It was white with blue flowers around the rim, clearly the good mug. There were, indeed, extra marshmallows. "Thank you, Sophie. " She said. Sophie climbed onto the second stool with the ease of a child who had claimed this territory long ago. She arranged Gerald on her knees and looked at Riley with calm curiosity.
"What's your name? " "Riley. " "Do you live in the mountains? " "No, I live in Denver. " "We went to Denver once. " Sophie said. "Dad got lost. " "I didn't get lost. " Daniel said from under the motorcycle. "He got lost. " Sophie said confidentially to Riley. Daniel said nothing. Riley hid her smile behind the mug.
She drank the hot chocolate and it was, without question, the best thing she'd tasted in months. She thought about her kitchen in Denver, the one that her housekeeper kept stocked and her chef used three times a week to prepare meals. She ate at her desk while reviewing quarterly projections. She thought about the last time someone had made her something with extra marshmallows because she'd been outside in the cold. She couldn't remember.
Riley Hargrove was 31 years old and worth, at last estimate, somewhere between 40 and 60 million dollars, depending on the quarter and the valuation method. She had started Hargrove Analytics at 25 with a business partner who left after 18 months and a seed round she'd had to fight for every dollar of. The company built predictive market tools for mid-size retail chains, not glamorous, not the kind of thing that got TechCrunch headlines, but extremely useful and increasingly irreplaceable. By the time she was 28, she had 200 employees. By 30, she had 400 and a third office, this one in Austin.
Success had come to Riley Hargrove the way it comes to people who work 16 hours a day and treat sleep as a negotiation. Completely and in ways that left no room for anything else. She had an apartment in Denver's Cherry Creek neighborhood that cost $11,000 a month and that she used primarily to store her clothes and sleep. She had a personal assistant named Marcus who she trusted more than most people she'd known for years. She had a stylist, a personal trainer, a therapist she saw every two weeks and mostly lied to, and until four months ago, a fiance.
His name had been Brendan Westcott. He was handsome and successful and said the right things in front of the right people. And she had been with him for two years before she understood that she had been with him the same way she'd rented her apartment because it made logistical sense, because it fit the shape of the life she was trying to run. The engagement lasted 7 months. The end was quiet, no screaming, no accusations, just Brendan saying, in the careful voice he used for things he'd rehearsed, that he didn't think she was actually present in the relationship and Riley looking at him across the kitchen island and realizing she couldn't argue with that.
She'd handed back the ring. She'd gone to the office the next morning. She'd put it in a folder in her mind labeled resolved and moved on. Except she hadn't moved on because there was nowhere to move on to. There was only the next quarter, the next product cycle, the next round of investor calls.
There was only the vast, efficient machinery of her professional life running flawlessly, producing results, meaning nothing. Four months later, she'd stood at her office window on a Tuesday morning watching it snow on Denver and felt something she didn't have a precise word for. Not sadness, exactly, but its cousin. The sense of a life that was full of everything and empty in some way she couldn't locate or quantify. She'd gone downstairs.
She'd gotten on the motorcycle. She'd ended up here in a garage in Aspen with grease on her riding jacket and a mug of hot chocolate in her hands and a 7-year-old telling her, with complete seriousness, that Gerald the rabbit was afraid of thunder but not of snow because snow is quiet and Gerald prefers quiet things. "Gerald sounds like a very sensible rabbit. " Riley said. Sophie considered this. "He is. " "But he doesn't like change. " "A lot of people are like that. " "Are you like that? " Riley thought about this honestly.