Chapter 1- Cabin Nine
Mindy
The windows are down and my hair is a disaster and I don’t care even a little bit.
“Amanda, turn it up!” I shout over the wind, slapping the dashboard like it owes me money. She reaches for the volume knob with that quiet smile she does—the one that says you’re ridiculous and I love you—and bumps it up two notches. Not the five I wanted, but I’ll take it.
The highway opened up about twenty minutes ago into that stretch where the trees crowd in on both sides and the air shifts from hot asphalt to something greener. Cooler. Like the lake already knows we’re coming and is sending a welcome party through the vents. I stick my hand out the window and let it ride the current, tilting it up and down the way I’ve done since I was a kid, pretending I’m flying.
“You’re going to lose a finger doing that one day,” Amanda says without looking up from the directions on her phone.
“And I will go out happy.”
She shakes her head. I grin.
This trip was my idea—the lake, the cabin, the whole thing. Two semesters of exams, dining hall food and a dorm room that smells like someone else’s shampoo no matter how many times I clean it, and I needed to breathe something that wasn’t campus air. Amanda didn’t take much convincing. She never does when it comes to getting away from noise. She’d live in a library if they let her sleep there.
“Next left,” Amanda says, pointing. “Then it should be about a mile down.”
I take the turn onto a gravel road that crunches under the tires and winds through a tunnel of pines. The trees break and there it is—the lake, spreading out wide and flat and silver-blue through the gaps in the cabins lining the shore. I can smell it before I see it properly. That clean, mineral, slightly fishy smell that means summer is actually happening and not just something on a calendar.
“Oh, that’s pretty,” Amanda murmurs, leaning forward to see past the windshield.
“Pretty? Amanda, that’s gorgeous. We’re never leaving. I live here now. Tell my professors I died.”
She laughs—the real one, the quiet one that means I actually got her—and I pull into the gravel patch in front of Cabin Nine.
It’s small. It’s very small. The porch I saw in the listing photos is really more of a step with ambition—just wide enough for two chairs that look like they’ve survived multiple Pacific Northwest winters through sheer stubbornness. The screen door has a tear in the bottom corner that something has definitely crawled through at some point. The siding is that sun-bleached wood that was probably charming thirty years ago and is now just weathered.
I love it immediately.
“Home sweet home!” I announce, throwing the car into park and climbing out before Amanda can finish unbuckling. I stretch my arms over my head and breathe in—deep, full, the kind of breath you don’t realize you haven’t been taking until you finally do. The air tastes like pine sap and lake water and the faintest hint of charcoal, like someone nearby is already grilling.
Amanda gets out at her own pace, which is always slower than mine. She’s not slow—she’s deliberate. She takes things in before she reacts to them. It’s one of the things I love about her and one of the things that drives me crazy in equal measure, depending on the day. Today it’s love. I’m in a love mood. I’m in a lake mood.
“Grab the cooler?” I call over my shoulder, already hauling my duffel toward the front door.
“Already on it,” she says, because of course she is.
Inside, the cabin is exactly what six photos and a seventy-dollar-a-night price tag promised. One bedroom with two twin beds pushed against opposite walls, a bathroom with a shower that I’m praying has decent pressure, and a kitchen-slash-living room situation with a couch that’s seen better decades. The bedding looks clean, though. The counter has been wiped. Someone left a note that says ‘Welcome! Firewood out back!’ in handwriting that’s trying very hard to be cheerful.
I toss my bag on the bed closer to the window. Amanda sets the cooler on the counter and starts unpacking it—because Amanda unpacks things. Immediately. Systematically. She puts the drinks in the fridge and lines up the snacks on the counter and folds the reusable bags and I watch her do it with the particular fondness you develop for someone whose brain works nothing like yours.
“You know we could just leave stuff in the cooler,” I say, leaning against the doorframe.
“We could.” She doesn’t stop unpacking. “But then the ice melts and everything gets soggy and you complain about soggy chips for the rest of the trip.”
“That was one time.”
“It was three times.”
“Okay, it was three times.” I push off the doorframe and head for the porch. “I’m going to go look at the water. Come find me when you’ve organized everything by expiration date.”
“It’s alphabetical, actually,” she says, deadpan, and I bark out a laugh as the screen door bangs shut behind me.
***The lake is better up close.
I walk down the worn dirt path from our cabin toward the water, flip-flops slapping against my heels, and stop at the edge where the grass thins out into a strip of sandy shore. The water is calm—barely moving, just a slow, lazy push against the bank like the lake is breathing. There’s a dock to my left that belongs to no one and everyone, stretching out about thirty feet with a few posts that have seen better days. Across the water, the far shore is just a dark line of trees under a sky that’s starting to go gold at the edges.
I close my eyes and stand there for a second. Just stand there. Feeling the sun on my face and the breeze off the water and the ground under my feet that isn’t linoleum or concrete or lecture hall carpet. It’s dirt. Actual dirt. I almost want to take my flip-flops off just to feel it.
A burst of laughter pulls my eyes open and to the right.
A few cabins down—maybe three or four units from ours—there’s a crowd. And by crowd, I mean the kind of setup that screams college guys who got here yesterday and haven’t been sober since. Two trucks and an SUV parked at angles that suggest the drivers stopped caring about lines a long time ago. A canopy tent with a folding table underneath it covered in bottles and red cups. A speaker sitting on someone’s tailgate pumping out something with bass. And bodies—shirtless, sunburned, loud—sprawled in camp chairs or standing in clusters or throwing a football in the stretch of grass between their cabins.
I recognize a few faces.
Not well. Not the way you recognize friends. The way you recognize people you’ve been in the same room with a few times—frat parties, mostly. Amanda and I have been to a handful over the past two years. Not because we’re frat party girls, but because when you go to a school with a hockey team that dominates the social scene, the frat houses are where the parties happen, and parties are where I happen to thrive. Amanda tolerates them. I feed off them. Different metabolisms.
I squint at the group. That guy with the backwards cap — I’ve talked to him. Kyle? Kevin? Something with a K. And the one with the red shorts, I’ve definitely seen him doing keg stands at Sigma something. They’re hockey-adjacent, most of them. Some are on the team, some are just in the orbit. The particular breed of college guy who plays hard and parties harder.
“Mindy?” A voice calls from the group, and K-name is waving at me with a cup in his hand. “Mindy Hart, right?”
I wave back, already shifting into social gear—the bright smile, the easy posture, the version of myself that walks into any room and makes it feel like I belong there. Because I do. I belong everywhere. That’s my superpower.
“Hey!” I call back, walking toward them. “I didn’t know you guys were going to be out here!”
“Yeah, we booked a few cabins for the week. The team’s doing a Fourth of July thing. You here with people?”
“Just me and my roommate, Amanda. We rented a cabin for a few nights.” I gesture vaguely behind me. “Just wanted to get out of town.”
“Nice, nice.” He nods, taking a sip. “You should come to the party on the Fourth. Everyone at the lake usually parties together. Big bonfire, fireworks over the water. It’s gonna be solid.”
“Yeah?” I glance back toward our cabin. “That sounds fun. I’ll check with Amanda, but I’m sure we’ll swing by.”
“Cool, cool. You want a drink? We’ve got—” He gestures at the table behind him, which looks like a liquor store exploded on it.
“I’m good for now, but I’ll definitely take you up on that tomorrow or the Fourth.” I grin, and he grins back, and it’s easy. It’s always easy for me. That’s not ego — it’s just true. I know how to talk to people. I know how to make them comfortable. I know how to be the person you’re glad showed up. It’s a skill, like anything else. Some people are good at math. I’m good at this.
I chat with a few of them for a couple minutes—surface stuff, summer plans, how’s the water, did you guys bring fireworks or is someone else handling that? The energy is friendly and loose. Daytime drinking energy, not nighttime chaos energy. I’m cataloging without meaning to—who’s harmless, who’s trying too hard, who’s the one I’d avoid if the drinks got heavy.
And then I see him.
Not for the first time. I’ve seen Bret Taylor before—on campus, across dining halls, and in the periphery of frat parties I’ve been to. You don’t miss him. He’s over six feet of solid hockey player with shaggy black hair that falls into his face like he’s never heard of a barber and a walk that takes up more space than one person should be allowed to occupy. He moves through the world like he’s the main character in it, and the worst part is that everyone around him seems to agree.
He’s standing near the water with two other guys, a beer in one hand, his other hand gesturing broadly at something that’s making them laugh. He’s shirtless—because, of course, he is. It’s July at a lake and why would Bret Taylor miss an opportunity to remind everyone that he has a body built for contact sports? Even from here I can see the easy confidence radiating off him like heat. The grin. The posture. The way he leans into whoever he’s talking to like they’re the most important person in the world, right up until the next person comes along.
I know his reputation. Everyone knows his reputation. Bret Taylor doesn’t do girlfriends. Bret Taylor does girls—plural, rotating, interchangeable. But here’s the thing that people leave out when they tell the story: he tells them. Every single one. He’s upfront about what it is—a fling, a good time, an itch scratched, whatever word makes it easier to swallow. He doesn’t promise more. He doesn’t pretend. He’s honest in a way that should earn him credit but never does, because the girls who walk away disappointed don’t talk about the part where he warned them. They talk about the part where they thought they’d be the one to change his mind. I’ve heard it from at least three different girls, each of whom thought she’d be the exception. None of them were. And that’s not on him — he told them the rules. They just didn’t believe the rules applied to them.
He’s hot. Obviously. I’m not blind and I’m not a liar. But hot and worth my time are different zip codes, and Bret Taylor lives in the wrong one.
I watch him for maybe five seconds — long enough to confirm the file, short enough that I’m not staring — and then I turn back to the group I’m talking to. He hasn’t noticed me, or if he has, I’m just another girl at the lake, which is fine. That’s exactly what I am to him and exactly what he is to me: background noise with good bone structure.
“I’m going to head back,” I tell K-name, pointing over my shoulder. “But we’ll see you guys tomorrow night.”
“For sure. Bring your roommate!”
“I’ll try. She’s more of a ‘reading by the fire’ type than a ‘keg stand’ type.”
He laughs. I laugh. I head back toward the cabin with my flip-flops slapping the dirt path and the late-afternoon sun warming the back of my neck.
