Resisting the urge to glance back at the shop window, I meet Shepherd’s eyes, smile, and lie through my teeth: “A tour sounds perfect.”

We drive with the windows down, the smells of pine and sweat and sunbaked dirt braided into the wind. I’ve never seen anything quite like the Blue Ridge Parkway, the way its easy curves are sliced into the side of the mountains so that shaggy treetops tower over us on one side and unfurl beneath us on the other. Shepherd’s a rare sight too. He has the kind of forearms that authors could spend full pages on, thick with muscle and dusted with fine golden-blond hair. He hums along to the country song on the radio, fingers drumming on the steering wheel and the clutch.

After the initial thrill of doing something spontaneous, the nerves set in. It’s been a long time since I’ve been out with an unvetted man. Setting aside the possibility that he’s a rapist, murderer, or cannibal, I also just don’t know how to talk to a man I know nothing about and am not considering as a long-term partner.

You can do this, Nora. You’re not Nadine to him. You can be anyone. Just say something.

He finally puts me out of my misery: “So, Nora, what you do?”

“I work in publishing,” I say. “I’m a literary agent.”

“No kidding!” His green eyes flash from the road to me. “So you already knew Charlie, before your visit?”

My stomach drops, then surges upward in my chest. “Not really,” I say noncommittally.

Shepherd laughs, a clear, booming sound. “Uh-oh. I know that look—don’t judge the rest of us based on him.”

I feel a swell of protectiveness—or maybe it’s empathy, an understanding that this might be how people talk about me. Simultaneously though, I’m annoyed that I literally got into a stranger’s car like it was a deep-space escape pod, and somehow the specter of Charlie is still here.

“He’s not as bad as he seems,” Shepherd goes on. “I mean, coming back here to help Sal and Clint, when pretty much all he ever wanted was to get away from . . .” He waves his hand in a sweeping arc, gesturing toward the sun-dappled road ahead of us. He turns up a side street that winds further up the foothill we’ve been climbing.

“So what do you do?” I say.

“I’m in construction,” he says. “And I do some carpentry on the side, when I have time.”

“Of course you do,” I accidentally say aloud.

“What’s that?” he asks, eyes twinkling like well-lit emeralds.

“I just mean, you look like a carpenter.”

“Oh.”

I explain, “Carpenters are famously handsome.”

His brow crinkles as he grins. “Are they?”

“I mean, carpenters are the love interests in a lot of books and movies. It’s a common trope. It’s how you show someone’s down-to-earth and patient, and hot without being shallow.”

He laughs. “That doesn’t sound too bad, I guess.”

“Sorry, it’s been awhile since I’ve been . . .” I stop short of saying on a date—which this is definitely not—and finish with the far more tragic “anywhere.”

He grins, like it hasn’t even occurred to him that I might have recently escaped a doomsday hatch in the ground after years of little to no socialization. “Well then, Nora from New York, I know exactly where I’m taking you.”

I’m not much of a gasper—dramatic, audible reactions are more Libby’s terrain—but when I climb out of the truck, I can’t help it.

“Bet you don’t have views like that back in New York,” Shepherd says proudly.

I don’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t gasping about the view. Though it is gorgeous, I was actually stunned by the three-quarters-built house that sits on the ridge, overlooking the valley below us. At its far side, the sun sinks toward the horizon, coating everything in a honeycomb gold that might just be my new favorite color.

But the house—a massive modern ranch with a back wall made entirely of glass—is blazing in the fiery wash of the sunset. “Did you build this?” I look over my shoulder to find Shepherd pulling a cooler from the bed of his trunk, along with a blue moving blanket.

“Am building,” he corrects, knocking the tailgate shut. “It’s for me, so it’s taking years, between paying jobs.”

“It’s incredible,” I say.

He sets the cooler down and shakes out the blanket. “I’ve wanted to live up here since I was ten years old.” He gestures for me to sit.

“Did you always want to be in construction?” I tuck my skirt against my thighs and lower myself to the ground, just as Shepherd pulls two canned beers from the cooler and drops down beside me.

“Structural engineer, actually,” he says.

“Okay, no ten-year-old wants to be a structural engineer,” I say. “They don’t even know that’s a thing. Frankly, I just found out it was a thing in this moment.”

His low, pleasant laugh rumbles through the ground. I get that shot of adrenaline that making anyone laugh sends through me, but the drunken-butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling is obnoxiously absent. I adjust my legs so they’re a little closer to his, let our fingers brush as I accept a beer from him. Nothing.

“No, you’re right,” he says. “When I was ten I wanted to build stadiums. But by the time I went to Cornell, I’d figured it out.”

I choke on my beer, and not just because it’s disgusting.

“You okay?” Shepherd asks, patting my back like I’m a spooked horse.

I nod. “Cornell,” I say. “That’s pretty fancy.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle handsomely. “Are you surprised?”

“Yes,” I say, “but only because I’ve never met a Cornell alum who waited so long to mention that he was a Cornell alum.”

He drops his head back, laughing, and runs a hand over his beard. “Fair enough. I probably used to bring it up a little more before I moved home, but no matter where I went to college, people here are still more impressed by my years as the quarterback.”

“The what now?” I say.

“Quarterback—it’s a position in . . .” He trails off as he takes in my expression, a smile forming in the corner of his mouth. “You’re joking.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Bad habit.”

“Not so bad,” he says, a flirtatious edge in his voice.

I nudge his knee with mine. “So how’d you end up back here? You said you lived in Chicago for a while?”

“Right out of school I got a job there,” he says. “But I missed home too much. I didn’t want to be away from all this.”

I follow his gaze over the valley again, purples and pinks swarming across it as shadow unspools from the horizon. Trillions of gnats and mosquitoes dance in the dying light, nature’s own sparkling ballet. “It’s beautiful,” I say.

Up here, the quiet seems more calming than eerie, and he wears the thick humidity so well I’m able to (somewhat) believe that I also don’t look like a waterlogged papillon. The hot stickiness is almost pleasant, and the grassy scent is soothing. Nothing feels urgent.

In the back of my mind, a familiarly hoarse voice says, You’d rather be somewhere loud and crowded, where just existing feels like a competition.

I feel eyes on me, and when I glance sidelong, the surprise is disorienting. Like I’d fully expected someone else.

“So what brings you here?” Shepherd asks.

The sun is almost entirely gone now, the air finally cooling. “My sister.”

He doesn’t press for information, but he leaves space for me to go on. I try, but everything going on with Libby is so intangible, impossible to itemize for a near-perfect stranger.

“Wait here a sec,” Shepherd says, jumping up. He walks back to his truck and digs around in the cab until country music crackles out of the speakers, a slow, crooning ballad with plenty of twang. He leaves the door ajar and returns to me, stretching his hand down with an almost shy grin. “Would you like to dance?”