“Yeah,” I say. “It’s like that.”
We sit on the rocks without discussing it. The water fills the space between us—completely, thoroughly, leaving no room for small talk or deflection. Just the sound of falling water and the smell of mist and pine and the weight of whatever I’m about to say.
“My parents died when I was nineteen,” I tell her. “Bush plane crash. They were doing a supply run to the villages. They were supposed to be back in three days. They weren’t.”
I can see her shoulders get tighter, like she’s bracing for something.
“Hank raised me after that,” I continue. “He was already older. Already set in his ways. Already the kind of man who understood that love was built in actions, not explanations. And suddenly he was responsible for fixing a person who was fundamentally broken. Who was angry in a way that didn’t have a direction—just this general rage at the world for being unfair.”
The falls crash against the rocks with relentless precision.
“He didn’t try to fix it,” I say. “Didn’t try to make me feel better by telling me things would get easier. Didn’t try to explain why it happened or what it meant or how I was supposed to live with it. He just—he showed up. Every day. He fixed the cabin. He fixed the truck. He built things. He existed in the same space as my anger until eventually the anger got smaller because I was busy watching him move through the world with this particular kind of quiet intention.”
I haven’t talked about Hank like this—not in full sentences, not in explanations. I’ve held him in silence the way he held me.
“He died a few years ago,” I say. “And I found letters afterward. Letters he’d written but never sent. I didn’t know until I found them what the letters were about. Didn’t know for along time. But in those letters, he was explaining himself. Not to me. To someone else.”
Gabby is completely still. I can see her breath coming shallow. Her jaw is clenched. She’s understanding something without me having to say it.
“That what?” she asks quietly. “The letters were to who?”
The water fills the space where words should go. I let it for a long moment.
“He knew exactly what he was doing,” I finally say. “Everything he taught me about patience and presence and showing up for people—he didn’t figure that out on his own. Someone showed him. Someone taught him that love is an action, not a feeling. That you don’t have to say anything if you’re already doing everything. That sometimes the most honest thing you can do is exist completely in another person’s life without needing them to acknowledge it.”
I turn to look at her and she turns to look at me, and there’s a moment—a specific, very dangerous moment—where nothing exists but the falls and the realization that I’ve just said more words in a single continuous stretch than I’ve said to anyone in years. The water crashes. A bird calls. The world keeps moving.
Her eyes are bright.
Her lips are close.
The air between us has changed into something heavier, something that tastes like inevitability and electricity that terrifies me completely.
And then?—
Crash.
Not the water. Something wrong. Large, splintering branches. The sound of something massive moving through the tree line about fifteen feet away, completely indifferent to the fact that it’s about to destroy a moment that felt like the architecture of my life was rearranging itself.
Morris emerges from the brush like he’s auditioning for a nature documentary. He’s massive. He’s covered in mud. He’s completely oblivious to the specificity of what he’s interrupted.
Gabby laughs.
She laughs so hard she has to put her head on my shoulder, and her laugh is echoing against the rock face and bouncing off the water like it’s the most important sound that’s ever existed in this space. She’s laughing at the absurdity of it—the precise timing, the inevitability, the cosmic joke of a moose appearing exactly when everything was about to shift.
“He has the worst timing,” she gasps between laughs.
“He’s actually perfect timing,” I say, and I don’t sound happy about this. “He’s showing us exactly what’s about to happen.”
“What’s that?” She’s still laughing, still leaning against me like this is easy, like we haven’t just moved into a territory we can’t move back from.
“Everything else,” I say flatly. “Morris is a metaphor. A large, very destructive metaphor. He’s a warning about what happens when you stop pretending this isn’t real.”
She laughs harder at that, and Morris—satisfied that he’s completed his mission—snuffles and wanders back into the brush to destroy something else or sleep or do whatever moose do with their time.
And now Gabby knows how I’m thinking about her. The way Hank thought about someone. The way someone arranges their entire life around another person’s existence.
She’s still sitting on this rock next to me, laughing.