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TWO

RYDER

Someone is licking my face. It’s not the weirdest thing I’ve ever woken up to—that honor goes to the squirrel I found cuddled up inside my sleeping bag during a camping trip to Estes Park—but it is unexpected. And since I haven’t shared my bed with anyone since my ex-girlfriend Hannah called me an asshole and stormed out of our apartment with a box of her stuff, the tongue currently caressing my forehead definitely isn’t human.

Jesus. I spring out of bed, wiping a trail of drool off my cheek. I haven’t exactly been living my best life lately, but if I’ve reached the point where rats are infesting my apartment and greeting me with morning kisses, things are way worse than I realized.

Ruff! A cold, wet nose nudges my hand, and relief floods me when I realize the licking culprit isn’t vermin but Daisy, the friendly collie I’m dog-sitting for the week.

“Hi, girl,” I say, giving her a scratch behind the ears. She wags her tail and sighs in contentment. “You’re in a good mood this morning, huh? Well, that makes one of us.”

Instead of going to bed at a decent hour last night, I stayed up watching all four Jaws movies and drinking an entire six-pack, and now I have a raging headache to remind me of my stupidity. I also have a pile of beer cans and Hot Pocket wrappers cluttering the nightstand. I riffle through the mess to find my phone and wince when I register the time.

“Shit, Daisy, it’s not morning at all,” I mutter, grabbing the first pair of boxers I can find. I’m not entirely confident that they’re clean, but it’s twelve minutes past noon and I’m late for a TaskRabbit gig. Again.

With Daisy panting at my heels, I take a cursory swig of mouthwash, swipe a deodorant stick under each arm, and make a rushed cup of coffee while I feed Daisy her kibble—plus a handful of treats for waking me up. TaskRabbit isn’t exactly lucrative, and performing random odd jobs for strangers isn’t anything to write home about, but rent’s going up again, and I need all the cash I can get. Dog-sitting isn’t a huge moneymaker, either, but at least I get paid to hang out with cool girls like Daisy.

She finishes her kibble and glances up from her bowl with a question in her eyes. It’s probably Hey, are you just gonna stand there, or can you get me more food? but I interpret it as Why did Mommy and Daddy leave me in the care of a thirty-four-year-old man who wears pizza-print boxers and subjects me to Jaws 3-D ?

“Good question, Daisy. I, too, doubt your parents’ judgment. Let’s go.”

I put on her leash and haul ass to my truck, where she jumps into the passenger seat without hesitation. When I pull up my navigation app, I see alerts for a missed call and a voicemail from my former almost-sister-in-law Tara. I delete the alerts and hit the road with my tires squealing. Talking to Tara brings back memories I’d rather forget, and it’s too early in the day for that kind of gut punch.

It’s always too early in the day.

I pull up to a sprawling Colonial in Cherry Creek, only a handful of miles from the townhouse I rented before my life went to shit and I was forced to downgrade to a squat apartment with low ceilings and nonexistent natural light. I ring the doorbell while Daisy seizes her chance to pee all over a neat row of yellow rhododendrons. When a man in a dark blue suit opens the door to find her mid-squat, he scowls at us.

“No solicitors, please,” he says coolly, already halfway to shutting the door in my face.

“Oh, I’m not a solicitor. I’m Ryder Fleet.” I give him my best sorry-for-the-dog-pee smile, but the introduction doesn’t seem to register.

“Ryder from TaskRabbit,” I clarify. “You requested help mounting a TV?”

He turns away to call to someone inside the house. “Lexi! TaskRabbit Ryder is here!”

When he disappears down a hallway, leaving the door ajar behind him, Daisy and I exchange a look. If someone told me two years ago that I’d be referred to by that title, I’d have thought they were crazy.

Daisy gives a soft bark that sounds a bit like Whatever, Don Draper! and leaves a wet kiss on the palm of my hand. We step inside a foyer with vaulted ceilings and an enormous painting of a Revolutionary War soldier on horseback, and I try to guess how many odd jobs it would take for me to afford a single inch of the canvas. I’m estimating somewhere around a hundred when a dark-haired woman in yoga pants and a loose sweater waves at me, a silver bracelet jingling from her wrist.

“It’s a Foxamura,” she says.

I’m not familiar with that brand of TV, but I sure hope it doesn’t require any fancy mounting equipment.

“Foxamura,” she repeats, pointing at the painting. “The Canadian artist featured in the New Yorker ? This is from one of his early collections. He’s examining the intersection of coercive diplomacy and the human-equine relationship.”

I don’t know much about coercive diplomacy—it looks to me like a messy doodle of a fugly dude riding a horse—but I’ll take her word for it. My expertise lies more in playing Skyrim and disappointing people than appreciating highbrow art.

“Foxamura, sure,” I say with a nod. “Hey. I’m TaskRabbit Ryder.”

“Hi there, TaskRabbit Ryder. I’m Lexi.” She smiles, giving me a lingering once-over as she shakes my hand, and I find myself wishing I’d worn a looser-fitting T-shirt. Even though I haven’t hit the gym in a while, good genetics and frequent manual labor mean I still have relatively toned biceps, and judging from Lexi’s appreciative glances, I’ve still got the tall, dark, and handsome-ish vibe that all the Fleet men are born with. I’m not particularly concerned with my looks, but there was a period last year when I used them to my advantage, turning to pretty women and casual hookups in an attempt to soothe the unrelenting ache in my gut.

It didn’t work.

“Mind showing me where you want the TV set up?” I ask.

Lexi leads me into the living room, swaying her hips more than necessary. She shows me the giant Smart TV she wants me to mount above the fireplace, and I thank her for the instructions and slip in my AirPods, hoping she’ll get the hint that I prefer to work alone. She seems to, and I’ve finished locating the wall studs and am halfway through marking my drill holes when my phone buzzes. It’s Tara again, and I shake my head and set my phone on the coffee table. The universe is working hard to screw with my head today.

“Lemonade?” Lexi returns just as I’m attaching the mounting bracket to the wall. She’s abandoned her loose sweater in favor of a thin tank top that leaves little to the imagination, and I force myself to fiddle with my drill instead of looking directly at her.

“I’m okay, ma’am, but thank you very much.” At somewhere in her early forties, Lexi’s probably only a decade older than me, and with her pretty brown eyes and cute dimples, I’d be lying if I pretended like the me of six months ago wouldn’t have happily accepted the drink and engaged her in flirty banter.

“No need to call me ma’am. Lexi will do just fine.”

I nod and give her a closed-mouth smile. “You got it.”

“So,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and watching as I grab the mounting plate. “How’d you get to be so good with your hands?”

I cough, and a series of buzzes from my phone saves me from having to reply.

“You sure are popular,” Lexi observes.

I’m actually wildly unpopular, seeing as how my own mom dodges my calls these days and my ornery next-door neighbor Lulu is my closest (and only) pal. I make a noncommittal noise and grab my phone to see another incoming call from Tara.

“It’s my sister-in-law. Mind if I answer this real quick?”

Lexi waves a hand at me. “Go for it. You never know if it’s an emergency.”

I’m not too worried about an emergency, seeing as how the worst has already happened, but I thank Lexi and step out to the back patio with Daisy to answer the call just in case.

“Hey, Tara,” I say, closing the sliding glass door behind me. “How’s it going?”

“And here I thought you dropped your phone in a toilet.” Her Southern drawl lands thick in my ear, and the warm cadence of her tone could take me back to happier times if I close my eyes and let it. I don’t.

“Nope, just busy with work.” I wink at Daisy, who curls up in a patch of sunlight next to a teak bench.

“Still bartending?” Tara asks.

“Yep. Still tending bar, still on the dog-sitting app, still donating plasma when the budget gets tight. What can I say? I’m a winner, Tar.”

She laughs, and I can picture her in the sunlit kitchen she used to share with my brother Caleb, her phone tucked between her ear and shoulder as she spoons fruit into her yogurt.

“So,” I say, “is everything okay? Or did you just call to listen to me brag?”

Her heavy sigh speaks volumes. “We have a problem, Ryder.”

“Uh, yeah,” I say gently, thinking that problem is a nice way to describe the unthinkable tragedy that ruined both our lives. “I’m aware. But if you’re trying to drag me to that grief support group again, I told you, it’s not my thing.”

“I’m not. But just so you know, there’s a really great new facilitator, and he hardly ever lets Simon dominate the whole meeting by talking about his pet iguana,” Tara says. “May she rest in peace, of course.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I tell her, even though I definitely won’t.

“Anyway, I’m not calling to wrangle you back to the support group. I’m calling because I can’t sleep unless I get monthly verbal confirmation that you’re alive and somewhat well, and also because…look, there’s no good way to say this. Look at the text I’m sending you and you’ll see what I mean.”

I pull the phone away from my ear and frown at it, wondering if Tara’s about to tell me that she’s dating again; that she’s moved on from Caleb with someone named Mike or Dave or Christopher, a good dude from a good family who I’ll dislike simply because he’s not my big brother. Maybe she’s sending me a picture of the new guy, and I’ll have to pretend that I’m happy for her. But when her message flashes across my screen, I see something much, much worse.

“Goddammit,” I mutter.

It’s a screenshot from an app called Boat Trader, and I instantly recognize the vintage turquoise bow rider listed for sale. Fully repaired 1976 open bow Sea Nymph , the text beside the boat reads. Lovingly restored and ready to get back out on the water!

“Dad’s selling Caleb’s boat,” I say in disbelief, rage coursing through my veins. I blink at the spotless wood paneling and pristine leather seats that my brother spent countless hours restoring in our grandfather’s old barn, and it takes everything in me not to fling my phone across Lexi’s backyard.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw the listing,” Tara says. “Your dad promised he wouldn’t.”

I kick an invisible rock across the deck. “I can believe it.”

When Caleb and I were kids, our father’s obsession with the racetrack and betting on the Packers was as constant as his bad moods. Luckily, Caleb was two years older and about ten years smarter than me, and he quickly figured out how to outwit Dad’s sticky fingers. When my birthday approached, Caleb taught me how to race to the mailbox and check for a card from our grandparents in Tulsa, because if we didn’t get to it first, Dad would tear open the envelope and pocket the cash inside. Caleb kept our best baseball cards hidden safely in an old coffee tin in the attic, and when I won a KB Toys gift card at field day by smoking the other fourth graders in the sack race, he taped it to the underside of my bed until I figured out which Super Soaker I wanted to spend it on. Even as a boy, he always found a way to protect the people and things he loved.

And I’ll be damned if I let Dad sell Caleb’s most prized possession like it’s a Nintendo 64 he swiped from underneath the Christmas tree.

“We have to stop him,” I say firmly.

Tara sighs. “Trust me, I’ve tried. I yelled and begged and pleaded, but your dad says he’s fallen on hard times. He wants it sold ASAP.”

I snort. “The only hard times he’s fallen on are the Packers’ shitty season. Anyway, screw him. The Little Adventure should be yours.”

When Caleb and I were teenagers, we spent most summers visiting our grandpa Tim in Michigan. Grandpa Tim ran a bait and tackle shop during the day and restored old boats at night, and while I spent most of my time flirting with cute girls and going to bonfires on the beach, Caleb loved tinkering with the broken motors and collapsed metal fittings. He and Grandpa Tim spent an entire summer fixing up a worn-out old boat they found at an estate sale, and though I pitched in here and there, it was Caleb who repaired a thousand hull cracks with gelcoat and made regular trips to the hardware store, bringing back paint samples until he found the perfect shade of turquoise blue. By mid-August, the boat had a shiny new exterior and a motor that purred like a kitten, and Caleb whooped with glee when Grandpa Tim let us take it out on the lake. When Grandpa died a few years back, he left The Little Adventure to Caleb in his will.

When Caleb died, he didn’t have a will. He hadn’t planned that far ahead; he was only thirty-four.

“Legally, I have no right to it,” Tara says, her voice hollow. “I called a lawyer to ask, but since we weren’t married—”

“You were three weeks out from your wedding,” I cut in. “That’s practically the same thing.”

“It might as well be three hundred years in the eyes of the law,” she explains. “The legal system isn’t exactly known for its nuance.”

I nudge a potted plant on the deck with my toe, fighting the urge to kick it. “So what can we do? I’d say we steal it, but a boat’s kind of hard to hide.”

I don’t say what we both already know—that I sure as hell don’t have the funds to buy it. Not unless Lexi has another few thousand TVs she needs mounted.

“I can use my savings,” Tara says, “but I’m a few grand short. I think I found a way for us to close the gap, but I need your help to make it work.”

I’d sell every spare organ in my body on the black market if it meant keeping the boat from ending up in a stranger’s hands, and she knows it.

“Anything.”

“I hope you really mean that,” Tara says. “Because you got a submission on the Fleet Outdoor Adventure website, and I responded to it. There’s a woman in Ohio who needs a guide for a trip to Isle Royale National Park, and, well…I sort of told her you would do it.”

“Tara,” I say, shaking my head like she can see me, “have you lost your damn mind?”

“I know, I know. It sounds crazy, on the surface. But—”

“Oh, it doesn’t just sound crazy. It sounds crazy dangerous . Crazy irresponsible. Crazy d—”

She sighs. “Just hear me out, okay? Her name is Emily Edwards. She was supposed to go to Isle Royale with her boyfriend, but they broke up, and she has no camping or backpacking experience. She’s in desperate need of help.”

“Well, Emily Edwards will have to figure something else out,” I insist. “And so will we. There’s no way in hell I’m taking on a guide gig. And there’s no way anyone would want me to. That was Caleb’s territory, and you know it.”

Almost a decade ago, Caleb got the idea to start a business offering private tours of the national parks and other wild places for tourists who wanted to explore nature with the security of an expert’s guidance. Caleb, who’d never met an adventure he wasn’t up for, had extensive training in backpacking, wilderness survival, and every outdoor activity you could think of. I, on the other hand, had extensive training in browsing Tinder, winning beer pong tournaments, and parroting Dwight Schrute’s lines from The Office until Caleb wanted to slap me. But I also had a degree in marketing, and despite my twentysomething immaturity, Caleb saw enough promise to invite me on as his co-partner. We created Fleet Outdoor Adventures in the living room of his apartment, me building the website and handling advertising and promo while Caleb did the grunt work of leading the tours. Within a year, we had a waitlist of clients wanting to go everywhere from the Grand Canyon to the Rocky Mountains, and within five, Fleet Outdoor Adventures had a roster of expert tour guides and a glowing write-up in Outside magazine. Tara, who Caleb fell for when she brought her class of first graders to a community adventure day the company hosted, had helped with the administrative side of things.

But that was then, and this is now.

“Come on, you can set up a tent, can’t you?” Tara asks. “And help Emily carry her luggage? Because that’s all you’d have to do. It’s a simple six-day backpacking trip from Windigo to Rock Harbor, and she has her itinerary planned down to the hour. You couldn’t ask for a smoother gig.”

“First of all, nobody should bring luggage to a national park,” I tell her. “You bring a backpack and a day pack, max. And did you miss the part where I’m no good in the wilderness? You were on that camping trip in Big Thicket where my dumb ass decided to shortcut through a swamp and almost got killed by a cottonmouth.”

“You’d do just fine in the wilderness if you learned to trust your instincts,” Tara says, cutting me off. “You’d do just fine in your personal life, too.”

I’d argue that following my instincts is the reason I’m an underemployed slacker with too much emotional baggage and too little 401(k). Caleb was the planner, the thinker, the one who knew exactly what a venomous cottonmouth looked like and where one might be hiding. He wasn’t just the brains of the company but the brawn, too; I was merely the goofy little brother who lucked out with good genes and a knack for wooing the right social media influencers.

“Look, I want to save Caleb’s boat as much as you do, but we both know I’m in no shape to take on a gig,” I reason. “And are you forgetting how I ran the agency into the ground? Frankly, that cottonmouth should have done us all a favor and finished me off way back then.”

“Come on, Ry,” Tara says softly. “You can’t possibly mean that.”

I’m half joking about the cottonmouth, but I’m dead serious about everything else. I tried to keep Fleet Outdoor Adventures going after Caleb died, but in true Ryder fashion, I failed spectacularly. I screwed up tour dates and pissed off employees and completely ruined a sweet elderly couple’s fiftieth anniversary trip by booking their lodging at Yellowstone instead of Yosemite. Honestly, Emily Edwards is better off without me.

“Listen,” Tara says gently, “I know this is a big ask. I’d do it myself if I could, but between my work obligations and my mom’s health, I…” She sighs. “I won’t pressure you to do anything you don’t want to. But I think you should consider the possibility that this is a chance for you to have a reset.”

“A reset from what?” I ask, letting Daisy lick my palm. “A carefree life where I work when I want and do what I want, with no strings holding me back?”

I don’t need to see Tara’s face to know she’s rolling her eyes.

“ You’re the string holding you back, Ry. I know you insist you’re doing okay, but we both know that’s not true. I mean, you haven’t dated anyone since Hannah or held a stable job in almost two years. You’re one of the best guys I know, but you’re drinking your days away instead of living the life you deserve.”

“I’m drinking my nights away, technically,” I say, gulping in air to loosen the tightness in my chest. “And I’ll have you know that when it comes to minor home repairs, I’m one of the most sought-after Taskers in the Denver metro area.”

“You used to be happy, Ryder.” The gentleness of Tara’s voice cuts right through my bullshit. “You used to have goals and hobbies, and you used to care about things. And I know how much it hurts you that Caleb’s gone, because I miss him every second of every day. But it’s like…it’s like you’re gone, too, even though you’re still here, and I don’t want that for you. Caleb wouldn’t, either.”

Her voice cracks, and the sound is a stab to my heart. Everything about this is wrong. I should be living in a nice Colonial like Lexi’s right now, maybe engaged to Hannah and certainly the proud fur dad of a good girl like Daisy. Tara and Caleb should be married and trying to keep up with a chubby-cheeked, sticky-fingered toddler, or at least have a baby on the way, and Fleet Outdoor Adventures should have expanded abroad, just like Caleb planned.

The business shouldn’t be in shambles. Caleb shouldn’t be gone.

“Please don’t cry,” I tell Tara. “I’ll figure something out, okay?”

But even as I say it, I know she’s right. I don’t have any spare cash laying around, and it’s not like I can get a loan with my shitty credit score. I’m sure Mom doesn’t have the money, and even if she did, I couldn’t get her to pick up the phone so I could ask to borrow some.

“Maybe this is a chance,” my sister-in-law says. “A chance for you to realize that you’re way more capable than you think. And I know you don’t believe in fate, but doesn’t it seem weird that the website goes months without a request, and then as soon as we need an influx of cash, someone needs our help? Maybe it’s meant to be, you know? Maybe this is supposed to happen.”

“It’s a coincidence,” I say flatly. Tara can subscribe to the notion that things happen for a reason if it brings her comfort, but I know better. I know that shitty things just happen, and good things do, too, and we all just have to do our best with whatever comes our way.

“Oprah says there are no coincidences.”

“Yeah, well, I bet Oprah’s sister-in-law never signed her up for a job she has no business doing.”

“You can do it, Ry,” Tara insists. “We both know you can.”

I sigh, wishing she’d pin her hopeful belief on someone worthy of it.

“So, this Emily person,” I say. “She’s really in a hard spot?”

“She’s in an impossible spot,” says Tara. “She said she’s going to Isle Royale whether she has a tour guide or not, but she’d very much prefer not to wander through a wolf-infested hellhole on her own. And that’s verbatim.”

I scratch the back of my neck, wondering how much longer I have before Lexi loses her patience and I lose my excellent TaskRabbit rating. Why would a woman with zero camping experience be so committed to venturing into the wilderness that she’d risk her own safety to do it?

“Did she say why she’s going?” I ask Tara, knowing that I should say no regardless.

“She just said she needs to unplug and enjoy nature’s beauty for a while. Given her recent breakup, I’m guessing it’s an Eat, Pray, Love kind of thing.”

I’m busy doing my own cope / mope / self-destruct kind of thing, but I don’t love the idea of somebody out on their own and exposed to the elements. I’m not sure I’d be much help—I didn’t even take good care of the Chinese money plant Hannah gave me, a fact she threw in my face when she broke up with me—but there’s safety in numbers, right? And I’m not the expert Caleb was, but I have been camping, haven’t I?

“Between my savings and what you’d make from the gig, we could buy The Little Adventure from your dad,” Tara says, her voice hopeful. “We could have a little piece of Caleb back.”

I close my eyes for an instant, and what I see is Caleb at twelve or thirteen, no more than a boy, his dark hair bleached with comically frosted tips and his wiry arms sticking out of a yellow Green Day T-shirt. He squats in front of a disembodied motor in Grandpa Tim’s garage, biting his lip as he lifts the muffler cover and reaches for a wrench.

“You just gonna stand there, Ry, or are you gonna help me?” he asks, nodding toward his toolbox. “C’mon. I’ll share my Funyuns if you find my missing screwdriver.”

I can almost hear the shaky pitch of his deepening teenage voice, almost inhale the thick scent of motor oil and paint. It’s a deeply ordinary memory, a happy Caleb moment made significant only by the fact that there will never be any new ones. But it’s enough to stop me from saying no.

“When’s the gig?” I ask Tara, knowing I’ll probably regret this.

“Two weeks from tomorrow. I know it’s not much time, but—”

“I’ll do it,” I tell her.

Because I owe this to Caleb. I let him down once, a fact that I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting. But now I have a chance to make something right, to return the boat he loved to the woman he loved even more. I can’t bring back what’s gone, but if I can stop The Little Adventure from sailing out of Tara’s life forever, maybe I can hang on to a small piece of my brother.

“Really?” Tara cries in disbelief, her excitement radiating through the phone. “Oh my goodness, Ryder, thank you! You’re going to be happy you said yes, I promise! Okay, I’ll send you an email with Emily’s itinerary and all the trip details, and you’ll want to review Caleb’s old tour guide handbooks and make sure the gear’s in working order…”

I don’t really hear her as she launches into a long list of what I’ll need to do to prepare for the trip. Because all I can see is two boys fiddling with a broken boat, one laser-focused on his work while the other pounds Funyuns and daydreams about Pamela Anderson. All I can hear is Caleb’s reedy teenage voice. You just gonna stand there, Ry, or are you gonna help me?

No matter what Tara says, I know this is a bad idea. I’m in no shape to hike and camp in an unfamiliar island, let alone lead someone else through one, and to answer her earlier question, I’m actually pretty shit at reading maps. But I can’t say no to that good-natured, farmer’s-tanned kid asking for my help. I can’t lose another piece of Caleb.

Let’s just hope, for Emily Edwards’s sake and mine, that there aren’t any snakes on the island.