The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River #3)

Pine River, Colorado

The first thing Emma saw each morning when she awoke at Homecoming Ranch was the snowcapped mountain peaks. Sometimes, the clouds were so heavy they stacked right on top of the mountains like cotton candy. Sometimes, the sun would begin to peek out from behind the mountains and cast a gold halo around them. Whatever the view, it was so different from what she’d known all her life, so refreshingly crisp. So new.

Emma had not expected to be so moved by it when she’d arrived on the doorstep of the ranch she’d inherited earlier in the year. Frankly, she’d never believed she’d spend any time here. Emma’s father had left the ranch to her and her two half sisters, Libby and Madeline. But Emma’s relationship with her biological father had not been good, and she’d convinced herself that she hadn’t wanted anything to do with the ranch or the sisters she’d scarcely known about.

But sometimes, things happen. Sometimes, the last place you want to be is the place you end up.

Emma hadn’t expected to stay more than a couple of weeks when she’d shown up a few weeks before Thanksgiving. She’d just needed a place to lay low, to think about things. She’d understood that she’d have to contend with Libby and Madeline, both of whom had been at the ranch since their father had died. Emma had guessed Madeline wouldn’t like her unannounced appearance, but that Libby would be cautiously hopeful of some sisterly bond. So Emma had planned to tell them the first day that she wasn’t staying, that she was just passing through.

But Emma never said that. Because when she was driving up that bumpy road to the ranch house, she’d felt a calm settle over her. The anxiety that had built up during the last weeks in LA began to ebb, and when Emma had stepped inside the house, into the warmth and the smell of something baking, she’d been as uncertain about what she was doing at Homecoming Ranch as she had been about quitting her job and leaving LA.

And then she’d discovered the mountains.

Of course she’d seen them, had driven through them a few times. But she hadn’t actually felt them until she was up here, at roughly eight thousand feet above sea level. She’d felt them that first week, felt their energy reverberating in her, waking her up.

Emma had been at Homecoming Ranch for a few weeks now.

The winter was turning out to be fairly mild, and most mornings were bright and crystal clear. It made Emma feel alive and in tune with nature. It made her feel real. She could almost hear practical Madeline: I don’t understand. Of course you’re real.

Yeah, well, Madeline hadn’t come here from LA. In LA, Emma woke to the unnatural swish of the fronds on her neighbor’s plastic palm trees scattered around his pool. And then she went to work in an industry full of plastic people and manufactured lives. She was sick of staging lavish events for toddlers’ birthdays, Mommy’s divorce, and the inexplicably pointless but popular White Parties.

The sun was a little higher in the sky this morning, which meant Emma had overslept. She rolled to the edge of her bed and hung over the side, her blond hair spilling onto the floor as she reached underneath it. Against Libby’s advice, Emma had taken this room at the far end of the upstairs hall when she’d arrived. Libby said this room was too cold, that the heater didn’t work properly. She was right about that—the propane burner had only one speed: low.

Luke Kendrick—Madeline’s fiancé, whose family had once owned this ranch—said this room had been a nursery when his brother Leo was born, but as a toddler, Leo had tried to crawl out one of the three side-by-side windows that faced the mountaintops, and his mother had been so freaked out by it that she’d turned it into a study-slash-sewing room. Apparently, no one had ever studied or sewn anything here—the shelves were empty and there were no furnishings but the cast-iron twin bed.

Emma groped around under the bed until her fingers brushed the handle of her worn bag. She pulled it out and dragged it up onto the bed with her. She’d bought the bag for her seventeenth birthday, shelling out more than five hundred dollars, which she’d earned babysitting and washing cars, for the plush leather and multiple interior pockets.

She arranged herself cross-legged; the bed creaked beneath her weight. It was a wonder she managed to sleep at all on this thing—it was at least as lumpy as the gravy Libby had made at Thanksgiving. Gravy was a food Emma didn’t understand—it served no nutritional purpose and really didn’t add much flavor to anything. She hadn’t meant to start an argument with Libby about it, but Libby had asked her what she thought of the gravy, and Emma had stated her opinion about gravy in general and Libby’s in particular, and Libby had taken exception.