He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look surprised. Just waited—the way he’d waited at the bottom of the stairs when I’d been hauling my suitcase up to the garage apartment two days ago.
“I can’t tell a hemlock from a hickory,” I said. “I’ve never used a chainsaw. I’ve never built anything with my hands. I plan corporate galas, and I label my packing cubes, and I have a spreadsheet for my grocery list. That’s who I am. And you—” I gestured at the cabin, the mountain outside the window, the boots by the door. All of it. “You’re this. And at some point, the novelty of the girl who sorts your mugs is going to wear off, and you’re going to realize that I don’t actually fit here. I just organized your stuff, and you mistook it for belonging.”
The words came out sharper than I intended, and the worst part was that I wasn’t angry at him. I was angry at myself—for wanting this, for letting myself have it, for waking up in his bed and feeling like I’d found something I hadn’t known I was missing and then immediately looking for reasons it couldn’t be real.
Dash pushed off the wall and crossed the kitchen in three steps. He didn’t touch me. He just stood close enough that I had to look up at him, close enough that I could smell pine and sawdust and sleep, and he looked at me with an expression that had nothing uncertain in it.
“You think I need you to be a mountain girl?” he said. “You think I fell for you because you’re going to learn to run a chainsaw?”
“You didn’t fall for me. It’s been two days.”
“It took me less time than that to know I was done selling kayaks. Some things don’t need a long timeline to be obvious.” He reached out and tugged the sleeve of his hoodie—the one Iwas wearing, the one I’d grabbed without asking, the one that smelled like him. “I didn’t fall for you because you fit my life, Hartley. I fell for you because you walked into my disaster and made it make sense. Not the kitchen. Me. You made me make sense.”
My eyes were burning. I blinked hard and stared at his collarbone.
“My whole life has been instinct and duct tape,” he said. “And it works—I’m not apologizing for it. But you know what I’ve never had? Someone who thinks ahead. Someone who makes a plan and actually follows through. Someone who looks at a mess and sees what it could be instead of walking away from it.” His hand moved from the hoodie sleeve to my chin, tilting my face up. “You don’t have to fit into my world. You already changed it. You changed it the second you moved that air filter off my counter and told me ‘no promises.’”
A sound came out of me that was somewhere between a laugh and something more raw.
He pulled me in, and I let him—pressed my forehead against his bare chest and breathed him in while his arms wrapped around me and held on like he had no intention of letting go.
“I’m not good at this,” I said into his skin. “I don’t know how to not have a plan.”
“Then make one. I’ll be in it. Put me on a spreadsheet. I don’t care. Color-code me. Just don’t leave before the festival’s over because you’ve convinced yourself you don’t belong in a place you’ve already made better.”
I stood there in his kitchen—the kitchen I’d reorganized, the kitchen with the sorted mugs and the cleared counter and the coffee I’d made—and I let go of the plan.
Not forever. I’d probably have a new spreadsheet by tomorrow. But for right now, standing in this man’s arms in acabin on a mountain I hadn’t known existed a week ago, I let the next thing on the list be nothing.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stay.”
“Through the festival?”
“Through the festival. And then we figure it out.”
He kissed the top of my head.
“I’ll clear out a drawer.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“Already did it. While you were still asleep.” He paused. “Top drawer. I moved my stuff to the second. Fair warning, though—the second drawer doesn’t close right, so I might need you to fix it.”
I laughed, and this time it didn’t shake. “You’re impossible.”
“And you’re staying. So we’re both getting what we want.”
EPILOGUE
DASH: 5 YEARS LATER
The kitchen had matching mugs now.
White ceramic, clean lines, handles all facing the same direction in a cabinet that closed properly because Hartley inspired me to rehang it. The countertops were granite instead of the scarred butcher block I’d lived with for years. The table—the same yard-sale table she’d unearthed on her second morning in my life—had been sanded, restained, and sealed. It was the one thing from the old kitchen she’d insisted on keeping.
“It’s where we started,” she’d said when I’d offered to replace it. “It stays.”
The whole cabin had gotten the Hartley treatment. She’d project-managed the renovation herself the year after our son was born—spreadsheets, timelines, vendor binders, the works. The loft was a real bedroom now, with an actual door and a closet that had a system I pretended not to understand. The garage apartment was a guest suite. The exterior stairs had a railing and zero power tools on them.