Unable to sleep, M. DANIEL MCKENNON, “MAC”, rides horseback to The North Ridge beneath a moonlit Colorado night. He gazes across a meadow to a small hunting cabin below, where smoke curls from the chimney and light glimmers, outlining the darkened windows. SAMANTHA JAMISON, “Sam”, is awake, reading her manuscript, her parting gift to him when she left four years ago, the story she doesn’t remember writing but he has read a hundred times. Flooded with hope, his pulse quickens. Part One is the story Sam is reading which takes place four years earlier and portrays an ill-fated love between a modern-day rancher, Micah, and a Midwest acquisitions editor seeking a respite from a cheating husband and soul-crushing career. Sam’s heroine finds comfort in the rancher’s faith, and strength in his gentle words. It’s never too late to choose a different path. Despite an intense physical attraction and the heroine’s impending divorce, Micah resolves not to get tangled up with another flatlander destined to leave, but when his five-year-old son falls for her, his determination is sorely tested. Still in love with her husband and committed to saving her marriage, the flatlander returns home at summer’s end, leaving the rancher and his son heartbroken. Furious at the tragic ending, Sam hurls the manuscript. Tears course down her cheeks as she realizes it’s their story—hers and Mac’s—but she still remembers none of it. Sam recalls waking in the hospital after a car accident, her ex-husband at her bedside. Their marriage was over; he’d ended it. And due to a traumatic brain injury that erased the last eighteen months of her life, she’d forgotten why. She’d discovered herself with child, but it wasn’t his. At home, she found a note that read, “I love you, Sam. When you’re ready, you know the path to where I am. Micah.” She struggles to remember Micah, certain he must be her baby’s father, but the memories, like wet on white, elude her. Part Two picks up one week before Mac’s midnight ride to the ridge when Sam returns to her remote cabin for a family vacation with her twins bound for master’s programs in Denver, and a toddler with familiar eyes. When Mac discovers Sam is engaged and doesn’t remember him, his world spins on every axis. He’s waited four long years for her return. Sam tells Mac she’d quit her job on the day of her car accident and doesn’t know why. But Mac does. She was changing her path to be with him. With only one week to recapture her heart, Mac and his son reenact highlights of their first summer together with Sam: stargazing, kayaking, and berry picking. On their last evening together, Mac gives Sam her manuscript, hoping and praying she’ll remember, or fall in love again with Micah, the protagonist rancher she’d so lovingly portrayed. With him. Departure morning, in an ethereal storm of cottonwood fluff, Sam and Mac talk about her story and he explains her young daughter’s paternity. When Sam asks to see the waterfall at Epley’s Pass, Mac knows she read the entire story, including the returned letter he’d written years ago professing his undying love and a final chapter for her story which he’d tucked in at the end. At the waterfall, emotions erupt. Sam blames him for abandoning her. Mac insists he’s been waiting for her. Swept away, Sam marvels at Mac's enduring love. As her defenses crumble, an impending wildfire pulls Mac away. In a heart-wrenching goodbye, as Sam strips his little girl from his arms, Sam lies, telling Mac she’s in love with her fiancé and thus setting Mac free to save his ranch. Sam leaves to get her eldest daughter to med school in Denver. Later that evening, amid a downpour from heaven, the pain of his own failed marriage years earlier, coupled with losing Sam a second time, brings Mac to his knees. Seething with hatred for his cowardice and haunted by his own words, It’s never too late to choose a different path, Mac resolves to change his own path and go after Sam. Guided by hope and flanked by fear, Mac tracks Sam to her fiancé’s movie set where she hugs him with unexpected intensity. The other man’s ring is gone. In an epilogue titled Mac’s Ending, Mac is now a gnarled old man, gazing down the valley from The North Ridge where he remembers his wife, Sam, who recently passed, her pure Colorado heart and sky-blue eyes, her resilience and bravery, and the glorious years they had together.