The first time Andre Walker saw Camille Sterling again, she was stepping out of a black Range Rover in the middle of an Aspen snowstorm. He stood across the street with a shovel in his hands, clearing the driveway before his daughter’s school bus arrived, while movers unloaded expensive furniture into the enormous stone house that had been empty all winter. Andre had not spoken to Camille in ten years, but he recognized her before she removed her sunglasses. Some people could disappear from your life without ever really leaving it.
Andre was thirty-four now, a Black single father with a seven-year-old daughter, a mortgage that always seemed larger in January, and a structural-engineering business he ran mostly from a laptop at his kitchen table. His marriage had ended almost two years earlier, and since then he had built his life around routines that could not surprise him. Wake up early, make breakfast, get Lily to school, work, pick her up, make dinner, repeat. Predictability was not exciting, but after the divorce, Andre had decided exciting was overrated.
The shovel slipped slightly in his gloved hand.
Camille turned.
Their eyes met across the snow-covered street.
Neither of them moved.
For ten seconds, Andre was twenty-two again.
He was sitting in the architecture library at Northwestern with Camille across from him, her dark hair tied into a careless knot while she destroyed one of his design concepts with the kind of honesty that somehow never felt cruel. He remembered coffee at midnight, walking across campus after snowstorms, and the way she would lean over his shoulder when they worked together on structural models. He also remembered the night he almost told her he loved her. Three days later, she announced her engagement to someone else.
“Dad!”
Andre turned toward the house.
Lily stood behind the front window wearing one snow boot and holding the other above her head.
“I can’t find my other boot!”
Andre stared.
“You are holding it.”
Lily looked at her hand.
“Oh.”
Camille smiled across the street.
Andre saw it.
That made everything worse.
He grabbed the shovel and headed inside.
Thirty minutes later, Lily sat at the kitchen table complaining about scrambled eggs while Andre pretended he had not spent the entire morning thinking about the woman across the street. Lily wore purple pajamas beneath her winter coat because she had refused to change until Andre threatened to send her to school wearing them. Andre had learned that parenting involved a surprising amount of negotiation with people who could not legally sign contracts. His daughter was brilliant, stubborn, funny, and entirely convinced that her father existed mainly to solve logistical problems.
“These eggs are weird.”
Andre placed toast beside her.
“They’re eggs.”
“They’re too yellow.”
“That is historically their color.”
Lily frowned.
“Mom makes them lighter.”
Andre stopped for half a second.
Then smiled.
“Your mother also buys milk that costs eight dollars because the carton says organic.”
Lily nodded seriously.
“It tastes better.”
“It tastes like financial irresponsibility.”
She had no idea what that meant, but laughed anyway.
Andre glanced through the window.
The moving truck remained across the street.
Camille was nowhere in sight.
He told himself he was relieved.
Lily followed his eyes.
“Who moved in?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were staring.”
“I was looking.”
“That’s staring.”
Andre pointed at her plate.
“Eat.”
“Is it a woman?”
“Yes.”
“Is she pretty?”
Andre nearly dropped his coffee.
“Why does that matter?”
Lily shrugged.
“It doesn’t.”
The bus arrived before she could interrogate him further.
Andre zipped her jacket, kissed her forehead, and watched her run down the driveway carrying a backpack almost half her size. She turned at the bus door and shouted that he needed poster board for her science project. Andre raised one hand to show he heard her.
When he turned around, Camille was standing at the end of her driveway.
She held a coffee cup in both hands.
No sunglasses now.
No expensive coat.
Just jeans, winter boots, and a gray sweater beneath an open jacket.
Andre’s heart immediately forgot it was thirty-four years old.
Camille started across the street.
He considered going inside.
For approximately two seconds, he genuinely considered pretending he had not seen her.
Then she stopped ten feet away.
“Hi, Andre.”
Her voice had not changed.
Still quiet.
Still controlled.
Still capable of making him forget the first sentence he planned to say.
“Hi.”
She smiled slightly.
“You look exactly the same.”
Andre looked down at himself.
“I have a seven-year-old and lower-back pain.”
“I meant your face.”
“Oh.”
Camille laughed softly.
“You’re still bad at compliments.”
“I didn’t realize I was supposed to be good at receiving them.”
“You never were.”
Silence followed.
A snowplow passed at the end of the street.
Andre shoved his hands into his jacket pockets.
“What are you doing here?”
Camille glanced toward the enormous house behind her.
“Apparently making very expensive decisions while emotionally unstable.”
Andre smiled despite himself.
“You bought that place?”
“For now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I needed somewhere that wasn’t New York.”
Andre nodded.
He knew about the divorce.
Everybody who occasionally read financial news knew about the divorce.
Camille Sterling had spent the last decade transforming her family’s real-estate company into one of the largest private development firms on the East Coast, which also meant gossip websites treated her marriage like public infrastructure.
“I heard about you and Grant.”
Camille looked uncomfortable.
“Of course you did.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She took a breath.
“Ending it was probably the healthiest decision either of us made in years.”
Andre did not know what to say.
Camille looked toward his house.
“The little girl.”
“Lily.”
“She’s yours?”
“My daughter.”
Something softened in Camille’s expression.
“She’s beautiful.”
Andre smiled automatically.
“She knows.”
Camille laughed.
“I should let you get back to your morning.”
“Yeah.”
She turned.
Andre watched her walk three steps.
“Camille.”
She stopped.
“It’s good to see you.”
She looked back at him.
For a moment, the confident woman on magazine covers disappeared.
The twenty-two-year-old he remembered was standing there instead.
“You too, Andre.”
Then she crossed the street.
Andre went inside and stood in the kitchen staring at the coffee maker for far too long.
The coffee shop where Andre worked most mornings was called Mountain Grind, which he considered an unnecessarily Colorado name. It was warm, smelled permanently like cinnamon, and had a table in the rear corner where nobody complained if he stayed for three hours reviewing construction drawings. Andre worked as an independent structural engineer, mostly consulting for builders who wanted large windows in places where snow loads strongly suggested they should not have large windows. The work paid well enough to keep Lily comfortable and gave him the flexibility single parenting required.
Two days after Camille moved in, Andre was studying roof calculations when somebody placed a coffee on the table across from him.
He looked up.
Camille.
“I swear I’m not stalking you.”
Andre leaned back.
“That sounds exactly like something a stalker would say.”
“I needed internet.”
“The mansion doesn’t have internet?”
“The installation guy apparently believes Thursday means sometime between Thursday and the next presidential election.”
Andre smiled.
Camille pointed at the chair.
“Can I?”
“Sure.”
She sat.
For twenty minutes, they worked in silence.
Andre tried to focus on steel-beam calculations.
He failed.
Camille typed quickly, stopped occasionally to write something on a yellow legal pad, then typed again.
Her handwriting looked exactly the same.
Small.
Precise.
Almost irritatingly perfect.
Finally she looked up.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Apparently.”
“Why Aspen?”
Andre closed his laptop halfway.
“My ex-wife got a job here.”
“Your wife?”
“Ex-wife.”
Camille nodded.
“I know.”
Andre raised an eyebrow.
“You Googled me?”
“Maybe.”
He laughed.
“She got hired by a hospitality company about four years ago.”
“And you followed.”
“At the time, yeah.”
“Then you divorced.”
“Eighteen months ago.”
Camille studied him.
“And you stayed.”
Andre looked toward the snow outside.
“Lily’s here.”
That answered everything.
Camille nodded.
“What happened?”
“With my marriage?”
“If that’s okay.”
Andre thought about it.
“Nothing dramatic.”
“No affair?”
“No.”
“No terrible secret?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Andre rubbed one hand over his beard.
“We were good roommates.”
Camille became quiet.
“We paid bills.”
“Raised Lily.”
“Remembered birthdays.”
“We almost never fought.”
He looked at her.
“And one day we realized not fighting wasn’t the same thing as loving each other.”
Camille looked down at her coffee.
“That sounds familiar.”
Andre knew better than to ask.
He asked anyway.
“What happened with Grant?”
Her jaw tightened.
“We were excellent on paper.”
Andre waited.
Camille continued.
“Same circles.”
“Same ambitions.”
“Same kind of family.”
“Everyone thought we made sense.”
“But?”
She smiled without humor.
“He wanted a wife who could stand beside him at events.”
“I wanted somebody who actually knew me.”
Andre felt the answer somewhere deeper than he expected.
Camille looked at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a lie.”
“You still do that.”
“Do what?”
“Answer questions with your face.”
Andre smiled.
“You still overanalyze people.”
“I get paid very well for that.”
They worked another hour.
Eventually Camille closed her laptop.
“I should go.”
“You’ve barely worked.”
“That’s because you’re distracting.”
Andre stared.
Camille realized what she had said.
Something moved behind her eyes.
Then she stood.
“I’ll see you around.”
“Camille.”
She looked back.
Andre wanted to say something brave.
Instead he said, “Your coffee.”
She looked down at the untouched cup.
“Right.”
She grabbed it and left.
Andre watched her through the window.
Ten years ago, he would have spent the next week analyzing that conversation.
At thirty-four, he only spent the next four days.
Thursday afternoon, Andre returned from picking up groceries and found Camille standing in her driveway staring at a sheet of water pouring from beneath the side of her house.
He dropped his grocery bags beside the truck.
“That’s bad.”
Camille turned.
“Excellent analysis, engineer.”
“Where’s your main shutoff?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
Andre was already crossing the street.
“Basement?”
“Probably.”
They went inside.
Camille’s house looked exactly like the kind of property Andre saw in architecture magazines.
Massive fireplace.
Reclaimed timber.
Stone walls.
Furniture positioned perfectly enough that nobody seemed allowed to sit on it.
The entire place looked expensive.
It also looked lonely.
Andre followed Camille downstairs.
The shutoff valve had frozen partially open.
He returned to his truck for tools, wrestled with it for several minutes, and finally managed to close the line.
The rushing water stopped.
Camille exhaled.
“Oh my God.”
“You’ll still need a plumber.”
“I already called one.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
Andre nodded.
“Then you should be okay tonight.”
Camille stared at his dirty hands.
“You just saved my basement.”
“I turned a valve.”
“A valve I couldn’t find.”
“That does reduce the value of my heroism.”
She smiled.
“Coffee?”
Andre checked his watch.
It was nearly six.
“I don’t usually drink coffee this late.”
“I know.”
Andre looked at her.
Camille immediately looked uncomfortable.
“You used to say it kept you awake.”
“You remember that?”
She turned toward the kitchen.
“I remember a lot of useless things.”
That sentence followed Andre upstairs.
Camille poured coffee anyway.
He accepted it anyway.
They sat at the kitchen island while snow pressed against the windows.
Camille looked toward the living room.
“I hate this house.”
Andre almost laughed.
“You paid several million dollars for it.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Then why buy it?”
“Because buying something seemed easier than deciding what I actually wanted.”
Andre studied her.
“That sounds expensive.”
“It was.”
She looked at him.
“I came here because I needed to disappear for a while.”
“From what?”
“My company.”
“Your divorce.”
“My board.”
“My life.”
She paused.
“Myself, probably.”
Andre wrapped both hands around his mug.
“You know Aspen has people too.”
“Unfortunately.”
He smiled.
Camille looked at him for several seconds.
“I’m glad you’re one of them.”
That sentence changed the temperature of the room.
Andre looked down at his coffee.
“I should go.”
Camille’s expression tightened.
“Right.”
He stood.
At the door, he turned back.
“If anything else breaks, call me.”
“I can hire people.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you offering?”
Andre hesitated.
“Because I’m across the street.”
Camille gave him a look that said neither of them believed that was the whole answer.
He went home anyway.
Friday morning, she appeared at Mountain Grind and sat across from him without asking.
Andre looked up.
“No internet again?”
“Internet works perfectly.”
“So now you are stalking me.”
“Possibly.”