Page 59 of Stuck with my Mountain Daddies

Just me.

And Garrett’s quiet steadiness.

And Beckett’s rough edges.

And Asher’s ridiculous, infuriating charm.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, huffing out a breath.

Get it together, Brooks.

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

And I couldnotget totally lost in it.

The phone buzzed on the coffee table, and for a second, I stared at it.

Lucy.

Shit, that timing. It was as if she knew.

With a shaky breath, I snatched it up and hit accept, tucking my legs under me as I sank deeper into the couch.

“Hey, Lucy.” My voice came out soft.

“Riley! Finally.” Her own voice was a rush of warmth through the line. “Are you okay? Are you still stuck?”

I closed my eyes for a second, a tiny smile pulling at my mouth. “Yeah. Still snowed in, still stuck, but alive.”

She exhaled, sharp and quick, then softened. “Good. I was starting to wonder if I needed to borrow a snowmobile to come rescue you.”

A laugh bubbled out of me. “That’d be a sight.”

“Don’t tempt me,” she teased, then gentled. “Seriously, though. You’re okay? You’re holding up? Because I want to get back as soon as I can. But with the flooding…”

There was a pause. I chewed the inside of my cheek.

“Yeah. It’s weird. Different.”

Lucy let out a soft hum. “Medford’ll do that to you.”

I hesitated. Then the words slipped out before I could stop them. “You… you haven’t seen anything online, have you?”

Damn it.

I was an addict. Even as I wanted to pull away from that life, I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask.

She made a confused little noise. “Online?”

“Yeah, like Instagram, TikTok, the usual disaster zones. About… me.”

“Riley.” She laughed, light and breezy like it was the easiest thing in the world. “I haven’t even looked. I’ve been too busy dealing with work to eventhinkabout social media.”

I blinked. For some reason, that landed like a punch to the gut. Because, of course, she hadn’t looked.

Because here, in Medford, people were living their actual lives, not measuring their worth by likes or comments or who was dragging who in their stories.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

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