Chapter 1
Nobody prepares for catastrophe. I mean, let’s be real. It’s not like anyone wakes up one day and says, “Today is the day I get ready for my life to hit a brick wall going a hundred miles per hour,” and acts accordingly. Because––my two cents here––whether we’d like to admit it or not, most of us hope for the best even though we often get the worst.
Fundamentally, the human species is a tragically optimistic lot. It’s what keeps us moving, evolving, thriving. Myself included, even though personal experience has taught me that life doesn’t give notice. Good and bad happen, for lack of a better description, out of the blue.
In the corner of my left eye, Jess’ white BMW 3 Series comes into view. It’s traveling toward me at a high rate of speed, blowing with nary a pause past the Harris Ranch sign, which has been hanging at the end of the driveway since this place was built close to a hundred years ago.
In fact, I’m absolutely certain she just hit the gas. The car fishtails and kicks up a cloud of red dust. It’s a scene straight out of a Mad Max movie.
“Uh oh…”
My feelers immediately perk up because the immutable facts are as follows:
Fact number one: Jess works in Beverly Hills as a junior agent at one of the big three talent agencies, a good hour and half away from the furthest reaches of Ojai where the Harris Ranch is located.
Fact number two: Jess hates anything remotely rural. You’d have to drag her by her perfectly flat-ironed hair to any place that isn’t covered in concrete.
Fact number three: It’s Jess, so this is going to be bad no matter what it is.
I’ve never been great at math, but in this moment, I am Isaac freaking Newton calculating every variable from wind speed to the ground distance I need to cover to get to the farmhouse. Unfortunately, I determine that even my personal best isn’t good enough to save me. In other words, I don’t have the time to run and hide. Which I could argue is a good general description of my life thus far.
“Brace for impact, Billy.”
Billy, the one-eyed dwarf goat we rescued from a neglectful petting zoo, squints at me with his one good yellow eye but otherwise remains by my side next to the feeder. Little man loves to eat. The problem is, with the heat index hovering somewhere between convection oven and hot-as-the-deepest-corners-of-hell, the grain mixed with flax seeds sours quickly and this batch needs to be dumped. All in a day’s work when you run a rescue which includes multiple regular-sized horses and two elderly Percherons, three mini horses, two sheep, four goats, two mini donkeys, one lamb, one llama, and a couple of chickens. No partridge in a pear tree yet.
Dropping the shovel on the rain-thirsty summer ground, I tip up my baseball cap and wipe my sweaty face with the collar of my faded Raiders t-shirt, because hunched over a pile of rancid, leftover grain isn’t how I want to have this conversation.
The BMW comes to a hard stop in front of the fence I’m standing behind and dirt billows up around me. It lands and sticks to every exposed, sweaty surface of my body. Excellent.
The car door swings open and the red sole of my best friend’s black Louboutin high heel hits the ground hard.
“Mierda,” she growls. Pushing her black Tom Ford sunglasses to the top of her head, she inspects the dirt covering her pumps with an expression of pure disgust.
“Hey…” My voice comes out strangely high and thin, shooting up on the last vowel like it does when shit’s about to get real. “What are you doing here…” I ask, sliding out between the slats of the paddock fence to face whatever reckoning’s coming, “in your work clothes… in the middle of the day?”
To understand the question, you’d have to understand my BFF. Jess is the person who rings your doorbell unannounced at 1:00 in the morning holding an overnight bag because she decided a trip to Vegas is suddenly absolutely essential. I once went seventy-four hours without sleep because she insisted on driving to Texas to see a Beyoncé concert. We were sixteen at the time. Her parents were not amused that we “borrowed” their car without permission.
Jess is the most spontaneous person I’ve ever met. And that’s saying a lot because I used to be pretty spontaneous myself. But there’s good reason to be on guard whenever she shows up for an unscheduled visit. Because there’s a very good chance that an arrest warrant awaits you at the end of that journey.
Her brown eyes drag from her expensive kicks to me, and for a split second, there’s a heavy dose of guilt in them that only a rare few who know her well would detect.
“If you answered your dang phone, I wouldn’t need to be here ruining my new shoes, would I?” She’s obviously still salty about her shoes so I tamp down the urge to chuckle at her expense.
“Who answers calls anymore? Learn to text like the rest of civilized society.”
“I did text, you savage. Maybe check your phone more than once a week.”
She has me there. I’ve been enjoying my comfortably numb bubble for the last few years, and any intrusion from the outside world feels like a chore now.
Jess’ gaze runs up and down my body, her expression pained. “You’re wearing overalls.”
The woman is positively militant about fashion.
“They’re practical.”
She shakes her head. “I thought you were going through a phase when you took this job.” She glances around. “Who lives like this?”
“You mean who lives in the country, enjoying fresh air and physical safety? I do. I live like this. And it’s a phase I plan on continuing forever.”
I love Ojai. I love everything about it. More importantly, however, it’s been the safe place I desperately needed. Nothing would ever compel me to move back to L.A. Not even the food trucks.
A donkey’s very loud bray cuts the awkward pause in conversation.
“Your life is officially an episode of Naked and Afraid.”
“With a five-star spa resort in town?” I counter, compelled to defend my little slice of heaven. “More like Naked and Pampered.”
“It’s just so,” she rubs her manicured fingers together, testing the grit in the air, “grimy.”
That fact alone makes her visit all the more suspicious. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here or are we going to play Truth or Dare?”
Chewing on her bottom lip, her gaze slides over to meet mine. “Yeah, yeah… we need to talk.”
“Jessica…”
Nodding. Some more nodding. Her perfectly-airbrushed mask falls, and she suddenly looks nervous. “Okay, so I did a thing.”
My smile dips. All the way down. To my feet.
“You did a thing?” It goes without saying that nobody here assumes it’s a good thing. “What kind of a thing did you do?”
“You know who Aidan Hughes is, right?”
I can’t even pretend to be offended by her question because celebrities in general and current news about them are not at the top of the list of things I give a flip about these days. “The actor? Yeah, the guy’s a train wreck––”
“Exactly!” The devious spark in her eyes tells my well-developed survival instincts that it’s legitimately time to be scared. “Anyway, Cruella reps him––”