I walked out of the office, the check secure in my bag. My hand kept touching the leather, reassuring itself it was still there.
I had the automatic conditioned reflex to call my parents. To say, I crushed it. What would I even say? I didn’t need to guess. Just last month, my father, Gregory, had texted me a link to an MBA program.
Have you considered grad school like your brother? Julian had his MBA. He also had a rotating series of consulting gigs and, as far as I knew, still had my parents paying his car insurance.
My eighty-five thousand would be nice, a good start—but before the conversation inevitably turned to Julian’s potential, my team, my real colleagues, insisted on celebrating. We went to a taco joint down the street, loud with music and sizzling fajitas. Priya, Gabe, and Luce, my creative partners, raised their glasses of beer.
“To Faith,” Gabe shouted, “the only person who could make mosquito netting seem aspirational.”
We laughed. I ate. I smiled. I felt a genuine warmth. But after an hour, I slipped outside. The coastal air was sharp and damp. I leaned against the brick wall and dialed the only number I wanted to.
“Nana Ruth’s residence. This is the queen,” her voice crackled.
“Hi, Nana.”
“Faith, kiddo. What’s that sound? You at a party?”
“Sort of. We landed a big campaign. It went… it went really well.”
I told her about the metrics, the clients’ reaction, and then I told her about the envelope. I said the number out loud.
“They gave me a bonus, Nana. Eighty-five thousand dollars.”
There was a sharp, perfect silence on the line. Then she just said, “Well, it’s about time they noticed.” Her voice was rough. “I’m proud of you, kiddo. You built this all by yourself.”
That was it. That was the validation.
“Thanks, Nana. I just wanted you to know.”
“I always know,” she said. “Now go back to your friends. Don’t waste a good party.”
I went home, but sleep was impossible. The money was sitting in my savings account, and combined with what I had already aggressively saved, it wasn’t just a nest egg anymore. It was an escape hatch.
I opened my laptop, the screen bright in my dark condo. I started on Zillow. It was a passive hobby, a way to dream. I usually looked at minimalist lofts in the city. But the Tideline campaign, all those images of granite and pine, had shifted something in me.
On an impulse, I changed the search area. I typed “High Timber,” a small town in the Elk Crest Range. I’d driven through once, three hours from the coast.
I scrolled past log cabins and dated ranches. And then I stopped.
It was an A-frame. Pure, dramatic, and black. All angles, a dark triangle against a backdrop of snow and pine. The listing was new—three bedrooms, two baths, a massive deck. Listed by Elk Crest Realty.
It was almost midnight. I found the agency’s website and clicked the number, expecting a recorded message.
“Elk Crest Realty, Maya Lynwood speaking.” Her voice was alert, professional.
“Oh,” I said, startled. “Hi. My name is Faith Stewart. I’m calling about the A-frame on Kestrel Ridge. I know it’s incredibly late.”
“The city folks always call late,” she said, her voice smiling. “It’s when you have time to dream, right? That house is a beauty. Just came on the market.”
“I’m in Harborview,” I said. “I can’t get up there for a few days.”
“No problem,” Maya said. “I’m ten minutes away. You want a video walkthrough right now?”
My phone buzzed. A FaceTime request. I accepted. Maya’s face appeared, framed by a parka hood.
“Okay, Faith, let’s buy a house.”
She turned the camera.
“Here we are. Keys in.”
The door swung open. She hit the lights and my breath caught. The entire wall facing the valley was glass. The ceiling soared up to a single sharp peak crossed with heavy, rough-sawn beams. Pine-light, warm and golden, poured across the wooden floors, reflecting from the simple overhead fixtures.
“This is the main living area,” Maya said, her voice echoing slightly. “The fireplace is stone, floor to ceiling.”
She walked me through the galley kitchen, the downstairs bedroom. She climbed a spiral staircase to a loft space that looked out over the entire room.
“Guest room up here too,” she said.
“What’s out the windows?” I asked. “The big ones.”
“The valley,” she said. “Hold on.”
She went back downstairs and I heard the slide of a heavy glass door. A rush of wind filled my speaker.
“This,” she said, stepping outside, “is the deck.”
The camera panned. It was dark, but I could see the vast empty space. A few lights glittered thousands of feet below. The deck was enormous, hanging over nothing. It stared down a valley of blue cold. It was isolated. It was magnificent.
“It’s a lot,” I said, my voice small.
Maya turned the camera back to her face.
“It is. It’s not a house for everyone, but the bones are good. She’s solid.”
We hung up. I sat in the silence of my gray-walled condo. I closed my eyes. I asked myself the question I’d been avoiding my whole adult life.
Can I picture waking up here alone and feeling safe?
I pictured my childhood home in Maple Bridge, always full of people, always humming with Julian’s needs. A place where I felt constantly, quietly unsafe, waiting for the next eraser.
Then I pictured the A-frame. The single road. The stone fireplace. The deck staring into the void. The absolute, profound silence.
The answer was a physical thing. It was a loosening in my chest, a deep, slow breath that felt like the first one I’d taken in years.
Yes.
The next morning, I did not call a mortgage broker. I went online and, for a small filing fee, I created Hian Pine LLC. Hian for the mythical bird that calms the wind and waves. Pine for the trees that would guard the house.
My name would not be on the deed. My name would not be on the utilities. The house would belong to the LLC. It was a fortress. It was a boundary made of corporate law.
I opened a new business bank account and wired the entire eighty-five-thousand-dollar bonus plus my savings. At 9:01 a.m., I called Maya Lynwood.
“I’m making an offer,” I said.
“You haven’t even smelled the air up here yet,” she laughed.
“I saw everything I needed to,” I said. “I’m making an all-cash offer, twenty-one-day close, through my LLC.”
The professional in her snapped to attention.
“Okay, Faith. Let’s get it done.”
I submitted the offer ten thousand below the asking price. I knew an estate was selling it. They wanted efficiency. They countered at five thousand higher.
I looked at the email. My finger hovered over the keyboard. This was the click. I was not asking permission. I was not waiting for an invitation.
I typed, Accepted.
My fingers were buzzing.
For the next three weeks, I was a machine. I worked my full day at Redwood Meridian, my focus absolute. At night, I signed digital documents, reviewed inspection reports, and arranged wire transfers.
I told no one.
While waiting for the title search, I opened the Notes app on my phone. I made a new file. I typed four lines. A new creed for a new life.
Keys mine.
Address private.
Mail P.O. box.
Access invite only.
Closing day was a Friday in late November. I signed the last document in a sterile title office in Harborview, and the keys—three new sharp-toothed brass keys—were placed in my hand. They felt impossibly heavy.
I drove my sedan, not a moving truck. The trunk was filled with a borrowed tool kit, two down pillows, a new sleeping bag, and a duffel bag of clothes. In the passenger seat, I had a large thermos of black coffee and my phone. The playlist I had made for the three-hour drive was called “Different December.” It was all instrumental, full of cellos and quiet pianos. It was the sound of purpose.
The sun was setting by the time I pulled up the gravel drive. The A-frame was a sharp black shadow against a bruised purple sky. I got out of the car and the cold hit me. It was a clean, high-altitude cold that smelled like pine and snow.
I used one of the new keys. The click of the deadbolt sliding back echoed. I stood in the entryway. The house was empty, cavernous, and smelled of stale air and cedar. My footsteps boomed on the hardwood floors.
My first night, I didn’t even try to set up a bed. I inflated an air mattress and threw the sleeping bag on it, right in the middle of the great room, facing the wall of glass and the stone fireplace. It was so cold I could see my breath fogging in the moonlight. I found the gas valve for the fireplace, and after a few tries, a line of blue flames snapped to life. It began to heat the stone, but the glass sucked the warmth away.
I lay there fully dressed in the sleeping bag, and a strange hollow ache settled in my chest. It was the ache of being the only adult in the room. There was no one to call for help, no one to ask about the furnace, no one to blame. The safety, the warmth, the entire physical reality of the next hour was my problem to solve.
For the first time, that knowledge didn’t feel like a burden. It felt like a foundation.
I fell asleep watching the flames. My breath slowly stopped fogging.
My life split in two.
Weekdays, I was in Harborview, sharp and focused, leading meetings at Redwood Meridian. But at five p.m. on the dot, I was in my car, driving the three hours up the mountain. I’d work until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, sleep on the air mattress, wake up at five a.m., and drive back to the city.
I was fueled by coffee and adrenaline.
Those first weeks were a montage of pure physical labor. The kitchen cabinets were a dark, dated cherry. I spent a whole weekend sanding them down. Sawdust worked its way into my eyelashes, into my hair, under my nails. My shoulders burned. But as the dark stain gave way to pale, raw wood, I felt like I was stripping away a layer of my own skin, exposing something new.
I hated the light fixtures. They were builder-grade brass and glass globes that cast a sick yellow light. I bought sleek black track lighting online. I spent an entire Tuesday night on a step ladder, my arms aching, studying wiring diagrams on my phone. When I flipped the breaker and the new warm white bulbs flooded the kitchen in clean light, I nearly wept with satisfaction.
The most important job was the locks.
