I am never taking the train again. When the route from Seattle to Deer Pines came up on the weekly deals list, the ticket price slashed to thirty-five dollars, it seemed like a no brainer. Especially when it would've cost me three hundred bucks to fly, another hundred to get a taxi home from Glacier Park, and I figured those kinds of numbers make up too significant a portion of my bank balance for it to be worth it.

Except it would've been more than worth it because I just spent seventeen hours on the train from hell. It's bad enough that it should have been fourteen hours, nevermind the fact that we had to wait in Wenatchee for the police to haul off a couple of guys who started a fistfight and we stopped for an hour between Sandpoint and Libby waiting for freight to pass. Worse still: my broken seat only reclined halfway and the guy next to me snored louder than a monster truck so I haven't had a minute of sleep in the last twenty-seven hours, and I didn't bring enough food with me to last the journey.

And now, the cherry on the cake, there's no-one to pick me up from the train station. That wasn't a problem when I was supposed to get into Deer Pines at seven: Mom was going to meet me and we were going to go for breakfast before she had to be at work for nine. I was so looking forward to a couple hours alone with my mom when I haven't been home in over a year, haven't seen her since she and Dad came out to Seattle in February for Dad to go to a conference.

Actually, this cake has two cherries, because it's snowing. Of course it's snowing. I've spent most of the last seven winters in Seattle and I've yet to experience snow in the city, but it's a guarantee here. Deer Pines, Montana, where it snows seventy days of the year and the sun hardly shows it's face from the middle of November until the start of March. Here, we get seventy inches of snow each year and one year, we got almost half of that in a single day. Town came to a standstill, everybody snowed in. This snow, though, is pathetic. A flurry of fluffy flakes that probably won't stick yet, they'll just make me colder and wetter and angrier.

It's great. Perfect. Exactly what I need when the station is a mile out of town and the only other person who got off here is already driving away by the time I've grabbed my bags and made it to the parking lot. Most people are continuing on to Whitefish or West Glacier or taking the train all the way to Chicago. Deer Pines, an hour south of the Canadian border and an hour west of Glacier National Park, with a population two thousand eight hundred and forty, doesn't attract many visitors.

I didn't think this through. When I took full advantage of the generous baggage allowance and crammed a hundred pounds of belongings into two suitcases as well as the backpack digging into my shoulders, I didn't anticipate having to drag them a mile in the snow, but there's no taxi rank and the help desk is closed and my cellphone is dead. Great.

My charging cable chose the moment I boarded the train to give up the ghost and I did my best to make my fifty-two percent battery last as long as possible, but it died a couple hours ago, not long after we left Libby. If the train had been on time, I'd have made it here before my phone ran out of juice, but it wouldn't have mattered because my mom would've been here.

Fuck this fucking shit. I am so fucking done, and I haven't even started. This entire year has been blow after blow and this might be it. The last straw, the one that breaks my back, the last setback to tip me over the edge.

With a cry of frustration, I kick my case – pointless, I know, but I'm angry and hungry and beyond tired and all I want to do is sit in the empty station and cry – and I yank both of the handles, slowly making my way towards the center of town. I am nothing if not doggedly determined, although five minutes in I wouldn't question getting in a stranger's car. After ten minutes, I have to take a break because I have the upper body strength of a newborn and my arms are screaming for a rest, and there's no-one around to hear me when I yell out an increasingly imaginative string of curse words. Except a horse in a nearby field, who gives me an inquisitive look.

"Are you gonna give me a hand?" I shout. The horse tilts its head at me and huffs, its hot breath fogging the air. "Quit fucking staring, then."

I don't actually mind horses. I grew up in Montana, after all. They kind of come with the territory. Guilt kicks in instantly as the horse continues to stare. "Sorry," I say. "I'm having a bad day."

And now I'm talking to a fucking horse, so I guess I can add losing my mind to the list of reasons today is a shitty day.

It takes me nearly forty minutes to drag my suitcases down the interminable road in the freezing cold, my thin jacket nowhere near warm enough when it's thirty-three degrees out here. I have a hat at least, the thick wool pulled down over my ears, but I didn't think about gloves. My fingers are icicles by the time I see the dim lights of my hometown, the sky so thick and gray that it feels more like five p.m. than ten in the morning. A misty haze hangs heavy over Deer Pines, turning the yellow lights into a pastel blur, white buildings disappearing against the sky.

Nobody drives past me for the entire walk, not a soul in sight until I reach the nearest of Deer Pines' two coffee shops. They're both independent family affairs – The Caffeinated Cowboy is run by Wyatt and Brody Nelson, a couple of brothers who left ranch life behind to dedicate themselves to good coffee; Betty's is owned by Iris and Sophia Bauer, a mom and daughter duo who are masters when it comes to any kind of baked goods. Their cinnamon rolls are to die for, while the peppermint mocha from Cowboy can't be beaten.

Any rivalry between the two must be for show because, last I heard, Wyatt and Sophia are shacking up.

The Caffeinated Cowboy is the closest. I drag my stuff into the coffee shop, the heat stinging my bitten cheeks and frozen hands, and it takes everything in me not to sink into one of the deep armchairs and cry. I don't think I even have the energy to cry. First, coffee. Then tears. I need a moment, though. I use my hip to push my cases against the wall beside my favorite seat in this place and I cup my hands in front of my face, blowing into my palms. Every inch of exposed skin is numb and stinging, every muscle weeping. My nose is so cold that I can't smell the coffee that permeates this place.

I would give anything to be teleported to my parents' house. I can't walk another step with my bags. I shipped most of my stuff here last week, when after six months of graft I finally had to admit that life in Seattle was no longer tenable and Mom told me to come home, but I didn't realize how much was left. I didn't think I'd accrued so many belongings in the seven years I've been away, but even after donating a whole bunch of stuff to charity and giving my things away to friends, there are three more cases that arrived here before me.

My whole life, summed up in five suitcases. Mostly clothes. More pairs of shoes than I should have kept. A selection of my favorite books. Little trinkets, bits and pieces I've collected over the years that I'm not ready to part with even if I definitely should. Like the box of snowglobes from every place Holly and I visited together. I have a lot of memories attached to those stupid little globes: riding in a hot air balloon over Albuquerque; getting knocked over by a police horse on Bourbon Street; ice skating at Rockefeller Center.

I'm not going to get rid of mementos just because they're attached to the memory of her. It's been six months, and the breakup hardly came out of the blue. I'm over her, but I'm not over everything we did together.

When my nose thaws out enough to smell the heady aroma of coffee grounds and my fingers are warm enough that they no longer feel like they're going to snap off, I search in my backpack for my purse. There's a rush of panic when I don't find it instantly, until I remember I hid it away inside a balled-up pair of socks in case of train thieves. Card in hand, I join the line, my heart set on that peppermint mocha.

And I freeze. Metaphorically this time. Because right there at the front of the line, in a loose-fitting maroon sweater and wide-legged pants, her coat draped over her arm and her hair as rich a brown as the espresso in her hand, is Laurel Jacobs.

I haven't seen her in eight years, since the summer before my senior year of college, but it's her. It's undeniably her. No-one else stands with her poise, so tall and straight with one leg out like a dancer, toes pointed. No-one else has hair that luscious or pants that perfectly pressed.

Fuck. She cannot see me. Not like this. Fuck. I am a goddamn mess right now. My hair is all over the place thanks to the hours of tossing and turning in a train seat and the static from my hat; my face is thirty shades of blotchy pink and red from the freezing cold outside and the roasting heat in here. I'm wet from the snow and I can't take the beating from all the emotions warring in my head and my heart right now.

The last time I saw Laurel Jacobs, we were sitting in her car, parked down a quiet street behind the church at the other end of town. It was an unseasonably cool August morning, so early in the day that the windows were steamed up, affording us a sliver of the privacy we craved. It was the day before I headed back to Missoula for my final year of college, after Laurel and I spent the whole summer sneaking around. Three months of hedonistic bliss on my part. For her, it was three months of escaping the breakdown of her marriage, carving out a little piece of good for herself.

It never would have lasted. She was in the middle of a divorce. I was a rebound, opposite in every way to the man she wished she hadn't married. I was young and fresh and exciting, just turned twenty-one; she was – she still is – a MILF with two kids who got married too young.

I told her I'd be back after college. She told me not to make promises I couldn't keep. And she was right. When I came back, it was to pack up my things and move to Seattle. I don't need all my fingers to count the number of times I've been back since then and never have I seen her. But now she's here. Getting coffee. Looking like no time has passed. And she cannot fucking see me like this.

I turn away. Pull my hat back down over my hair, as though she might see my blonde waves and remember running her hands through them, digging her nails into my scalp, panting in my ear. I act real interested in a piece of art on the wall, a kitschy framed print of a cowboy on a horse holding a coffee, my eyes burning with the intensity of my focus, until the barista clears his throat and I turn just in time to see Laurel leaving with her coffee in one hand, the other pulling her hair out from under the collar of her coat. I swear I catch a waft of her perfume, the woody musk of a fall candle, and my knees weaken.

It's been almost a decade since I saw her. I have dated other people since, for far longer than we were together. I was with Holly for more than three years. But I have never forgotten about Laurel. After we broke up, even when I dated other women, my thoughts would drift back to her. To what could have been.

And somehow, amidst the chaos of moving back in with my parents at twenty-nine after thinking I got out of this small town, I didn't stop to consider that I might see her again.

I step up to the counter and order a peppermint mocha and a grilled cheese sandwich. I've reached the point of hunger where I'm nauseated, where the last thing I want is bread and melted cheese, but I know it's what I need. I hold out my card to pay but the kind-faced woman behind the counter holds up a hand.

"It's already paid for," she says. "It'll be at the end when it's ready."

"Huh?" Aside from verbally abusing a horse, I haven't used my voice in over a day and in that time I've forgotten how to act like a human.

"That woman paid for you, hon," the barista says, nodding at the door. The door Laurel just walked out of.

Fuck.

She saw me.

Oh, god.

She saw me and she didn't say anything and she must've realized I was avoiding her but she pitied me enough to pay for my order.

Fuck. This is bad. What are the fucking odds that my first time back in Deer Pines in over a year, at the lowest point in my life, she is the first person I see?

Laurel fucking Jacobs. The first woman I ever loved. The worst part? I didn't even realize how much I loved her until it was over, until I spent the next eight years chasing that feeling. That intense, all-consuming, gut-wrenching love where all I wanted was to be with her, near her, every second that I could. Until I left, and she watched me walk away.

But now I'm back, and she's still here.

*

welcome to tis the damn season! i apologize on annie's behalf for her poor first impression. in her defence, an overnight trip on an amtrak train is an Experience. i hope you like this chapter, though, and i can't wait for you to meet laurel!