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Dedication

To my mom and my Tom.

Thank you for always supporting me and my writing. Apologies in advance for pages (redacted) and (redacted) and (redacted) and (redacted) and (redacted).

To my mother-in-law, Karen Hahn. Thank you for sharing your love of romance with me and for raising the best (bearded) romantic hero a girl could ask for.

1

CAMERON

STITCHES

FIVE YEARS AGO

I’ve never loved flying. It’s not only the lurching-in-a-claustrophobic-metal-tube-thousands-of-feet-above-the-earth part that bothers me, though that’s … not great. I genuinely prefer watching the landscape zip past on land. I was meant for high-speed trains. Or low-speed trains. Any train, honestly. In fact, I’d take a wagon train rattling along the Oregon Trail, ditching dressers and flatware across the grassy miles, over flying.

Most especially, I’d choose train travel over this shitstorm of a bushwhacker held together with honest-to-God duct tape and flown by “Hal No Last Name” who reminds me of that crop-duster pilot from Independence Day.

And listen. I’ve traveled the world, and getting around is always iffy when you’re working in remote areas, which is ninety-five percent of the job when you film documentaries for National Geographic. This feels infinitely worse. In part, because the three other passengers, members of a family from Anchorage, backed out at the last minute, leaving me the sole human cargo. Something Hal No-last-name barely seemed to register.

It’s fine. It’s for Shelby. No one dies in a plane crash on a flight taken as a grand gesture of a decade-long friendship.

I check my phone, which I refuse to turn off. It feels unwise to shut down the GPS just in case … well, you know. Surely, there’s GPS on the plane. And a black box.

“There’s a black box on this thing, right?” If I die out here, I’d like my mom to know why. No doubt, my dad would just grumble at the news and assume it was my fault for daring to leave ground in an “overblown, dramatic, Hollywood style—”

I shake off the morose thought.

Shelby. This is for Shelby.

Hal tugs one side of his headset away from his ear. “What was that?”

I decide to let it drop. Just as well I don’t know about the black box.

I have two messages. The first is from my dad, asking if I’m coming home for Christmas.