Page 2

Chapter 1

T he email sat two-thirds of the way down my depressingly sparse inbox. ENTREPRENEURS, REMOTE WORKERS, PROFESSIONALS, the subject line read, then farther down in the body, The Gentle South Beckons You . . .

I paused the Netflix documentary playing in the background, another pyramid-scheme-turned-cult series where the perpetrators of whatever scam were now sitting in a jail cell. It was my jam these days, two years after New York’s pandemic lockdown, comfort-watching shows about appalling scammers with God complexes. They reassured me that sometimes the bad guys really did lose. That the people taken in by them, the victims who had suffered major professional and personal loss, could rise from the ashes.

I tossed the remote aside and focused on my laptop. The email was from someone named Bonnie St. John. Probably junk, but what the hell. My Lower East Side restaurant, Billie’s, had been closed long enough that I wasn’t even getting any emails related to the business anymore. And I certainly wasn’t getting any from Mom. So yeah, even spam had started to look interesting. I opened it.

Dear Billie Hope,

Start your life today in a community that cares, courtesy of the Juliana Initiative. Founded in 1832, Juliana, Georgia, is an idyllic, historic, riverside mill town that offers every amenity you need to start your new business, continue your remote work, or set up your practice in a safe, secure, and vital environment.

We may be two hours northwest of bustling Atlanta, but we are a world away from city life. Juliana has always been its own town, and we are proud of it. The weather is warm here and so are the people . . . a perfect place to raise your family or start one at last. Purchase your dream home in Juliana for only $100 and receive a generous business grant from our town council. We welcome all races, genders, orientations, religions, and creeds to Georgia’s gentle jewel. ...

Below the text was a picture of a quaint town square. It was straight out of a storybook—courthouse, bronze statue surrounded by ancient oak trees, rows and rows of street lamps. Below that was a link. I clicked on it, and it took me to the home page of Juliana, Georgia. The site was clean, modern, and professionally laid out, showing more photos of the town. Wide sidewalks, cute shops, and window boxes bursting with flowers. Gorgeous Victorian houses, all crisply painted in pastel shades. American flags on every corner.

My heart did a little flip as I reread the paragraph. One hundred dollars for a house? That couldn’t be right. Although I had just recently read an article in the Times about how several cities across the U.S. and Europe whose economies were suffering in the wake of the pandemic were luring people to move with offers like this. Topeka, Kansas, offering low-cost apartments to remote workers who wanted to relocate. A town up in South Dakota handing out grants to small business owners. Even a medieval village in northern Italy giving away castles for free. Times were hard. People were getting creative. But this was beyond.

I clicked through the rest of the town’s website. There was the elementary and high school, the river spanned by a picture-perfect bridge that looked like it was straight out of a movie set. A list of services in the county. The population of Juliana, Georgia, was predominantly white—no surprise there—but the numbers showed a fairly racially diverse community. Not only that but, included with the rainbow variety of Christian churches located within a fifteen-mile radius, there was a Jewish temple and a Unitarian church.

My heart beat faster, and every nerve pulsed beneath my skin. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Replies were to be directed to a generic email address, [email protected] . I hit the link and typed out one sentence.

Is this offer for real?

I sent it. Almost instantly a reply pinged back.

Hello! Thanks for your interest in the Juliana Initiative. Please provide your contact information, and someone will be happy to call and answer any questions you may have.

It was signed Dixie Minette, Mayor.

My heartbeat ratcheted up to a full-blown patter. I typed my cell number and hit send, the whooshing sound giving me another wave of goose bumps.

“Peter,” I said over my shoulder.

“Hmm?” My husband was on his laptop over at the dining room table he used for his office.

I looked at him, then over at Meredith. She was sprawled out on the rug, my old Joy of Cooking open in front of her, finger on a page, mouthing words. She’d started reading early, at four, and showed little interest in typical picture books. Ramsey lay beside her, the entire length of his substantial, orange cat body in contact with hers.

The goose bumps were now covering me head to toe. This was the way I’d felt when I’d first gotten the idea for Billie’s. When I’d first envisioned the menu, the atmosphere, the exact space I wanted in Alphabet City. I’d had this same hair-raising sense of rightness.

“Do you know anyone in Georgia?” I asked Peter.

“State or country?” He didn’t look up from his laptop.

“State.”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

I carried the laptop over to the table and stood beside him. His reddish-brown hair was mussed, and his round tortoiseshell glasses had slid halfway down his freckled nose. He smelled like my guilty pleasure: the phosphate-packed laundry detergent I bought furtively at the CVS on Orchard, the one with the scent of a chemical version of a grassy meadow. His scent surrounding me, my heart going wild, and every cell in my body on full alert, I felt like I was about to blast off into space.

A small town. Our own house. A perfect childhood for Mere and . . .

Another restaurant for me.

Peter was grinning at me. “Billie. What?”

I pointed at my screen. He read the email.

“Huh.”

I leaned over, clicking around the Juliana, Georgia, website for him. “I mean, look.”

He took it in. “It’s a pretty town. I’ll give it that.”

“Check this out.” I navigated back to the ad, which they’d given the spot of honor right in the middle of the home page. I pointed to a row of adorable Victorian houses. “A hundred dollars, Peter. One hundred dollars.”

He looked doubtful. “Not for one of these. No way.”

“Yes, for any of these houses. And look. The river that runs through the middle of the town. There’s canoeing, kayaking, fishing. A historic mill.” I clicked tabs maniacally. “Here’s the library. Medical center. Once-a-month farmers market.” He was nodding. “And here”—I paused for effect—“is Juliana Elementary School.”

He stared at the screen, brown eyes blinking over his glasses. The lenses were smudged. It had been a long day. Back-to-back clients. My husband worked incredibly hard. He saved lives. For the past two years, he had been making a difference in this traumatized world, while I poured all the energy I’d previously used at the café into helping Mere navigate her schooling. She’d gotten off to a rocky start. Her pre-K year had ended abruptly, the following year of kindergarten had been mostly remote, and for first grade, I’d decided to homeschool her.

She needed extracurriculars, but she didn’t love organized gymnastics or soccer or dance. What she loved was being outdoors. It had been an exhausting two years of trying to keep my daughter physically as well as mentally engaged, and this spring hadn’t made it easy. It had been a brutal few months, cold and rainy, with most of the inside playground options permanently shut down after the pandemic. On rare nice days we invariably ended up taking the long subway ride to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

She had no interest in the kids’ Discovery Garden there, with the preplanned activities and simple crafts and workers who talked to her like she was a baby. No, my six-year-old wanted to explore every other space: the Rose Garden, the Shakespeare Garden, and the Cherry Esplanade. She didn’t want anyone telling her anything about the trees or flowers. She only wanted to take off her boots or sandals and run away from me as fast as she could, weaving through the trees and smelling every plant, whether it bore blooms or not. She liked to create intricate fairy houses in the roots of trees with acorns and rocks. She liked to lie on her back on the grass and see if she could convince the ants that she was a fallen branch.

“She wants to connect with the earth,” Peter said. “Which is actually the best thing anyone can do for their mental health.” But eventually she was going to need more than the Botanic Garden, and I was afraid I couldn’t provide that for her. I’d spent all my restaurant savings on buying a house for my mom, and now, while certainly not broke, I wasn’t exactly flush with cash. The cost of connecting with the earth in New York was too high for us.

Interrupting my thoughts, Peter pushed his laptop aside and pulled mine closer, navigating around the site for himself. I glanced over at Mere. Ramsey had jumped up on the back of the sofa and was staring at me as if he knew that something monumental was happening.

“They’re giving up to thirty thousand dollars to people who open a brick-and-mortar business in town.” He showed me some fine print on one of the tabs. My heart started to race again. I’d been so excited about the hundred-dollar house thing that I hadn’t even registered that detail. “Kind of hard to believe. Thirty K?”

“Cities spend a lot more than that to attract manufacturers. They campaign for Amazon warehouses and car plants. Why wouldn’t they offer it to regular people?”

He looked unconvinced.

“Peter. Think about it. I could open another café. Just breakfast and lunch this time, so I could be home when Mere gets out of school.” I was talking so fast, I was practically stumbling over my words. “We could own an actual house, free and clear. Think about it. No mortgage in our thirties.”

“Except I’m forty,” he said.

“Whoops.” I sent him a wry grin. “So old, but still so sexy.”

“We could get some land,” he said. “For Mere.”

“Have another baby,” I said. “Or two. We could afford it down there, easy.” Our eyes met. “Our kids would grow up with grass and trees and sky. A place to run. A place to grow old and have a family of their own one day.”

As he looked up into my eyes, I could feel our synchronicity kicking in. We were both drawn to the idea of putting down roots in a place that was more affordable with more room to breathe. Peter’s parents were gone, his mom from uterine cancer and his dad from a heart attack. Losing his parents in his late teens was the thing that had propelled him into psychology and then family counseling.

We’d always had the essential things in common—both raised in New York, both preferred to spend our money on travel—or a house for my mom, in my case—rather than clothing or jewelry or cars. What we’d never said out loud, but what I was now seeing so clearly was that both of us were still searching for our true home. A place to ground our family, hopefully for generations to come.

Peter bent over my computer again. “I’m just wondering how it’ll go over with my clients—”

“You could still see them online, right? Most of them have gone remote anyway, and I know there are all sorts of waivers now for seeing out-of-state clients. And for getting licensed to practice in multiple states, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yeah, no. You’re right.” He seemed to be thinking about something else.

“What?”

He leaned back. Looked up at me with a thoughtful expression. “I don’t know, it just . . . Doesn’t it feel kind of suspicious? I mean, out of the blue, this random email pops up, offering a hell of a lot of money for us to relocate to this amazing town?”

“I mean, sure. Maybe. But I think it’s legit.”

He shook his head, something obviously bothering him.

I felt my face grow warm and folded my arms. “Just say what you want to say, Peter.”

He shook his head. He wasn’t about to tread on that particular land mine, so I said it for him.

“You think this is the same kind of thing Mom fell for.”

He softened. “I’m not trying to be a jerk, here, Billie. Honestly.”

I sighed. He had every reason to be skeptical. Mom’s situation had started off the same way—a out-of-the-blue email soliciting her participation in a new, exciting adventure! And he and I both knew how it was going to end. The cult documentaries on Netflix left little room for doubt.

It had been annoying at first, the ancestry hobby she’d gotten into when I’d moved her out to the house in New Jersey, but I hadn’t been seriously worried. My mother and I were close enough, as close as Sibyl Sheridan Lewis allowed anyone in her life, so I figured if there was a problem, I’d know.

I was an only child. When I was young, my parents worked a series of low-paying, grueling jobs and were exhausted most of the time. We never went out to eat. We rarely even gathered around a table. For us, meals were survival, not social occasions. Then Dad died my first year in college. After graduation, I moved back to the city and got a job serving at a popular Northern Italian bistro in Soho. And, strangely enough, that’s when I found the key that unlocked my mother.

Mom would show up at the restaurant, usually unannounced, and eat whatever I put in front of her. If things were slow, I’d join her, and we’d talk. At last—in those stolen moments, both of us picking at a plate of osso buco or pumpkin risotto—my mother let me in. She told me everything. All about her hardscrabble childhood, the dreams she’d had then given up. Her love for my father, ground to dust by their never-ending financial hardship. Over a meal, I finally got to know my mother.

And so, the idea for Billie’s was born.

She was delighted throughout the whole process of opening the restaurant, my number one cheerleader. And when the restaurant started doing real numbers, I wanted to make it up to her, give her the house my father could never afford. Now I realized it had been a bad idea. The pretty Dutch colonial cottage I bought for her out in New Jersey was just far enough away that she got lonely. Then at some point, when I wasn’t looking, her harmless hobby took a turn.

Online she discovered she had Irish ancestors who’d settled in Maine in the 1850s and had started a religious sect. A Quaker offshoot they dubbed The Gathering. The church only lasted a decade or so, but apparently the small town the group had built, though now abandoned, was still standing in western Maine in a desolate corner of White Mountain National Forest.

A couple of days after the lockdown, along with other descendants connected to the original group who met online, Mom decided to sell her house. It went for almost double what I’d paid for it. She moved up to Maine, to a patch of land they’d all chipped in to buy so they could revive The Gathering. From what little she shared in her sporadic letters, the new commune members spent their time either growing their food, fixing up the decrepit buildings in the town, or tracing every twig of their family trees.

Members of The Gathering were only allowed use of phones in case of emergency and computers to send supervised emails. Predictably, they were encouraged to donate whatever spare cash they had to the guy in charge, a person called Uncle Jimbo. If I had wanted to argue her out of going there, the fight was over before it began. One day, she was in Jersey, the next she was gone. I had a few handwritten letters from her, a few generic emails that sounded like PR blurbs, but no phone calls. Me and Peter and Mere weren’t enough for her. And there was nothing I could do but accept it and let her go.

Now I squared up to Peter and took a deep breath. “You think it’s a scam.”

He hesitated. My husband, always so careful with his words, wasn’t going to allow this to escalate into an argument. It wasn’t his style.

“I’m saying it sounds really, really good. I’m saying”—he broke into a grin—“maybe we sleep on it, do some checking around, make sure the reality matches up with the fantasy.”

“And if it does, would you . . . will you actually consider it?”

His fingers brushed my arm, tugging me closer to him. I pivoted until he could pull me onto his lap. He nosed into my neck, inhaling my scent.

“I’ll always consider anything you want me to.”

“Thanks for not beating up on my mom.” Even though I did just that, if only to myself, almost constantly these days.

He kissed my neck then looked into my eyes. “We’re all just looking for home, Billie. Your mom. You and me and every person in this jam-packed disaster of a city. That’s all any of us really want.”

I was quiet, thinking for the first time that maybe I could forgive my mother. If she’d been searching for the feeling of home, I guess I could understand. Because that word— home— the way Peter said it, it lit a fire in me, too.