Morris turns, steps off the porch with a grace that seems impossible for an animal his size, and lumbers into the darkness like this is a routine he’s performed a hundred times.
The man watches him go, then turns back to me.
I’m standing in the dirt driveway in heels and a sundress, holding a rolling pin, my hair wrecked from fourteen hours of travel, mascara probably under my eyes, looking like adisheveled pastry chef who has been personally victimized by the airline industry.
He takes me in for exactly one second. Maybe less.
“Welcome,” he says. Or grunts. It’s hard to tell if it’s a word or just a sound his body produced involuntarily.
And then he turns and walks back toward the tree line, disappearing down what looks like a trail that cuts through the woods behind the cabin. Gone. Like he was never there.
I stand in the driveway, alone, holding my rolling pin, staring at the empty porch where the moose was, then at the dark trail where the man was, then back at the cabin that apparently belongs to me for the next sixty days.
A breeze comes off the mountains, and I shiver hard enough that my teeth click together. It’s June. It’s June and I’m freezing. In Austin right now it’s ninety-two degrees and Marco is sleeping in the bed we bought together and my bakery—my bakery, the oneIbuilt—has Valentina’s name on it now, and I’m standing in the Alaskan wilderness holding a rolling pin and wondering what I’ve done with my life.
The cabin is dark. The silence is massive. Somewhere in the trees, something howls—or hoots, or screams; I can’t tell—and I flinch so hard the rolling pin slips out of my grip and clatters onto the gravel.
I pick it up.
I walk to the porch.
I try the door. It’s unlocked, because apparently in Alaska you don’t lock your doors, which is either charming or terrifying, and I haven’t decided which.
Inside, the cabin smells like old wood and dust and something faintly sweet—cinnamon, maybe, or vanilla. Like someone baked here once, a long time ago, and the memory of it soaked into the walls.
I find a light switch. A single overhead bulb flickers on, casting a jaundiced yellow glow that turns everything sepia. There’s a kitchen—small, outdated, with a cast iron stove that looks like it predates electricity. A living room with a couch covered in a quilt. A bookshelf stuffed with paperbacks. A window that looks out at nothing but darkness and trees.
No Wi-Fi. No cell service—I’ve plugged in my phone, and it has one bar that keeps disappearing like it’s shy. No working oven that I can see beyond the cast iron beast, which squats in the corner of the kitchen like a dragon that’s been asked to do domestic labor and resents it. No sign that anyone has lived here in at least two years.
There’s a photograph on the wall by the bookshelf. A woman—dark hair, big smile, flour on her cheek—standing in front of a building with a hand-painted sign that reads Sugar & Flour. She’s laughing at whoever’s holding the camera. She looks like she belongs here in a way I can’t imagine ever belonging anywhere again.
Edna.
The quilt is thick, and the couch is soft enough, and when I sit down the springs sigh under me like the cabin has been waiting for someone to come back.
I set the rolling pin on the coffee table next to a stack of mail addressed to Edna Flores.
Great-Aunt Edna. The black sheep. The woman who ran away to Alaska for some man, according to my mother, who said it like running away for love was the most irresponsible thing a person could do.
I pull the quilt up to my chin and stare at the ceiling and listen to the silence, which isn’t silent at all—it’s full of wind and creaking wood and distant water and whatever that animal was howling in the trees.
Sixty days.
I can survive sixty days.
I survived Marco. I survived the look on Valentina’s face when I walked in on them. I survived signing divorce papers in a Starbucks because my lawyer said, “somewhere neutral” and I didn’t have the energy to argue. I survived packing my life into a storage unit and sleeping on my sister’s couch for three weeks and eating gas station crackers in my car and saying “I’m fine” to everyone who asked until the words lost all meaning.
I can survive Alaska.
I close my eyes. The cabin settles around me like it’s making room.
Outside, something large snaps a branch—Morris, probably, circling back to finish destroying the railing—and I pull the quilt tighter and press my face into the pillow that smells like cinnamon and dust and someone else’s life.
Tomorrow I’ll figure out the bakery, the clause, the oven, the moose, the silent man from the trees, and the sixty days stretching out ahead of me like a sentence I don’t know how to finish.
Tonight, I need to not cry.
I almost make it. The tears come somewhere around two-thirty in the morning, quiet and uninvited, and I let them. Then I sleep.