They started three weeks ago—a simple mistake with croissants. I made them in the early morning because that’s when panic-driven creativity happens, and I’ve learned to follow that impulse. Golden laminated dough, whole salmon fillet, fresh dill, a whisper of lemon. They should have been a one-off. A local curiosity. Something Marnie would mention once and then move on from.
Instead, they’ve become the unofficial currency of Ashwood Falls.
“Salmon croissants again?” Marnie sets another order on the counter, and she’s trying not to smile, which means this is something she’s going to enjoy watching unfold. The general store owner has that particular gleam—the one that says she’s about to witness something absurd and she’s going to treasure every second of it. “That makes seventy-three in the past two weeks, according to my receipts. I’m keeping documentation.”
“You’re keeping documentation of pastry sales.”
“Strategic pastry sales," she corrects, leaning against the counter. "Dotty brought three to the last town council meeting.Tessa started requesting them. Old Al wants one for the potluck."”
I wipe flour off my hands with a towel that has given up being clean and surrendered to permanent beige staining.
“This is what hell looks like,” I say flatly. “Not the dramatic version with fire. The specific version where an entire town decides your accidental invention is essential to their survival.”
“You could say no,” Marnie suggests, but she says it gently, and we both know this is a lie. We both know exactly why I won’t say no. Some people accumulate debt. Some accumulate guilt. I accumulate baked goods like they’ll arrange themselves into an answer.
“I’ve been stress-baking since I was seven,” I say. “Nothing’s changed except now it involves more butter and a whole town watching.”
Marnie reaches over and squeezes my hand—quick, motherly, a gesture that would make me cry if I let it. Then she goes back to the register and I go back to the croissants.
I make twenty-three more before I close the kitchen at 6 PM. My hands know the lamination now—butter and dough, fold and turn, the meditative repetition of it. But my mind is somewhere else entirely. My mind is in Edna’s journal, which has been sitting on my nightstand like a question I can’t quite bring myself to answer.
That evening, I finally surrender to the impulse. I make tea—chamomile, honey, the calming version—and I settle at the kitchen counter with the journal in front of me like it’s a confession I need to read before I can write my own.
The handwriting is neat. Precise. The handwriting of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing, even when what they’re doing is running away to Alaska for a man she barely knows. And the entries—they’re not the usual diary stuff. They’re observations. Sharp-eyed, funny observations, the kind thatcome from someone who understands the world is ridiculous and isn’t afraid to say it out loud on paper.
I flip through, landing on a date from 1987.
Hank tried to fix the fence again today. The same section he’s been “fixing” for three months. He’s doing it wrong on purpose—I’ve caught him checking to make sure I’m watching from the window. When I finally went out and suggested an alternative, the correct alternative, mind you, he just smiled that particular smile and kept hammering nails into exactly the wrong places. Then I realized: he’s not fixing the fence at all. The fence is an excuse. He’s engineering reasons to exist in the space where I can see him, to exist in a way that requires my attention without demanding anything from me. God help me, I found it touching. God help me, I’m in so much trouble.
I laugh out loud at that one. The specificity of it—the accidental romance of pretending to fix a fence wrong just so someone will notice you exist. That’s not something you invent. That’s something you observe because you understand, on some cellular level, that this is what love looks like when it doesn’t know how to use words.
I keep reading.
Made soup that came out like salt water. A genuine disaster. I was too tired to taste while I was making it, too distracted by watching Hank build shelves in the next room. By the time I realized it was inedible, he was already sitting at the table waiting to be fed. I almost apologized. Almost explained. Almost offered to start over. But Hank looked at me and said, “I’m hungry,” so I sat the bowl in front of him and waited for him to push it away. He never did. He ate the entire pot. Every.Single. Spoonful. Never said a word. Just kept spooning it up like it was the best thing he’d ever tasted. When he got to the bottom he looked up at me with that smile—you know the one, the smile that says I’ve been the only good decision he’s ever made—and something inside me broke open. Not the good kind of broken. The kind where you realize you’ve already lost the ability to protect yourself.
My hands are shaking slightly. I set the journal down for a moment and breathe.
Love is a strange thing, the next entry starts. Hank could have told me the soup was terrible. Could have been honest. Could have suggested I taste my own cooking before serving it. But instead he chose to eat something objectively bad and make it seem like a gift. So here’s what I understand now about love: it’s watching someone eat something terrible you made and deciding—in that moment, in that chair, in that kitchen—that you never want to make them anything good again. Because you want them to keep choosing you even when you fail. You want to exist in a world where they choose you specifically because you’re flawed, and that’s the only kind of love that matters anymore.
The journal slips in my hands.
My chest tightens the way it does before panic. The way it does before essential reorganization. A truth I’m not ready for.
I pull out my phone, see my one bar, and call my mother. It’s 11:17 PM in Austin. She should be asleep. She’s not. I’ve inherited her insomnia—we both sleep in fragments, waiting for the world to demand something from us at 3 AM.
“Gabriella?” She answers on the third ring, which confirms the insomnia. “Are you okay? Is the kitchen on fire?”
“Tell me about Edna,” I say.
There’s a pause. A long one. My mother takes her time with truth-telling. She’s methodical about it, like she’s checking the facts multiple times before delivering them.
“Why do you want to know about Edna?” she finally says, and there’s something in her voice—recognition, maybe, or resignation.
“Because she’s here. Her kitchen is my kitchen. Her house is where I’m living. And I’m reading her diary and she’s describing someone, and I need to know who he is.”
My mother moves the phone. I can hear her setting down whatever she was holding, rearranging herself into the posture of serious conversation.
“Edna was the black sheep,” she says finally. “The one nobody wanted to talk about. She was twenty-two when she met a man at a diner in Denver—a man who was passing through, who mentioned he was moving to Alaska to work in construction. She knew him for maybe a week. And then she left everything—family, job, all of it—to follow him to Ashwood Falls.”