1
“I’m not crazy.”As soon as the words left her mouth, Grace Wells wished she could take them back.
Grace dealt in facts. And the fact was, a person who was talking to themselves stating that they weren’t crazy was exhibit A and B of evidence to make the case that they were, in fact, crazy.
She gripped the steering wheel so tightly that the whites of her knuckles appeared, as snow whipped across her windshield. Visibility was diminishing by the second as she drove up the winding mountain road to the small town that all three of her sisters now lived in. Hope Falls was a charming, tourist community that the Wells sisters had vacationed in when they were growing up. It was tucked away in the Sierra Nevadas and she’d decided this morning was going to be her new home.
The headlights were doing very little to illuminate the deserted, twisting, uphill road in front of her as she prayed that the chains she’d put on after leaving Sacramento would hold up. Grace had never actually put chains on a vehicle before and was now regretting that she’d allowed her pride to speak for her when Chuck, the nice man from the auto parts store, offered to assist her in putting them on her SUV. She’d politely declined his offer, driven to an abandoned parking lot, watched several how-to videos on YouTube, and put them on herself.
Grace’s late mother had always said that her stubborn independence made her a survivor but if she wasn’t careful, it could also lead to her downfall. And it seemed Cora Wells might be right.
As she drove up the highway, she felt like her life was spinning out of control, and she feared that her car might follow suit. Last night she’d gone to bed, warm and cozy in her three thousand square foot penthouse condo in downtown Los Angeles gainfully employed and on the fast track to partner. Now, twenty-four hours later, she’d moved out of her condo, was jobless and white knuckling it as she drove in a snowstorm.
This morning when she got into work she’d been called into a meeting. She assumed it was going to be a war room where she and several other attorneys would be coming up with a battle plan to combat the latest headline-making idiocy their top client and A-list movie star was facing after a wild weekend in Vegas—while his wife was giving birth to baby number three—so he didn’t lose his latest endorsement deal with Pepsi. It wasn’t.
Instead of a strategy meeting to save a client’s reputation she was presented with a new contract, one that named her as a partner at the entertainment law firm she’d worked at for the past decade and it should have been the best day of her life.
Becoming partner had been the crown jewel that she’d worked for. Sacrificed for. Lost sleep, neglected relationships, and dedicated her life to achieve.
So imagine her surprise when she was presented with the opportunity and she felt…nothing. Numb. Dead inside, if she were being blunt.
While she sat speechless staring down at the contract naming her a partner, her phone dinged with an alert. She used the interruption as an excuse to head back to her office, stating that it was an important call she’d been waiting for. Once she got back to her corner suite, she pulled up the message and saw that it was an email telling her that a real estate deal she’d worked on that was in escrow had funded.
In addition to her career as an attorney, she was a licensed real estate agent and worked for a broker part-time. It might sound strange but real estate was her plan B if she hadn’t passed the bar, which thankfully she had. After completing high school in two years and graduating at sixteen she’d started working in a real estate office as a receptionist while she was in college. When she turned eighteen, she got her real estate license. She’d worked as an agent to support herself and her three younger sisters, whom she raised after their mother passed a month after she turned eighteen, while she was a student. At twenty-four she graduated with an MBA but then enrolled in law school and passed the bar at twenty-six. And she’d done it all with dyslexia.
Some called her an overachiever. She didn’t look at herself in that light. She’d just learned the hard way, at a very early age, that life didn’t hand you anything. If you wanted something, you had to work for it. And so, she had.
And just that morning the culmination of all of that hard work and sacrifice had come to fruition. Besides being offered partner, she’d also closed a deal that had meant her bank account was now in the seven-digit range. She was officially a millionaire, and she had the opportunity to become a partner at Cunningham, Pace, and Cohen. Which then technically would be Cunningham, Pace, Cohen, and Wells if she took the offer.
Those were two things she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl growing up in the valley with a single mom who struggled raising four girls. Being a millionaire and a partner at a high-powered law firm in Los Angeles.
Which begged the question, upon receiving the offer of partner and learning about the closing, why had she typed up her resignation, effective immediately, emailed the partners of the firm, driven home and on the way called the broker that she worked part-time for to put her DTLA condo on the market, packed her bags, got in her Range Rover, and was now driving through a snowstorm in the Sierra Nevadas?
Because you’re crazy, Grace heard her little sister Viv’s voice in the back of her head.
To be fair, it was a plausible explanation. One that she’d been doing her best to discount on this drive that should have taken eight hours but was now turning out to be closer to twelve, thanks to Mother Nature.
The other explanation was that she’d lived her entire teen and adult life for other people. Since she could remember, everyone had underestimated her and she’d set out to prove everyone wrong. Whether it was graduating high school in two years with a learning disorder, gaining custody of her sisters, or earning her MBA and then law degree, there’d always been “well-meaning” people on the sidelines of her life telling her that she couldn’t do it. Yet each and every time she had. She’d done it all.
But once she succeeded at what she’d set out to achieve, she realized none of it actually made her happy and she knew, in that moment, that she had to make a change.
Her phone buzzed and a message appeared on her dash screen.
Is it true? Has Elsa the Ice Queen left the building?
The message was from Paulo, a paralegal who’d worked for the firm for about a year. Grace had taken a particular shine to him because he was a hard worker who never let anyone tell him that he couldn’t do something. Paulo was born with macular degeneration which caused him to lose his sight by the time he was nine. He was differently abled, but never used it as a crutch or an excuse. If anything, it made him work even harder. She recognized and respected his hustle.
It hadn’t surprised her that word had reached him that she’d quit. There was more gossip at that firm than a high school cheer team. And she hadn’t taken offense to him referring to her as Elsa the Ice Queen. The opposite, actually. She took pride in the nickname that had followed her from high school.
People had started calling her The Ice Queen freshman year when the star football player, Doug Lindon broke up with her in front of the entire student body the day before prom and she showed zero emotion. What her classmates didn’t know was that going to prom with the star quarterback was the least of her concerns when her mom was dying. The nickname had stuck and somehow followed her from school to jobs. Then once Frozen came out Elsa had been added to the moniker not only because she was an ice queen but also because Grace had blonde hair and icy blue eyes like the Disney character.
Origin of the name aside, Grace had built both her professional career and her personal life on not feeling anything. Not showing any emotions. It was something that she’d learned to do at a very young age.
The first time was when her father left her mom. She’d wanted to break down and cry, but she hadn’t because she knew, even at the tender age of five, that her mom and little sisters needed her to be strong for them. So, she’d held it together. She tamped down the fear, sadness, confusion, and anger that she’d felt and had not shown any emotion.
The next huge lesson was handed to her on the night of her eighth-grade graduation. She came home from a party at one of her friends’ houses to find her mom curled up on the couch crying. Her mom told her that she’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer and asked her not to tell her little sisters. She told her the thing she was the most scared of was dying and all of her girls being separated.
Grace wanted to breakdown, to cry and scream, but she knew that wouldn’t help anything. So instead, she made a plan. She met with a high school counselor and found out what classes she would need to take to graduate by the age of sixteen. In her young mind, she figured if she was graduated, and working full time, she’d have a better chance of gaining custody of her sisters if anything happened to her mom.