From the podium, I was poised to press the button, when I jolted awake. My thoughts immediately flew to Andrew Hanes and whether he had ever followed through on his plans for Pleasant Hollow. It weighed on me as if I had a vested interest, and I needed to know. It was a little before five a.m. when I tiptoed out of my bedroom to avoid waking my mom, brewed a Dunkin’ Donuts French Vanilla K-Cup, and powered up my laptop.

My first stop was Google. The Million Dollar Listing episode was probably filmed several months in advance, which meant if Andrew Hanes had moved forward with his investment in the town, it would come up among the initial results in a search of his name. The first link was: “Real Estate Tycoon Andrew Hanes to Invest Millions in Remote Upstate New York Town of Pleasant Hollow.” Score! I fist-pumped the air. The article described how Pleasant Hollow, a hamlet with a population of just under two thousand, had been almost completely overshadowed by the higher-profile and larger neighboring towns of Middletown, Newburgh, Monroe, and Goshen for decades until Hanes announced his interest.

I took a sip of my coffee and kept reading. According to the piece, Hanes had already purchased a large plot of unoccupied land in the town and was currently finalizing architectural and engineering plans for a combination condo/rental complex he was calling “The Hollows.” From there, I went to the Wikipedia page for Pleasant Hollow, then clicked on all the reference links at the bottom. Based on the pictures online, it looked exactly like what one would expect from a small town. The majority of the businesses—a hardware store, nail salon, bookstore, diner, etc.—were located along Main Street, and there was a town square and a park that ran along the Hudson River. Pleasant Hollow’s biggest claim to fame was a ballerina who was born and raised there, and a statue in the park had been erected in her honor. A brewery run by two brothers overlooked the river, and a pizza place housing a forty-year-old brick oven from Italy was the culinary spotlight. A pearl of an idea forming in my brain, I took screenshots of all the photos and saved them in a new folder on my computer.

Two hours later, after unearthing everything I could about Pleasant Hollow without enlisting the help of a shady character with access to the dark web, I veered my attention to Andrew Hanes. I tracked his professional history, saving articles about his previous ventures—Pleasant Hollow being his first in a small town—into the newly created file.

Finally, I aimed my research at Hallmark movies featuring quaint towns under attack by a big-city developer. In the last few years, movies like Love Struck Café, Under the Autumn Moon, Christmas in Love, and The Story of Us had premiered with viewership numbers between two and four million each.