She swings. The angle is right. The timing is right. The axe hits clean and buries itself about a third of the way through the wood. The wood splinters slightly at the impact but doesn't separate. Not a complete split, but the kind of swing that proves she understands the principle now. She's not thinking anymore. She's just moving.
She pulls the axe free and looks at it, then at me. Her chest is moving fast from the exertion. There's color in her cheeks that wasn't there before. She holds still for a second — chin up, jaw loose, not a smile but adjacent to one.
"Better," I say.
"Can we do it again?" she asks.
So we do. I stand beside her this time instead of behind. Her grip tightens and loosens as she learns the rhythm. Her hair is coming loose from her braid. Pieces of it are escaping around her face, and there's a single strand that keeps sticking to her cheek when she swings. She brushes it back with the back of her hand, and I have to look away because noticing the way she moves is becoming a problem.
Twenty minutes: rhythm. Thirty: four logs. Forty: six logs. The pile of split wood is building. Her breathing is hard. Sweat is starting to show at her temples.
"I'm doing it," she says, pulling the axe out of the seventh log. "I'm doing this. This is—I'm competent at wood-chopping. Who am I? What timeline is this?"
The question isn't really a question. It's a statement of surprise at herself. I've seen this before—people discovering they're capable of things they never tried. It's one of the reasons I like teaching. The moment where someone's estimation of themselves shifts. Where they stop believing the story they've been telling about their limitations.
"You were always competent at it," I say.
"No, I wasn't. I was terrible. Ninety seconds ago I was the worst person alive and now I'm?—"
"You were only missing instruction," I say. "That's different than being bad at something."
She stops. Lowers the axe. Turns to look at me like I've said something in a language she doesn't speak and she's trying to translate it. The translation is happening in real time. I can see her processing it. Not agreeing yet, just processing.
"That's not—" She stops. Starts again. "People don't usually just tell me I'm fine the way I am. They usually tell me I could do better if I tried harder, or if I was smarter, or if I was someone else entirely, or—" She stops again. Takes a breath. "Sorry. That's a lot of words about my personal trauma. You just taught me how to chop wood. This doesn't require my emotional deposition."
I think about Hank. About how he taught me the same thing—that the difference between being bad at something and being new at something is just instruction. That most people are fine. They're just untaught. And the person who teaches them, if they do it right, doesn't change the person. They just reveal what was already there.
She sets the axe down and sits on the log pile. The wood beneath her is still warm from summer. Jasper immediately getsup and walks over to sit beside her—not as close as he would like, but close enough that his flank is against Gabby's thigh. Traitor dog. My loyal, betraying dog is now completely devoted to a woman who's barely unpacked. She's won Jasper's loyalty almost immediately through nothing but genuine affection and a willingness to sit still and let a dog rest his head on her leg.
I should be concerned about this. I'm not. I'm just watching it happen and understanding that some people have this quality—this capacity to make things want to stay near them.
I sit on another log.
I've always found people like Gabby exhausting — someone who fills silence with words, with stories, with the constant running monologue of her own internal life. My parents were both quiet. Hank was the same way. We could spend hours in the workshop with maybe a hundred words exchanged, and it felt like a full conversation.
Except I'm still on this log. I've been here forty minutes and I haven't once thought about the workshop or leaving.
"You're cut out for this," I say.
Her eyes shift color in the afternoon light. Warmer. Less calculating. More like deciding.
"Chopping wood?" she asks.
"Being here."
She doesn’t say anything for a while. Jasper has his head on her lap. She’s running her fingers through his fur absently, like she’s been doing this her whole life.
"I don't know how to do that," she says finally. "Show up somewhere and not be waiting for it to fall apart before I'm ready. I keep thinking any minute now there's going to be a moment where I prove I was never actually capable of this — and it all goes under before the sixty days are even up."
"That's not how it works," I say.
"How do you know?"
I think about my parents. I think about being nineteen and coming to Hank's place because there was nowhere else to go, and how he just made room.
"Because you're still here," I say. "Every morning. That's not nothing."
She's quiet. I can see her processing. I can see the machinery of her mind moving behind her eyes, sorting through what I've said to find the trap door, the hidden meaning, the way it's supposed to hurt.