Page 45 of The Lonely Road

I’ve been turning that over since, like something I found and can’t quite identify.

The thing is that it felt wrong.

Not operationally wrong—there was no risk I could point to. I realize, as I watch a watermark on the ceiling, that I want her to tell me about the case herself.

I don’t know why.

Yes, you do, you, motherfucking idiot. You just don’t want to say it out loud…yet.

As I get impatient for the day to move faster so I can go get her and be with her, I force myself to work. I have two other projects that have come my way, and I’m ostensibly deciding which one to take on because they both are time-sensitive and overlapping.

One is a private equity firm based in Chicago that has acquired a small regional newspaper and wants to know which of the remaining investigative journalists on staff are working on stories that could complicate an upcoming land deal in California. The ask is framed as due diligence. I know what it actually is—politics.

The other is a defense contractor in Virginia who needs to know how a procurement decision got leaked to a rival. Corporate espionage dressed in the language of internal security review.

I read through what was sent on my encrypted laptop and find that I have no clue what I just read because in another hour, I’m going to pick Taya up.

I made a reservation at Atelier Noir, forty minutes away—up Highway 133 through the canyon, past the marble cliffs that gave the town its name, to a place most people in the valley still call the quarry resort, even though it’s been called something else for three years now.

The Carrara Lodge was built on the footprint of an old quarrying operation just outside Marble—a town of barely a hundred people that has no business hosting a property like this and hosts it anyway, with the indifference of a mountain landscape that has been remarkable for long enough to stop caring what gets built at its feet.

The architects kept the bones of the original quarry structures—the stone loading dock, the scale house, the narrow-gauge rail bed—and built around them in a way that was both expensive and restrained.

It’s very polished.

It has to be for what it costs to stay the night there.

It draws the wealthy who want to be completely unreachable—you know the kind who need to go away somewhere to detox with spa treatments and Michelin-star food. Which is why, in its second year of operation, the resort hired a French chef from Lyons who spent a decade in New York.

Atelier Noir has twelve tables. Reservations open thirty days out—gone in four hours.

I called in a favor.

It’s a considerable effort to make for a woman I know who likes French food, because I read it in a file that included receipts for dinners for two and for one at the French Alpine Bistro and Crêperie du Village in Aspen.

Then there’s my preference—which is to take a break from diner food and local beer for some caviar and French wine. I’m not a food snob, but I like variety. For two weeks now, I’ve been eating decent food—but a man sometimes likes his eggs poached in red wine sauce.

When I first thought about dinner, Blackwood Prime was the easiest and safest choice.

Close by.

Elegant.

All around a good idea.

But it was still in Wildflower Canyon, which means we’d bump into people she knows, whom I have met. And for some reason, that I don’t want to examine—denial is starting to become a way of life for me at this point—I want to give her and myself an evening that has nothing to do with either of our current circumstances.

I leave the inn at six-fifteen in dress pants and a jacket I recently bought in New York but haven’t had the opportunity to wear. I packed it, just in case I needed something beyond jeans and a chambray.

The drive to her house takes seven minutes. I park outside and am greeted with warm light in her windows, the Wrangler in the gravel drive, and the mountains going dark behind the cottage.

This is where she lives, gets comfortable.

It’s a simple home. The kind that knows what it is, just like this small town with big ranches.

She opens the door before I knock—she heard the truck. She is in a dress the color of deep water, her hair down, and silver earrings that catch the light.

She has dressed for somewhere.