Jace is Hank.
No. Jace is like Hank. There’s a difference, except there really isn’t. He shows up. He fixes things. He doesn’t explain himself. He exists in this space where I work and he doesn’t take credit or ask for recognition—he just builds a bench and leaves it like it’s nothing, like his time is just something he gives away freely to people who don’t know how to ask for it.
He’s doing the fence thing.
That’s what Edna meant. Hank was fixing a fence wrong on purpose just to exist in the same space as her, and Jace has been showing up at this kitchen for weeks finding reasons tobe here, finding things to repair, finding excuses to exist in the background of my life like he’s content to just be present without being acknowledged.
I’m spiraling. I’m 100% spiraling and I know it.
I pull the croissants out of the oven when they’re golden—that perfect moment between pale and brown, where they catch the light like they’re made of actual sunshine—and I set them on the cooling rack and I try to breathe like a normal person.
But I can’t.
Because I’m realizing that Jace is in my mental ledger for a reason. He’s in there with forty-seven pies and my dignity because I’ve been keeping track of what he’s cost me, and the cost is everything. The cost is my carefully constructed plan to come to Alaska and process my divorce alone. The cost is the comfortable lie that I could exist in this town without needing anyone. The cost is forty-seven opportunities to pretend I wasn’t noticing the way he moves through the world like he’s made of intentionality.
I could stop making these croissants.
I could stop showing up in this kitchen. I could call Jace and tell him I’m handling the 60 days differently—that I need to be alone, that I need to figure out who I am without a man orbiting my life like gravity. I could be brave like that. I could protect myself.
But Edna didn’t protect herself. Edna read the directions to a man, a man she barely knew, and she stayed in Alaska anyway. And then she spent her entire life making quiet choices that amounted to the same thing: she chose him. In small moments, in actions that didn’t require explanation, in soup that tasted like failure but was served with intention.
She chose him. Every day.
I’m terrified I’m about to make the same choice. I’m terrified I’m about to look up one morning and realize that the entiregeometry of my life has reorganized itself around someone I was supposed to keep at a distance.
I finish the croissants and arrange them in a box that I’ll deliver to Marnie in the morning, and I close the oven down for the night. The kitchen goes quiet. Just the hum of the refrigeration unit, the tick of cooling metal, the sound of my own breathing like I’m the only real thing in this space.
And I think about Edna writing in the dark. Trying to make sense of her love. Keeping it private. Keeping it real. How she understood that once you speak a thing out loud, it becomes subject to other people’s opinions. It becomes up for debate. It becomes a thing that can be questioned or challenged or deemed foolish.
So she kept it in a journal instead. She kept it hidden. She kept it safe from the world’s judgment by never letting the world know it existed at all.
I’m beginning to understand exactly what she meant.
I’m beginning to understand that some truths are too fragile to speak.
And some loves are so complete, so overwhelming, so utterly consuming that the only way to survive them is to write them down in the dark and never, ever tell anyone they exist.
Chapter 10
Jace
Ifind the notebook on a Tuesday afternoon when I’m delivering the desk—the one I’ve been building for weeks, the one Piper probably mentioned to Gabby, the one I’ve been using as an excuse to exist in this kitchen in a state of perpetual half-commitment.
It’s tucked under a stack of clean towels in the kitchen. Dark green leather. Her handwriting on the cover in what I recognize as her anxiety-scrawl: Mental Ledger - DO NOT READ.
So of course I read it.
The entries are organized by person, which is worse than if they’d been chronological. Like she’s conducting a personal audit of human relationships, tallying up what the world owes her in exchange for her presence in it.
Marco - ex-husband - owes me: emotional intelligence, basic human kindness, an apology that will never come, my self-esteem, the illusion that marriage is supposed to be easy
Dotty - owes me: nothing. She’s perfect. If she asks, I owe her. This goes negative. She’s in profit with my existence.
Morris - moose - owes me: two trays of salmon croissants, any future therapist bills, an explanation for your timing
Piper - owes me: discretion. She has none. She knows things and won’t stop smiling about them. Send help.
And then: