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“Maybe another time, darling,” her husband retorts smoothly.

She pouts but lets the matter go. No boy toy for her this time.

He won’t talk business with her in the room; neither will I, so I leave right after.

Jessup shakes my hand at the door and tells me he has every confidence, which is what men like him say when they’ve bought someone and are confirming the transaction. Celeste touches my arm again on the way out—brief, proprietary, a reminder that she hasn’t forgotten.

I take the elevator down alone and pause in the St. Regis lobby—pale stone, reclaimed wood, women who look like Celeste, men who look like Jessup, the whole place humming like a circus where money performs.

I think about Blair because spaces like these were ones she enjoyed—even if she found them vapid. They were like a guilty pleasure.

I don’t think of my ex-wife with grief but with clarity.

She told me, near the end, that I was the most competent person she’d ever met and the least present. She didn’t say it as an accusation, just as a fact that she’d learned during our time together.

She wasn’t wrong then. If she said it now, she wouldn’t be wrong either.

That competence opened doors—and built a life that, from the outside, looked like a man who’d made his choices and was fine with them.

What I hadn’t built was anything that required me to stay in one place long enough for it to matter—to be present.

The highlight of our divorce was the absence of a fight. That was the saddest part for her. After two years of marriage, we sat across from each other in a lawyer’s office and divided things with the same civil competence we’d applied to everything else. And that was that.

I push through the revolving door of the hotel into the Aspen cold.

The drive back to Wildflower Canyon takes an hour and a half, and by the time the road narrows and the canyon closes in around me, the tension in my chest releases, slightly, in a way I haven’t figured out yet.

I’ve worked in a lot of places.

Cities around the world.

Places that hum with the business of being important.

I know how to move through them, how to find the room within the room, how to make myself useful and then invisible.

This is different.

Wildflower Canyon doesn’t hum.

It sits.

The mountains hold it on three sides, and the sky is enormous in a way that cities train you not to notice, and the town itself—Main Street, the Horseshoe Diner, The Rusty Spur with its cracked mirror behind the bar—has the quality of a place that knows exactly what it is and has made its peace with that.

It’s the kind of place people live in.

I have not, in fifteen years, lived anywhere I’d describe that way.

The Ridgeline Inn is at the north end of Main Street, a three-story Victorian that a couple from Denver bought six years ago and restored with more love than sense and got right. My room has a window that faces the mountains, a quilt that weighs about twelve pounds, and a radiator that ticks in the night like it’s thinking. It smells like such inns do, of lavender sachets and clean wood oil.

I drop my keys on the nightstand and sit on the edge of the bed.

Somewhere in town, Taya Morningstar is working a case that I’ve been paid to dismantle.

I think about Jessup’s hands. The gesture of a man asking for something small.

I think about Blair saying I’m competent and not present.

I think about the way Taya paused at the door of Wild Coffee and said, “Don’t let Feig oversell the timeline,” like she wanted me to know I was someone worth a piece of honest advice. Like I’d earned something minor and real.