It takes me a minute before I realize it’s Walt fucking Ripley. Our mothers had been best friends since school and got pregnant with us both at the same time. “Hey, man,” I say. He’s unmistakably Walt, but older and forty pounds heavier. Then again, it’s been fifteen years since I laid eyes on him.

“Byron,” he says with a nod.

“Can I get you a beer?” I ask.

“You bet your ass, you can. I figure you owe me for going off to New York without me.”

Walt had been the guy who stood by my side at my father’s funeral. The guy who’d told me it was going to be okay when I found out we were going to have to move because the family farm was being sold by my father’s creditors to pay back all the loans he’d taken out to pay off his gambling debts. He was the boy who helped me formulate a plan to get out of Star Falls. Of course I hadn’t forgotten him. I just hadn’t let myself think about Star Falls after I left. It held too many painful memories.

“I’ve just been telling Byron that I still want to roam around with my dog,” Jim says.

I understand Jim’s frustration. The problem I have is that the promise the Colorado Club makes is exclusivity, privacy, and security. If celebrities want to escape LA, I want their first thought to be the Colorado Club.

“We can figure it out,” I assure Jim. “There aren’t going to be electric fences.”

“There shouldn’t be any fences—electric or not,” Jim says. “This is wilderness. Wilderness isn’t fenced off and claimed by an elite couple of thousand people in the world.”

They’re both staring at me, and I know they’re right. It’s just, for the Colorado Club to work, it needs to have a boundary. I nod. “I hear you.”

“It’s God’s country,” Jim says. “Not Byron Miller’s.”

I don’t ask him whether he’d welcome people wandering across his land. It’s not worth the fight—I’m not going to win, even if it is a double standard. But if the idea of having the land I own fenced off is a problem for the residents of Star Falls, I’m not sure what I can do about it.

I’m saved from having to think up a reasonable answer when Jim turns to see someone come through the door. I pick at the edge of the blue and white label on my beer bottle, wondering if there’s a solution to the problem. There’s got to be.