She could give him a hundred reasons. All the ways she’d been slighted in the office. All the times she’d picked up the slack, not just for Mandy but for her whole department. For Rupert himself. The list could go on and on.

“You’ll have to manage without me,” she said calmly.

“For Chrissake, Natalie. Why?”

“Because fuck you,” she said, and walked out of the room. She went straight to her beautiful new, perfectly organized office. She didn’t even bother to take one last look around. Her departure was sure to inspire gossip—she’d lost her mother and Rick and her mind.

She grabbed her few personal items—so few they fit in her tote bag—and walked out without a backward glance. Natalie, who didn’t have an impulsive bone in her body, drove away from stability, from safety, from everything she had worked for and focused on for the past decade.

A strange lightness enveloped her as she drove to her apartment, past the shady village green, the trendy shops and cafés and galleries and tasting rooms. Her favorite spot in town was the White Rabbit Bookstore with a sign over the door—FEED YOUR HEAD.

Yet despite the town’s charms, she had never quite set down roots in Archangel, a place so inviting it drew tourists from all over the world. But it wasn’t her town.

Rick had once hinted that they could move in together. He had a rustic but well-appointed cabin on the banks of Angel Creek, the sort of place people pictured when they dreamed of getting away from it all. It had a deck with a hot tub, a massive bed of peeled timber piled high with pillows and quilts, and windows that opened to the fresh scent of juniper and rushing water.

But no books. Rick wasn’t really a book person. And although that seemed like a lame rationale for Natalie’s hesitation, she had never been able to fit herself into that romantic picture. It was her failing, not Rick’s. She craved security, which was exactly what he had to offer—yet she couldn’t embrace a life of security with him. Why?

Now she wrapped up her life in Archangel with a few phone calls—to a moving company that could pack everything up in a matter of hours, to the management company that would terminate her lease.

What did it say about her that she could shed this life like a skin that had never fit in the first place?

The question haunted her as she drove south. She arrived in the city late at night and crawled into her mother’s bed. She hated that this was her story. She hated that her mom’s story ended this way. Maybe this was the reason she was so determined to turn the shop’s fortunes around—to give her mother a better ending.