breeze. Yep, June in the Rockies still smelled like cedar and pine and air so fresh it hurt.
Or maybe the pain came from being back for the first time in a decade. Her gut twisted at the thought and all the implications that came with it. Telling herself that it was hunger and most definitely not grief, she drove into the town proper. There were ten thousand residents scattered across a county that easily had far more wild animals than people. This didn’t include the influx of crazy that went on during ski and board season. During those times, Cedar Ridge’s population could triple in size. Most of the tourists spent their time up on the slopes, though, a five-minute drive and two thousand more vertical feet above town.
Lily had no intention of going any farther up the mountain. At all.
Ever.
Instead, she pulled into the first of the three gas stations in town and took a glance at herself in her rearview mirror.
Ack. Her hair had started off decent only because she’d flat-ironed all the natural frizz out, but somewhere between California and Colorado she’d gotten hot and had twisted the unruly mess up on top of her head, holding it there with the stylus stick from her tablet. Strands had escaped and rebelled back to their natural habitat of Frizz City.
Hmm. Not exactly runway-ready after two days on the road. But really, who cared? Probably no one would even remember her.
Buoyed by the thought, she stroked a hand down her clothes to smooth out the travel wrinkles. She wore a sundress and cute blazer out of habit, because that’s how they’d done it at the San Diego beauty salon where she’d worked until The Incident. They’d dressed nice to match their upscale clientele, a uniform of sorts.
And now being dressed nice was also her superhero cape. She figured if she looked well put together on the outside, people would assume the inside matched …
For the record, it didn’t.
Stretching after the long drive, she looked down at herself. Crap. She rubbed at the four suspicious stains on her blazer that might or might not be fingerprints directly related to an earlier Cheetos mishap. Note to self—give up Cheetos or buy some wet wipes to keep on her. She shed the blazer and eyed the sundress. Damn. There were two more Cheetos finger spots on a thigh. She licked her thumb and tried to rub them out, but this only made it worse. Apparently some things, like Cheetos finger stains and the searing pain of grief, couldn’t be fixed.
She was shedding her hard-earned urbanness moment by moment, transforming back to the rumpled, come-what-may, adventurous but oblivious mountain girl. She started to get out of the car, but stopped when her cell phone buzzed an incoming call from Jonathan, her childhood best friend.
“You here yet?” he asked.
Physically, yes. Mentally … well, she was working on that. “Sort of,” she said.
“What does that mean?” He paused at her silence. “You know you can do this, right? That you’re one of those rare people who can do whatever they need to?” he asked.
True, she’d learned this very skill at an early age, the hard way. But what she needed felt overwhelming and daunting—something that would get her out of the rut that was her life. “I might have come up against my limits this time,” she admitted in the understatement of the day. Hell, understatement of the year.
“Buck up, Lily Pad,” he said. “Things are about to get better. I promise.”
“Yeah.” She shook her head. “And how exactly is that going to happen again?”
“Because you’ve got me at your back now,” he said, a smile in his voice. “Trust me.”
She could trust him, she reminded herself, warming a little as she sighed. Besides, what choice did she have? “Okay, but you’d better be right.”
“Always am,” he said. “Always am. See you soon.”
Lily disconnected and started to get out of the car but realized her feet were bare. She looked around, but apparently along with her city shell she’d also lost one of her wedge sandals. Maybe it was wearing an invisibility cloak. The search led to some swearing and a lot of digging into the luggage in the backseat, and she finally grabbed the next thing she came to.
A pair of Uggs.
She had to laugh as she slid her feet into them. Uggs with a sundress. In San Diego dressing this way would have raised eyebrows, but it was par for the course in