She reaches over and turns the radio back up. Some song about summer and inevitability and the way good things are always worth the risk of losing them. The kind of song that’s trying to tell us something we’re not ready to hear yet.
But her hand stays on the console between us.
Our pinkies are almost touching—close enough that I can feel the heat of her skin, close enough that the air between them seems to shimmer with possibility. Close enough that everything has changed and cannot be changed back.
I can feel the moment she makes some kind of internal decision. The way her hand shifts just slightly, the way her breathing changes, the way she stops trying to pretend that this is casual or manageable or something that can be easily walked back.
By the time we pull into town, our pinkies are touching.
Not holding hands. Not yet. Just this small point of contact that feels more honest than anything else that’s happened between us.
When I drop her off at Edna’s house, her house now, she gets out of the truck slowly, like there’s a script we’re supposed to follow and she’s trying to figure out what the next line is.
“Tomorrow?” she asks.
“Tomorrow,” I confirm. “And the day after that. And however long you’re staying.”
She nods like she’s accepted something. Like she’s made a choice that mirrors the choices Hank made, and Edna made, and everyone who’s come before us made when they decided that the risk of complete, overwhelming love was worth taking.
She closes the truck door.
And I sit in the darkness with my hands on the steering wheel and I think about the letters I found in Hank’s desk. The ones addressed to someone he could never give them to. The ones that explained everything about how love works when it’s real enough to break you.
In the morning, I’ll remember that I told her about the letters but never told her that they were addressed to Edna—that Hank spent decades loving someone he couldn’t have, and it shaped everything he was and everything he gave to me. Never told her that my grandfather’s entire architecture was built on the foundation of a love so complete that it existed in secret.
But the falls knew.
And Morris knew.
And now, somehow, she knows too.
The keeping-secret part comes later. The protection, the fear, the moment where she realizes she’s become the thing she was terrified of becoming—someone who loves completely and can’t say it out loud, who builds lives out of actions instead of words.
For now, she walks across Edna’s front yard with her jacket wrapped around herself like armor.
For now, everything is crashing down.
For now, the ledger is still unbalanced.
Chapter 11
Gabby
The afternoon before the summer festival, Dotty walks into the bakery with a flyer in her hand and guilt in her eyes.
"So," she says, drawing the word out like a confession. "I did a thing."
I’m elbow-deep in a laminated dough, rolling butter into layers with the kind of focus I reserve for tasks that let me avoid thinking about Jace and the pinkie he touched to mine on the way back from the waterfall. “Dotty. That’s your ranch-hand-done-rogue voice.”
“It’s not rogue,” she says “It’s enterprising.: She sets a yellow flyer on my counter, careful not to dust it with flour.
I look down. A cartoon moose in a chef’s hat grins up at me. THE GREAT ALASKAN BACK-OFF takes up half the page.
“Dotty.”
“You’re entered. Category: Open Pastry. Station assignments tomorrow at eight. Judging at noon.”
“Dotty.”