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“Then they’re perfect. I love that you are pampering yourself.”

The woman’s face softened. She paid, tucked the bag into her purse rather than carrying it openly, and left without another word.

By two forty-five, the shop was empty. Erin moved through it methodically, restocking the three devices sold during the workshop, replacing the massage oil samples, and wiping down the display surfaces. She straightened the book spines so that they stood flush. Then she adjusted a silk robe on its hanger where someone had bunched the sleeve. The Christmas playlist cycled through its songs for the third time that day. Outside, flurries wandered past the glass, creating a perfect Christmas Eve scene.

She wiped the counter even though Ingrid had already wiped it. To keep busy, she reorganized the gift bags by size. She pulled out her phone. No new messages. Her mother had called that morning to make sure she was doing okay with spending Christmas alone, and to inform her that Aunt Donna had brought cannoli to the restaurant a full day early and her father was losing his mind about refrigerator space. Erin had laughed at every detail and said she was fine and meant it, mostly.

Fine was a word that covered a lot of territory. Fine meant the shop was thriving. Fine meant her online class enrollment had doubled since September. Fine meant she had built a successful business in a town where people initially looked at her storefront and crossed the street.

Fine did not mean she had someone to open a bottle of wine beside tonight, or a voice in the next room, or a reason to cook for two.

She caught herself and turned toward the back room. The espresso machine still had beans. She could make a cup, finish her inventory notes, and close at four as planned.

She was halfway to the back room when the light coming through the windows changed. It happened fast. The soft grey afternoon outside the windows darkened by a full shade, as though someone had pulled a curtain across the mountain. Erin turned toward the glass. The scattered flurries she’d been watching all day had thickened into dense flakes. Snow no longer drifted. It drove sideways, heavy and blinding, swallowing the tree line at the far edge of the parking lot. Within a minute, the mountains behind the shop disappeared entirely, replaced by a wall of white so solid it looked painted onto the glass.

Erin walked to the front door and opened it. Cold hit her face and chest. Snow stung her cheeks. The parking lot already wore a fresh inch, and her car sat beneath a rapidly growing blanket.

She squinted toward the road. Visibility ended about forty feet from the door. “That’s not just flurries,” she said to no one.

Before Erin could close the door, two headlights appeared through the whiteout. A dark SUV crept off the road and turned into the parking lot, its tires carving fresh tracks through the snow. The vehicle stopped near the front windows, but the engine stayed on.

Erin pulled the door shut and watched from inside. The windshield wipers revealed the driver in brief flashes. A woman sat behind the wheel, talking to herself. One hand lifted as if making a point, then dropped back into her lap. She looked at the shop, shook her head, and began the conversation again.

Erin had seen countless versions of that debate. Some customers drove past twice before turning into the lot. Others sat in their cars until embarrassment loosened its grip. A few had confessed that they had practiced saying the words vibrator or orgasm before trusting themselves to say them aloud at the counter.

The woman glanced toward the shop again. Erin stepped away from the window so she wouldn’t feel watched.

Chapter Two

The windshield wipers had surrendered to the blizzard approximately four minutes ago.

Claire sat in her SUV with the engine running and the heat on full, watching snow bury the glass in thick, wet layers that turned the boutique into a watercolor blur. She glanced back toward the road she’d driven in on. It had completely vanished, as though the mountain had swallowed it whole and licked its fingers clean.

She should not have come. That much was obvious. What remained less obvious was whether she should not have come because of the weather, because the entire idea had been foolish from the beginning, or because she had been sitting in this parking lot for nearly five minutes rehearsing the word vibrator like a woman preparing for a foreign-language exam.

“Vib-ra-tor,” she said calmly to the steering wheel. It was the same voice she used when telling a CEO his product had poisoned eleven people and the press conference was in forty minutes.

She could do this. She had done infinitely harder things. She had deposed hostile witnesses, navigated federal investigations, and once told the chairman of a Fortune 500 company that his own general counsel was the leak... while the general counsel sat three chairs away. Buying a vibrator should not require a pep talk. And yet, here she was, acting as her own most enthusiastic cheerleader.

Claire pressed her thumb against the bridge of her nose and stared at the building through the small crescent the wipers had left before giving up. All She Wants. She’d found the adult boutique at eleven-thirty the previous night, sitting cross-legged on the enormous sectional in the rental house with a glass of Sancerre and her laptop balanced on a throw pillow. The house was absurdly large for one person. It had five bedrooms and three bathrooms. A professional kitchen was far more than she needed for herself. A hot tub sat on the deck that she had not touched because getting into a hot tub alone over Christmas felt less like self-care and more like the opening scene of a documentary about women who disappear.

The trip was supposed to have been different. Last Christmas, the house had been full of voices. Her daughter Camille and her fiancé Nick had taken the loft. Her son Julien and his girlfriend had claimed the room with the mountain view. Claire and Andrew had shared the master suite, though courtesy had replaced intimacy long before they admitted they wanted a divorce that spring. She’d booked the house again months ago. Then Camille’s fiancé’s deployment date to Ramstein, Germany, moved up, and Julien’s girlfriend wanted to stay near her father in London after his surgery. The calls had come days apart, weeks before Christmas. Claire had assured both children that she understood. She did understand. She’d simply expected understanding to make the empty house easier.

“Of course, sweetheart. We’ll reschedule. Don’t worry about me.”

She hadn’t lied. She simply hadn’t told the full truth either, which was that canceling the entire reservation meant staying in Denver where she would feel terribly lonely. So she’d kept the reservation. She had packed the car and driven six hours into the mountains with a stash of good wine, three smutty novels, and the firm intention of proving that a woman of forty-nine could spend Christmas alone at a large Airbnb without it meaning anything was wrong.

The solitude had lasted approximately twenty-four hours before it began to feel like a favorite pair of pants that no longer fit.

She found the boutique’s website through a search she would never repeat in polite company. The photographs had shown soft lighting, elegant displays, and a reassuring absence of anything fluorescent or inflatable. The about page featured a dark-haired woman with an easy smile and credentials that included a master’s degree in public health and a certification in sexuality education. The boutique appeared professional and legitimate. It seemed like the kind of place where a woman could walk in, purchase what she needed, and leave with her dignity intact.

Claire had bookmarked the page, closed her laptop, finished her wine, and spent the next forty minutes on the sofa staring at the ceiling and constructing an argument for why she deserved to go.

That was the part that embarrassed her the most. She had found the boutique online late the night before, but it had taken until the following afternoon to make herself drive there. She had needed an absurd number of reasons to give herself permission to buy something millions of women owned without a second thought.

After spending nearly a day talking herself into coming, she had reached the parking lot in a blizzard and was quickly losing her nerve.

The snow thickened. The boutique door was perhaps thirty feet away. Inside, a figure moved past the window, straightening something on a shelf. Claire watched her disappear behind a display and then reappear carrying what looked like a tray of glasses.