 1
Gabby
The last flight into Anchorage smells like beef jerky, and the man in 14B has been snoring into my shoulder for forty-five minutes like we’re in a committed relationship.
This is fine. Everything is fine.
I shift sideways—carefully, because waking a stranger who’s drooling on your cardigan feels like a level of confrontation I’m not equipped for at eleven p.m.—and press my forehead against the window. Below, Alaska stretches out in every direction like the earth didn’t know when to stop. Mountains. Trees. More mountains. More trees. Not a single Whataburger in sight.
My phone has been dead since Seattle, which means I can’t check the email from the lawyer again, the one that arrived three weeks ago and rearranged my entire life in four paragraphs. The gist: Great-Aunt Edna Flores—a woman my family never mentioned, whose name I’d never heard, whose existence was apparently filed under “things we don’t discuss at Thanksgiving”—left me a bakery and a cabin in Ashwood Falls, Alaska. There’s a 60-day residency clause. I have to live there for two months to claim the inheritance. After that, I can sell.
I’d said yes before the lawyer finished explaining the terms. I was sitting in my car outside an apartment I couldn’t afford, eating gas station peanut butter crackers, and moving to Alaska felt like the only direction left.
That was the plan. Sixty days, sell the bakery, use the money to start over somewhere—anywhere—that isn’t Austin.
Austin, where Marco and Valentina are probably having brunch right now in the café we used to go to, sitting in our booth, eating our pastries, living the life that was supposed to be mine. Marco, my ex-husband, who I built a bakery with from nothing. Valentina, my best friend, who I told everything to—including, apparently, the exact vulnerabilities Marco needed to destroy me efficiently.
I didn’t see it coming. That’s the part that keeps me up at three a.m. Not the affair. Not the divorce. The fact that I had no idea. I stood in my own kitchen and smiled at both of them and never thought something was wrong.
If I couldn’t read the two people closest to me, how am I supposed to trust myself to read anyone?
Short answer: I’m not. Hence Alaska. Where there are apparently more moose than people, and you can’t betray someone you never get close to.
The plane jolts. 14B snorts awake, blinks at me like he’s never seen a human woman before, and resettles with his full weight against me like we’ve upgraded to long term.
“Cool,” I whisper. “This is great.”
The Anchorage airport at midnight is a fever dream of taxidermy and gift shops selling shirts that say Alaska: Where the Odds Are Good but the Goods Are Odd. My luggage did not make the connection in Seattle. All of it. Gone. Every bag, every carefully packed item, every practical shoe I own—vanished into theairline’s void, probably sitting on a carousel in Minneapolis right now, going around and around with nobody to claim it.
What I have: one carry-on. Inside the carry-on: another sundress (because I packed for the Austin weather I was leaving, not the Alaska weather I was entering), a phone charger, a toothbrush, and my rolling pin.
The rolling pin is a Matfer Bourgeat, French, solid maple. It was the first professional tool I ever bought with my own money. I’ve had it longer than I had my marriage. It survived a grease fire, two moves, and a divorce. It is the one thing I would grab in a house fire, and when the airline told me to choose what went in the carry-on, it wasn’t even a question.
My mother would say this is symbolic. My mother says a lot of things, most of them unhelpful.
I rent a car from a man named Gerald who looks like he’s been awake since the Eisenhower administration and who hands me the keys to something that might be a Jeep, or might be a large metal insect, and tells me Ashwood Falls is “about three hours if you don’t hit a moose.”
“Hit a moose,” I repeat.
“They stand in the road,” Gerald says, like this is a totally normal traffic hazard. “Big ones. Just lay on the horn.”
“And if the horn doesn’t work?”
Gerald considers this. “Drive around ‘em.”
“And if I can’t drive around them?”
“Wait.” He shrugs. “They move eventually.”
“Eventually,” I say, and Gerald nods like eventually is a perfectly acceptable timeline for a roadblock caused by a thousand-pound animal, and this is my life now—I’ve traded Austin traffic for moose traffic, and I’m not sure which is worse, but at least the moose aren’t texting.
“Great. Thank you, Gerald.”
“Welcome to Alaska.”
The drive is dark, endless, and deeply unsettling in the way that only total wilderness can be when you’re a city person who considers “nature” to be the potted fern in her apartment. The road narrows from highway to two-lane to something that’s less a road and more a suggestion, winding through forests so thick the headlights barely punch through. No streetlights. No other cars. Just me, the maybe-Jeep, and the growing certainty that I have made a catastrophic error in judgment.
Which tracks. My judgment has been garbage lately. Exhibit A: my marriage. Exhibit B: trusting Valentina with every secret I had. Exhibit C: agreeing to move to a state I’ve never visited based on a legal document from a dead woman I’ve never heard of.