Anna scrolled through her phone until she found the photo of her and John from the morning they had stayed in bed. The angle wasn’t artful, and the lighting wasn’t perfect. Her hair was a mess, not attractively tousled but impossibly tangled, and the side of John’s face was obscured. Still, it was real and wonderful, and she wanted to get back to that moment even after what she’d said and what he’d done. She owed it to John to try again. She owed it to herself to try again. It might come to nothing, but she wouldn’t sit and wait for the fight to come to her this time.

“Jenny, do you still have that reporter friend?”

“Yup, what are you planning?”

“What do they always say in those mafia movies?” She really needed to talk to John about the Godfather movies again.

Reed laughed. “Are you going to the mattresses?”

“That’s the one.”

Jenny screamed in delight.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“You’re sure, son?”

John and his parents stood in the foyer of the house that his uncle had built. The afternoon sun filtered through the ponderosa trees and illuminated the flagstones at their feet. The home looked like the secluded mountain paradise it was. John had always called it a cabin. Referring to it as a two-story, six-bedroom custom home built on a conservation easement on an untouched side of the mountain sounded pretentious even to people who didn’t know exactly what that meant. It meant the house was worth a lot of money. His uncle was an architect who designed cookie-cutter homes in sprawling suburbs through the western states. This was what he had built for himself.

The buyer had flown to Bend on a private jet, walked in the front door, and paid John the asking price, plus more if they could move up the closing date.

Giving it up hurt. John knew it hurt his mom too, even as she tried to hide it. She had probably pictured John living there at some point with his own family.

“I’m sorry,” John said, feeling inadequate but saying it anyway.

“Doing the right thing isn’t always easy, and this is the right thing.” His mother walked out the open double doors and stood at the stone fence.

John had helped his uncle, who had never married and had no children of his own, during the summers when it was being built. He had spent a lot of time there, working and dreaming up his big plans.

He’d dreamed of coming back to the house, retreating to the place where he felt like himself, where he could write and wouldn’t have to rely on anyone else. But the past few months had taught him that going it alone was a mistake. What a fool he had been. His uncle wouldn’t want him to keep it if letting it go meant he could correct his mistakes.