“Hansen,” she called, raising her voice to carry over the distance and the sound of the waves.

  Brittany looked over her shoulder with a puzzled expression on her face. “What?”

  “Tess Hansen. My last name.”

  Brittany grinned. “Brittany James.”

  Tess felt an answering smile relax her tight jaw. Not a cocky smile, or a sad one. Something calmer than both of those. She nodded a good-bye toward Brittany and left the beach.

  Chapter Four

  Britt stood at the edge of the water, willing herself not to turn and watch Tess walk away. Not to run after her and say yes to dinner. To whatever short-term, temporary affair Tess had offered. She was here for soul-searching and for contemplating major changes in her life. What could be further from her usual routine than sex with Tess in the back seat of her car in a public La Push parking lot?

  Britt laughed at the fantasy and stepped into the ripple of a departing wave with her brand-new shoes. They were advertised as waterproof, but Britt wasn’t sure she’d trust the health of her toes on footwear she’d bought in a Neah Bay general store. Still, she’d submerge in the chilly water if she needed to—anything to help her retain at least some sense of self while she felt her old world crumbling to the ground.

  She had stopped in this tiny coastal town for two reasons. First, the woman who owned the hotel she had stayed in the night before had recommended her cousin’s resort as an ideal place for an isolated getaway. Second, it was the closest Britt could come to being in the center of the northern stretch of Highway 101. If she turned back, she would come to the more civilized, hip towns of Sequim and Port Townsend. If she went forward, she’d either turn inland toward Olympia or reach the popular tourist areas of the southern Washington Coast. Either option would give her the opportunity to think about her future with the benefits of coffee shops, decent clothing stores, and quaint B and B accommodations. They’d also put her closer to Seattle and the temptation of her familiar life.

  She had thought she’d be better off here, where she wouldn’t be able to distract herself from her thoughts with wine tastings or movies. Of course, she had decided on this before she met Tess. An even more alluring distraction than anything civilization could offer.

  Brittany trudged along the shore, fighting against the harsh wind. Whoever said the ocean was a calming place hadn’t been to this particular stretch of beach, with its rough pebbles that slid under her feet, making walking difficult, and the gusty breeze that threatened to blow her hair out of its braid and completely off her scalp. She could jog on her treadmill for miles, but a hundred yards on this coast left her out of breath. As soon as she was sure Tess had had enough time to get in her car and leave the parking lot, Britt turned around and headed back.

  She climbed onto a driftwood tree trunk and scrambled up to the cement lot, hoping no one in the row of tiny cabins along the bluff was watching her ungraceful ascent. Those cabins had been her original destination, but now she stood between her car and the resort, unsure how to proceed. She had spent her life making decisions quickly and efficiently and then sticking to them, but she had felt uncertain and shaky since she had been on the stand in the courthouse yesterday. She had drifted to Neah Bay, and now to this godforsaken place. She had nearly come to tears in a small diner this morning because she couldn’t decide whether to have eggs or French toast. After breakfast, she had finally settled on a short stay in La Push, but now Tess had caused her to question her choice yet again.

  Tess. Britt shook her head in amazement. Who would expect to randomly meet someone like her on this beach? She was stunning, with her dark hair curling wildly in the breeze and her gaze that was as intense and powerful as the ocean. When Britt had seen her standing by the water, poised as if to jump into the sea like a porpoise, she had been drawn forward almost against her will. She had sensed something frantic, like Tess was running from something the same way she was. And something beautiful, as if Tess knew where to go to escape.

  But no matter how tempted she was, Britt hadn’t been lying when she said she had a girlfriend. She was pretty sure she still did, at least, though she had cringed inwardly when she heard her voice betray her uncertainty to Tess. Cammie hadn’t sounded thrilled with Britt’s impromptu disappearance when Britt had called her from the hotel last night. She obviously didn’t understand why Britt had felt the need to leave home while she thought through her next moves. She had sighed audibly and said, Call me when you cool off. Britt was sure she heard the phrase come to your senses echoing behind the words Cammie had actually said.

  Britt turned toward the resort as resolutely as she could manage. She was tempted to stay because of Tess and tempted to leave the area for the same reason. But she was here for herself and would stick with the original plan. Or at least the one she had sort of decided upon while eating the pancakes she had finally chosen for breakfast. She would stay here for a few days. Come to her senses.

  She hurried to the main entrance of the large, run-down lodge before she could change her mind yet again, or just stand in place for days, paralyzed by indecision.

  Britt paused just inside the doorway, jarred out of her self-obsessed thoughts by the lodge’s great room. She hadn’t been expecting anything fancy, given the outside of the building and the fact that it had been recommended by last night’s landlady who had questionable taste when it came to decor, but the lodge was magnificent. One entire wall was a mosaic of large smooth stones surrounding a huge fireplace. A series of baskets—some taller than Britt—were displayed on a wide mantel of interlocking pieces of driftwood. They appeared handwoven based on their irregular shapes, but the patterns on them were harmonious and intricate. A mural covered the expanse of the wall facing the fireplace, with two wolves baying at a full moon. The picture was made up of geometric patterns and bold black, red, and white colors.

  No one was at the front desk, but two older men who looked like they should be in a theater heckling Muppets were sitting at one of the tables near the fireplace, playing Scrabble. Neither one acknowledged her as she walked over to them.

  “Hello,” she said. She didn’t get a response, so she cleared her throat and spoke louder in case they were hard of hearing. “Does either of you work here?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t need to shout.”

  Britt sighed before trying again in a normal voice. “Does anybody work here?”

  “Fifteen seconds, Jim,” the man closest to the window said, practically cackling with glee as the other shuffled through his tiles, muttering softly to himself. Britt leaned over Jim’s shoulder and picked up several of them, laying D-A-V-E-N in front of the word port along the left edge of the board.

  “Now will you help me?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Ha! Triple word score.” He added up his total and then looked up at Brittany. “Thank you. I’ll go get Chris if you guard my tiles and don’t let Alec look at them.”

  “Those points don’t count,” Alec yelled at Jim’s retreating back before turning to glare at Brittany. “That’s cheating.”

  Nothing like angering the locals. Brittany was about to apologize when Jim and another man—presumably Chris—came back into the room. Chris was about her age, with black hair and a gaze that seemed to excavate her thoughts. He was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, clothes nearly identical to hers minus the green silk shirt she had been wearing with her suit yesterday, but he looked comfortable in his while she felt like an imposter.

  “Brittany James, right? I’ve been expecting you,” he said, sliding a ledger along the top of the counter toward her.

  “Oh, um, you have?” Britt stuttered, wondering how he knew who she was. Had he really been able to read her mind?

  “My cousin Nan called and said she sent you here. Betty told me you left the diner at ten, so I thought you’d be here earlier, but Alec saw you heading toward the beach.”

  “Okay, that’s a little creepy,” Britt said quietly to herself as she walked over to the desk, relieved that her thoughts were still personal even though her whereabouts weren’t. Apparently she was now part of the coastal grapevine. “Do you know what I had for breakfast?”

  “Pancakes,” Chris said without missing a beat. “Good choice, although I would have gone for the French toast instead. I was going to put you in one of the rooms here in the main lodge, but Nan thought you might want more privacy, so I had our finest cabin cleaned for you.”

  Privacy seemed to be a relative term in La Push. Britt was about to comment on that, but she was distracted by Alec’s derisive snort.

  “Hey, why did he make that noise when you mentioned the cabin?”

  Chris waved off her question. “You’ll love it. All the modern amenities.”

  “When you say amenities, do you mean an espresso machine and a jetted tub?” she asked.

  “Amenities like running water and a roof,” Alec said, not taking his eyes off the tiles he was rearranging.

  Chris shook his head and pulled the ledger back across the desk as soon as Britt finished writing the S of her last name. She didn’t have time to lift the pen, and she left a line of ink across the page as he moved it. He handed her a narrow rectangle of wood with cabin 6 painted on it and a key attached to one end. Britt accepted it reluctantly. It didn’t bode well for the condition of the cabin that it looked like the type of key she’d get if she asked to use a gas station bathroom.

  “Do you need my credit card number, or did Betty already give it to you?”

  Chris laughed. “Of course not. You can pay when you’re ready to leave. I trust you.”

  Alec snorted again. “Fool. She cheats at Scrabble.”

  Britt rolled her eyes and left with a quick wave at Jim. This wasn’t anything like the experience she had the last time she had checked into a hotel. She was quite certain the clerk at the Four Seasons hadn’t known what she had eaten for breakfast, and no one in the lobby there had implied that she might abscond without paying her bill.

  She walked away from the lodge and along the row of small cabins that followed the curve of the shoreline. Hers was at the end farthest from the public parking lot. Between Alec’s scoffing and the gorgeous appearance of the lodge’s main room, she had no idea what to expect when she went inside. She thought she’d find either something horribly decrepit or something beautifully decorated, but the reality was a lot plainer.

  She stood inside the empty cabin and wondered what the hell she was doing there. The room was nothing more than a small box, with unadorned walls, a small bed, and a teeny kitchen. A door led to the bare bathroom. Was Cammie right? Did she really need to leave the comforts of her roomy apartment and her bright white, ultra-modern kitchen to figure out what to do with her life?

  A plaid curtain covered the sliding glass door at the back of the room, and Britt walked over to it with low expectations. She probably had a view of the lodge’s garbage bin or something equally unappealing. She pulled the curtain aside and gasped at the view. The fir-covered cliff rose sharply on the left side. She was closer to the edge of the bluff than she had realized, and the gray-green ocean seemed about to flow right into the cabin. She felt small in the presence of the immense sea and the cliff but protected and sheltered at the same time.

  She left the curtain open and sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly sure that she was in the exact right place for what she needed to do.

  * * *

  Later in the evening, when it had gotten too dark to see more than the occasional tinge of a whitecap outside her window, she sat at the little table and arranged several notebooks, pens, and a bowl of canned soup in front of her. She had bought everything at the grocery store, including a thick sweatshirt to supplement the flannel shirt and jeans she had found in Neah Bay.

  She tested her new pen on the receipt to make sure the ink was flowing before turning to the first empty page in one of the notebooks. She was in a beautiful, inspiring setting, and she had the time and space to think. She would simply tackle this problem the same way she confronted any other issue in her life. Lists of pros and cons for taking a sabbatical and staying at her job versus quitting. Mind maps to determine possible routes to take with her future. Brainstorm pages and formal outlines with bullet points. The answer would be in there somewhere, and she just had to use a variety of methods to ferret it out.

  She started with the pros and cons for running away from home, even though she had already done it. She figured she was still in the grace period and could slip back into her life without much of a fuss if she went back soon. She filled an entire column with sensible reasons to go back to Seattle, while the only reasons to stay were facetious. Signs of instability will be a good bargaining chip when asking for more vacation time and This will make an interesting chapter in my memoir after I win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She had a hard time articulating the real reasons to stay here and think because they were too connected to feelings and not to logic.

  She tossed that page aside and started a mind map with all the ways she had violated the environment. She sometimes paid the extra five cents for a plastic grocery bag because she routinely forgot to bring her reusable ones to the store. She ate meat, she had never rescued a homeless animal, and she didn’t have a compost heap in her backyard. Just last week she had thrown away a stack of old magazines instead of recycling them. Not to mention being complicit in the indiscriminate dumping of hazardous chemical waste.

  Britt crumpled the page. How could she right every wrong? She didn’t even know where to start. She got a fresh piece of paper and wrote Pros and Cons: Having a fling with Tess Hansen. Hanson? The con side was obvious. Cammie. Common sense. She added the fact that she had already said no and wouldn’t be able to find Tess even if she changed her mind, but she knew it wasn’t true. Chris and Betty probably knew everything about Tess, too, from her current address to her cholesterol level.

  The pros were a fun fantasy, and Britt allowed herself to indulge in them for a few minutes. Those deep blue eyes. Her silky-looking hair. That body…

  Eventually the Tess list was scrunched up and added to the growing pile of paper balls. Britt gathered them up with a sigh, mentally adding wasting precious resources by making useless lists to her mind map. Her soup had long since grown cold, and she heated it up again, glad that the cabin’s amenities included a miniature microwave.

  Chapter Five

  Tess barely noticed the gloomy scenery as she drove inland from La Push to Forks, but she couldn’t escape it once she entered the town. Forks had once been a thriving foresting community—well before Tess was born—but now it was as bleak and depressing as the gray cloud cover. A short section of the main road contained a connected downtown area, housing a few stores and the town’s tiny library, but most of the businesses were separate. Tess passed hotels, a dentist’s office, an antique store, and a bakery that all looked exactly the same. Box-shaped buildings covered with yellowing white paint and with blinking Open signs in the windows, tied to the electrical grid with tangles of aboveground wires. No personality or individuality. Just a barren sameness. Exactly what Tess had run from when she reached eighteen.

  As she passed the hospital, she saw a tour bus stopped along the curb with a handful of passengers on board. They held cell phones out the bus windows, most likely snapping photos of the place where a fictional vampire doctor worked. Tess shook her head. Even decades after the book series had been released, the desperate town was still holding tight to its connection to sparkly vampires as a way to bolster the economy. On her way to La Push, Tess had noticed signs warning vampires to stay out of werewolf territory. It was kind of cute, but ties to an ephemeral pop culture franchise wouldn’t create a lasting source of revenue for a community like Forks.

  Tess turned off the main road and passed her high school, hating the sense of traveling through time and turning back into her teenage self. She had been as awkward with Brittany today as she had been when asking out her first crush. Not to mention, she had been turned down in both cases. Yeah, she definitely wasn’t going to mention that. During college, she had spent nearly as much time studying her interactions with women as she had marine biology, carefully honing her skills until she was adept at establishing distance while closing the gap between her and a potential date. It was tricky business, setting boundaries and initiating intimacy at the same time, but Tess was very good at it. Usually.

  She blamed her family for the failure, of course. Being forced to come back here, where she had felt unaccepted, un-nurtured, and bored out of her mind, had transformed her into a sulky teen again. Her inability to smoothly ask Brittany on a casual date—that would end in amazing, but casual, sex—had nothing to do with Brittany herself. Nothing at all.

  Well, maybe a little. Tess had been bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t met an unattached Brittany under different circumstances, but she was probably better off meeting her in this dead-end place. Brittany intrigued her. She seemed kind and intelligent, but Tess was accustomed to finding both of those traits in women. Somehow, though, Brittany oozed with juxtapositions, and Tess wanted to figure them out. Her fiercely tamed hair, her silk blouse, her brand-new beach-appropriate clothes. The odd inflection in her voice when she mentioned the girlfriend. Brittany was full of question marks, and Tess wanted to take the time to find the answers.

  Well, she wouldn’t find them here. Even if Brittany hadn’t shot her down—Tess couldn’t seem to keep her promise not to mention that fact in her mind—she couldn’t imagine dating Brittany in the context of her childhood home. Would she take her to a diner in Forks? Sit on a tour bus, holding hands as they followed a sparkly vampire trail? Ludicrous. Tess was alone in her exile.

  She pulled into the driveway of her childhood home and sat in the car with her engine idling. The two-story house was a plain, postwar box that had always been easy for her to draw when she was young—an upended rectangle with a triangle on top. Nothing special, but her parents had always taken care of the property because they had what Tess, when she was a know-it-all teenager, had considered to be an excessively bourgeois concern for what their neighbors thought of them. Her mother had tended her flowering shrubs and rosebushes, turning their garden into something worthy of an English estate. Her dad had painted the house—always slate blue with dark gray trim—as soon as the old coat showed signs of chipping or fading. Now her mother’s beautiful flower beds were overrun with weeds, and the house paint had weathered to a powdery light blue.