Ever since River had started actively climbing—about the time she realized that calming activities like yoga or meditation were not her thing—she’d started carrying a pair of tight climbing shoes and a bag of chalk with her when she went places. She never knew when a chance to climb would come up, even if it was only pulling off the side of the road or playing around on some boulders between film shoots. Unfortunately, she’d left both shoes and chalk with the rest of her gear, and there was no way she was returning and risking waking her crew. Early morning or not, if they knew what River had planned, they’d insist on filming her. But right now, there was no one watching. No cameras turned on her, no expression forced on her face. Just the rock.

A challenge, only for her.

Free-climbing wasn’t as safe as climbing with a harness and ropes, and she was taking a risk by not using chalk for her hands. It was the chalk more than the shoes that made her pause.

“You have no business on Mount Veil if you can’t handle a twenty-foot roadcut,” River reminded herself, setting her fingers into the first hold.

There had been a moment on her first solo climb when every muscle in her body had reacted in fear, freezing up. The result was her instructor having to talk her down and a solid twenty minutes of shaking like a leaf when her feet finally found the ground. River never forgot that feeling. Each time she started a climb, easy or tough, she remembered that fear, embracing it and using it to drive her upward.

The roadcut was more challenging than River had expected, nearly vertical with fewer holds the higher she went. Pausing to think about where she was going next, River considered two paths, one angling to the right and one nearly straight up to the top. The straight to the top route would be quicker, but River wasn’t looking for quick. She wanted to feel the strain in her arms and shoulders, to tax her back, thighs, and calves.

They had a long day of filming ahead of them, and River refused to cheat herself out of a moment of relaxation now.

A tiny breath of surprise escaped her lips as River’s hand slipped. For a moment, she hung there, two stories off the ground, by the fingertips of her left hand. Years ago, it would have scared her, but today, she simply enjoyed the stretch on her arm, loosening the tension in her shoulders as she dangled. Then River hauled herself upward with the strength of her bicep, her free hand and toes finding purchase in the rock. Resting her weight on her toes took the strain off her arms as she peered up. The top of the rock face was within sight, but the holds were harder to find, and the next one would require a dyno to reach.

“Sorry, Jessie.” She inhaled a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I know you would have loved to film this. But I’m allowed a me moment.”

Then she let go and jumped.

The first time River had tried a dynamic move, she’d landed flat on her butt. Now, they were her favorite. There was a moment during a dyno, when a climber let go of the safety of their hold, trusting that the momentum of their jump would take them to the next hold beyond their reach. To dyno was to trust oneself. Otherwise, flying became falling. River had learned young that when you fall off a horse, get right back on. A rock was no different, even if the fall hurt worse.

“Gotcha,” she breathed, fingers finding their grip, legs dangling. Her right foot found a second grip parallel to her shoulder, her left hand crossed over her head to a hold above her right shoulder.

Okay, maybe it was more like yoga than River wanted to admit.

A few more feet and River hoisted herself over the top of the roadcut, where a natural shelf cut horizontal into the mountain. The result was the perfect ledge for her to stand on, one arm looped around a pine tree growing at an angle out of the cliffside. On a branch somewhere behind her, a pair of songbirds chirped and flirted with each other, ignoring the crunching of the red squirrel eating pine seeds a few trees away. She swore she could smell the distant ocean on the breeze.

The sun never set at the top of the world. At least not in July. But as she stood on the shelf, sweat trickling between her shoulder blades and blood pumping, River raised her eyes higher in the sky. This was a new day, a new chance to find the elusive thing beyond her fingertips that chasing her dreams had never discovered. That single, integral part of herself that had always been missing.

Taking her crew up Mount Veil was a risk, but like a dyno, when you jumped, you had to trust yourself. Every instinct in River’s body told her what she was looking for was there, up in those mountains. She didn’t want to climb Mount Veil; she had to. To prove to herself she could do this. To prove to herself that she didn’t stop being worthwhile because a bunch of Hollywood executives thought she was too old. The part of her soul that was drawn to climbing was calling her to Mount Veil, to find what she’d always been looking for. Whatever that was going to be…River knew it would be her missing piece.

As the peaks in the distance slipped behind the morning’s cloud cover, it didn’t matter one bit that River couldn’t see her goal. She didn’t have to see it.

Hope already burned through her veins.

• • •

One of these days, Easton was going to learn to knock before walking through Graham’s front door.

“Oops, sorry,” he mumbled, sharing in the mutual embarrassment of the kitchen’s two occupants. “I brought breakfast.”

It was a good breakfast too. Homemade breakfast burritos, the kind his father only made on special occasions. Or when Easton booked a well-paying climb up his favorite mountain.

The Locketts were creatures of habit, and Easton was no exception. His natural inclination to do things the same way, the same speed, at the same time had served him well in his chosen profession. Alpine climbing wasn’t free soloing in Yosemite: dramatic and pulse racing as a climber clung to the side of a sheer drop-off hundreds of feet above the ground. No, to get to the top of a monster like Mount Veil, slow and steady won the race every time. Following good habits that kept him and his clients safe.

But being a creature of habit sometimes meant walking into your friend’s kitchen first thing in the morning and accidentally interrupting. Good thing Graham always had a sense of humor about it, but this was starting to become routine. The house, the diner, behind Easton’s truck. At this point, he’d have to walk around with his hand over his eyes to preserve everyone’s dignity.

The couple couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

It would be annoying if Graham hadn’t been so stupidly happy with his fiancée. But Easton could have easily lived without walking in on the two of them going at it like teenagers again.

“Am I going to have to start hanging a sock on the front door?” Graham joked while a flushed Zoey tried to rearrange her shirt in a semblance of order.

“You knew I was coming by.” Easton had agreed to give Zoey a ride to work that morning. Her car needed new brake pads, and Graham was trying to get them installed before he opened his popular one-man diner, the Tourist Trap, for lunch. “At least put up a warning sign.”