Page 1 of One Last Run

CHAPTER 1

DANICA

Danica Wendell thoughtthat a seven-hour car ride was going to be the worst part of her day, but she was very, very wrong. No, that moment would come later in the afternoon, immediately upon seeing her ex-girlfriend, who she was about to spend an entire week with.

The drive from Denver to Telluride hadn’t been terrible, though her motion sickness had gotten the best of her the entire trip. But any time she could steal her best friend away was worth it, regardless of the fact that she almost threw up whenever they went around a hairpin turn. She’d spent most of the windy mountain drive staring straight ahead, silently chewing ginger candies and white-knuckling the acupressure point on her wrist that helped with motion sickness. Of course, Kiera had offered for her to drive, but Danica knew Kiera would be uneasy being the passenger on the mountain roads, so Danica had tossed her keys to Kiera and popped a Dramamine. Danica would rather be dying from motion sickness than make anyone else even the slightest bit uncomfortable.

A text from Maggie popped up on the SUV’s media screen, drawing both women’s attention. Kiera hit a button to make it read aloud.

“Text from Maggie: We just got here! The door code isn’t working!” a robotic woman’s voice announced.

Kiera cursed, reaching toward the backseat and fumbling to find her phone in her purse.

“I’ll get it! You just keep us from falling off the mountain,” Danica said, aware that her voice had a pleading note to it. She turned, her stomach lurching with motion sickness as she reached into her own purse, pulling out her own phone. Eddie — her ex-fiancé as of one month ago — beamed up at her from the lock screen, clad in a tuxedo at some expensive gala for kid’s teeth. They were officially over, but she wasn’t ready to break that news to her friends just yet. One little lie by omission couldn’t hurt for a week. She swiped to unlock her screen, barely registering Eddie’s blindingly white smile.

“I knew I should have bought those stupid motion sickness glasses I saw on Instagram,” Kiera said.

“The big ones with the liquid? I got that same targeted ad,” Danica said. “What’s the door code?”

“8008135.”

Danica blinked, raising an eyebrow. “Are you a pubescent boy?”

“Aunt Jade let me pick whatever I wanted, and it’s memorable enough.” Kiera grinned, a dimple popping in her cheek.

“Memorable is right,” Danica mumbled as she typed the code into the group chat, rolling her eyes.

It had been nearly two years since Danica had seen Kiera. They’d met as college roommates but had become best friends easily. Both Kiera and Danica’s parents lived in Denver, and Kiera visited whenever her family was in town for the holidays orvacations. She was the kind of best friend that could be sending videos on TikTok while simultaneously carrying on a serious conversation about childhood trauma over text. The kind of best friend that didn’t complain when it had been three months since their last phone call. Exactly the kind of best friend that Danica needed these days.

When Kiera had suggested a retreat to Telluride to stay at her aunt’s condo, Danica immediately said yes. Work at the hospital had been grueling lately — they were short-staffed in the NICU where she was a neonatologist, and being the lowest on the seniority ladder meant she spent more time at work than at home in the past few months. Even getting time off for this trip was difficult, and she’d had to cash in a ton of favors to get it covered. As soon as this vacation was over, she wouldn’t see daylight from anywhere but the NICU floor windows for weeks.

She hadn’t quite wanted to admit to the others that things had ended with Eddie. Wedding planning was stressful for even solid couples, but they had been arguing endlessly. They’d called it quits, but she hated the idea of telling her friends that the relationship had ended and having them give her pitying looks. And worse, to admit to a failed relationship in front of Pete… No, it’d be better to tell them all later and let them think she was fine.

That was why this vacation was important. She needed to reconnect with her friends from college — which was depressingly one of the last times she’d truly felt whole — and get away from the job and ex-fiancé that were causing more than a couple of gray hairs to appear.

She’d been wholeheartedly looking forward to the ski trip, but that was before she saw the guest list. Maggie and even Izzy were welcome additions, and she hadn’t seen them since Maggie’s wedding five years before, but then she noticed Pete was added to the group chat.

PetrafuckingPancott.

Kiera’s phone began ringing, and the mental image of Kiera reaching into the back and swerving over the guardrail and the car flying off the mountain flashed in Danica’s mind.

“Let me get it.” Danica’s stomach churned at the thought of turning around again, much less staring at movement on a small screen, but fumbling blindly wasn’t getting her anywhere. She grabbed Kiera’s purse and dug through the carefully organized chaos within, pulling her friend’s phone out of a small child’s diaper. Unused, thankfully. The fact that Kiera had two daughters still weirded her out sometimes — she’d seen Kiera shotgun Miller High Life and scream-sing karaoke and lose her flip flops in a gutter, and now she was a mom. Weird. She swiped the call open, expecting to see Maggie’s flawless, dewy face smiling back at her.

But there she was. Pete, her dark brown curls perfectly mussed. The kind of perfectly mussed hair you somehow only get after rolling out of bed and leaving someone else behind, satisfied. Danica fought to banish the memory of Pete in bed that suddenly appeared in her mind. Pete laughed, always so unbothered. “It’s a no-go on the boobies,” Pete said brightly.

Danica nearly dropped the phone. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, hey Wendell. We called Kiera, right? Anyway, the door code. It’s not working.” Pete smiled in her classic unintentionally charming way.

Kiera furrowed her brow when Danica glanced her way. “That’s what I had her set it as. Our ETA is ten minutes, can you wait outside?” she said toward the phone, chewing on her lower lip.

They turned off the highway onto a smaller, snow packed road that twisted up toward Mountain Village, a neighborhood of mansions and expensive condos flanked by towering, snowcapped mountains and bare aspen groves.

“Yeah, of course,” Pete said, talking over Maggie and Izzy in the background. The three had flown into the small Telluride airport, since they weren’t local to Denver. Kiera technically wasn’t either, but she’d offered to fly into Denver and drive with Danica. The planes that flew into Telluride were tiny death traps, and Danica had very quickly refused that option. Though now, as she held the phone in one hand and stuffed another ginger chew in her mouth, she was regretting the driving part, too.

“We’ll be there shortly,” Danica said around a mouthful of ginger, the candy nearly burning her tongue with its intensity.

Pete cocked her head to the side, giving her a nod. “Can’t wait,” Pete said before ending the call — and was it Danica’s imagination or did her voice drop an octave, softening into barely more than a low whisper?

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