a cliché and say that I was falling in love with Sitka, the isolated feel of the place and the fjords, towering timber and sea all around seemed like a perfect fit. Slowly, I began to get a sense that this was where I was meant to be. Even before enrolling in the army and taking the strange path of events that had led me to receiving my first script, bedding my first a-list actress, and giving my first interview, I think I was destined to end up in Sitka—an odd thought, as I don’t believe in destiny.
The love affair with Sitka started during the second week I was in the cabin. I met a man at one of the local fish markets that told me about the network of hiking trails that stretched through the Sitka wilderness. My interested was sparked at once; I’d loved hiking and all things about the wilderness even as a boy. It was a passion that had taken a back seat when I joined the army and then it had been pushed away when I started making movies. The closest I had come to being involved in the woods was spending nine days on location in rural North Carolina for an action movie that did fairly well last summer.
Joy and determination set me out to find those trails. And when I found them, I felt like a child again. I walked along trails that were bordered by large trees and an immense and impossibly blue sky. I took in the smells of an unharmed forest, of spruce and fir that had been thriving there long before I had been brought into the world.
One day on my fourth week in Sitka, I found a small cliff just off of one of the trails. I walked out to a large outcropping of rock and looked out into the Gulf. Looking at it and noticing how it melded with the horizon made me think of things that did not end. It was that large and uninterrupted. Suddenly, my issues with Hollywood and this dulled midlife crisis I was going through seemed miniscule.
I sat there for at least three hours, watching Bald Eagles soar in the sky and a group of sea otters frolic and play in the dark salt water. I enjoyed being alone. I liked the solitude and the quiet. I would have stayed there well into the night if I hadn’t started to get cold as the sun made its decent beyond the horizon, setting the sky ablaze in fiery hues of pinks, purples and oranges.
By the time I returned back to the cabin, the idea of staying in Sitka for a year was welcoming. Hell… the idea of buying the cabin outright and staying here for as long as I lived seemed even more appealing.
The one hang up, of course, was money. Not that I was broke, far from it. I had more than enough money. Earlier in the year, my accountant had informed me that my net worth was somewhere around twenty-two million. I knew that I had at least three million sitting in one checking account and nearly five hundred thousand in another. But to get to those funds, I’d have to access the accounts of Devlin Stone and that would eventually get to Adam and probably my accountant, too.
I spent that night trying to come up with ways to get to the money. The two most likely scenarios was to call either Adam or Aubrey. I felt like I could let them in on what I had done, trusting them to secrecy. But something about that didn’t feel quite right.
So before sleep started tugging at me, I had another idea—one that made no sense but warmed me inside.
I’d stay here in Sitka and start a business. What sort of business, I wasn’t sure. But with the funds I had currently available, I figured that I had at least another three months to figure it out.
On the third day of my fifth week in Sitka, I watched the news for the first time since staying in the hotel. I flipped through the trashy entertainment channels, curious to see how the search for me was going—or if there was even still a search. My hope was that some teenaged celebrity had gone on a drug binge and done something stupid, making the public totally forget about the fact that the 'handsome action-and-rom-com star' had gone missing.