Jace – I owe him: forty-seven pies.
I read that last one three separate times, trying to understand the specific math of it. Forty-seven pies. Like the losses are compounding.
I’m still holding the notebook when she arrives, coming through the kitchen door the way she’s learned to—with the confidence of someone who’s earned the right to be here. Her entire life has reorganized itself around this kitchen and that oven named Lucifer, and watching someone build a life in real-time is its own kind of dangerous.
Her expression goes through seven distinct phases in approximately 0.8 seconds.
Shock. Horror. Panic. Resignation. Attempted comedy. Actual fury. Acceptance.
“You’re reading my private journal,” she says flatly.
“Mental ledger,” I correct, because if I’m going down, I’m doing it with the truth. Because she deserves honesty even when she’s terrified of it. “And it’s—this is accurate. Forty-seven pies is fair.”
She reaches for it. I raise it above my head.
Here’s the problem: I’m 6’3" and she’s not. She’s jumping like her body doesn’t understand physics, like she believes she can reach something a foot above her head. She’s jumping and grunting slightly with the effort, and I’m standing there holding the notebook and not laughing because laughing feels like it would destroy the careful equilibrium of what’s about to happen.
“Give it back,” she says, breathless.
“Forty-seven pies,” I repeat. “That’s a lot of pies, Gabby. That’s like—that’s the kind of debt that suggests something.”
“That I’m keeping score?”
“That you notice everything I do.” I flip to the next page, watching her expression shift. “That you’re accounting for everything I do.”
“Because you keep showing up!”
“Yes.”
“And fixing things!”
“Yes.”
“And making me feel like maybe I belong here when everything in me is screaming that I’m supposed to leave!” Her voice has climbed and she’s still jumping, one more attempt, and this time her fingers actually brush the leather edge of the notebook. “So yes, Jace, I’m keeping score because keeping score means I’m not just floating around waiting for something to hurt me. Keeping score means I’m paying attention, and keeping attention is the only way I know how to not lose people.”
I lower the notebook slowly. She stops jumping. We stand there in the kitchen with the ovens humming in the background, and I understand in a clear way why she needed to write this down. Why she needed to catalog what she owes the world—it’s not about debt, it’s about proof. Proof that she matters. Proof that she’s been seen.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say quietly.
“Yes, I do. You’ve—” she stops, gathering words like they’re scattered on the floor and she has to pick them up carefully. “You’ve cost me my peace of mind. You’ve cost me the ability to pretend I can do this alone. You’ve cost me forty-seven pies worth of effort and twice my dignity and the comfortable lie that I came here just to process my divorce.”
I set the notebook down on the desk I built. The unnecessary desk. The one with the intricate joinery that took weeks because I was looking for reasons to exist in this kitchen, to orbit her like I’m operating under some gravitational pull I don’t have the language for.
“Come with me,” I say instead of answering. “I want to show you something.”
“Jace—”
“Come with me.”
She grabs her jacket without asking why, which tells me everything I need to know about where we are in this. We’re past the point of caution. We’re in the part where she trusts my insanity without explanation, and I’m terrified of what I’m about to tell her.
The drive to the lake takes twenty minutes. Neither of us speaks. The radio plays quietly—something about small towns and summer leaving and the inevitability of change. I keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and I try to remember why I thought this was a good idea.
The waterfalls are another ten minutes in, down a trail that Hank carved out when he wanted a place to exist without anyone asking him why. When I was nineteen and angry about everything—angry about my parents being dead, angry about being alive, angry about the unfairness of a world that takes you by surprise—he brought me here and we didn’t talk. We just sat on these rocks and let the water do all the talking for us.
Gabby sees the falls and actually stops moving.
For someone who talks constantly, who fills silences with observation and humor and the particular self-awareness of someone who knows she’s using words as armor, she goes quiet. She stands there and watches the water crash down from the cliff face, and I can see the moment she understands why Hankbrought me here. Why some places are so big that the smallness of your own problems becomes irrelevant.