The flour on her clothes transfers to mine. White dust on my dark jacket. Her laughter has mixed with crying—I taste both. Her mouth is salty from tears but her lip catches on mine and that’s from the smile she can’t quite suppress, like some part of her is surprised that we’re doing this, that this is happening even though everything in her life says it shouldn’t.
The kiss deepens. She’s not pulling back. She’s pulling closer, pulling me toward her like she’s trying to memorize this. My hands find the small of her back and she makes a sound—not a word, more like a breath leaving her body and not coming back.
And then she pulls back. Not far. Just far enough to look at me. Her eyes are still wet. Her mouth is still close. There’s flour on her chin where my jaw brushed it.
“This is a temporary situation,” she says. Whispers. Like she’s reminding me of something I should have been payingattention to. Like the words are a wall she’s building between us right now, before we get too far.
“Okay,” I say.
“You’re aware of that.”
“I’m aware.”
“So—”
Jasper puts his paw on her foot.
She stares down at the dog with something like despair. “Even the dog,” she whispers.
The dog is conspiring. The dog is witnessing this moment and deciding to make it even more complicated by being present and adorable and concerned about Gabby’s emotional state. Jasper is now part of the problem, which was not in my planning.
And there it is—the thing that gets me. The realization that I’m jealous of my own dog. Six years I’ve had Jasper. Six years of feeding him, walking him, building him a place in my workshop, and he’s never given me his full attention the way he gives it to her. He’s never pushed his head into my chest like she’s the only solid thing in a collapsing world. And right now, watching him look at her with that liquid devotion, I understand that Hank must have felt something like this.
Hank, who kept Edna’s photograph in his workshop for years. Who died still loving a woman he couldn’t tell. Who told me, near the end, that the best things and the worst things are often the same thing—love that can’t be spoken is just love that gets heavier and heavier until it becomes a weight you carry like it’s normal.
I’d always thought that was the tragedy. That Hank spent decades watching someone he couldn’t have.
Now I’m standing in flour dust kissing someone I can have for less than two months, and I understand the tragedy isn’t about the time. It’s about the choosing—Hank chose to stay closeto Edna even though it cost him. He built her things for her house. He maintained her kitchen. He left salmon on her porch like a man making a prayer.
And now she’s here. Kissing me back. Tasting like salt and cinnamon.
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say that won’t make this worse. I don’t have words that can fix her exit plan or the fact that she came here on a deadline or the general catastrophe of timing and fear. So I stand there in the flour dust with her in the space where I kissed her, and I think about how you can’t control what you build once you’ve started building it. You can only show up and be honest with the materials you’re working with and hope they hold.
She’s going to break. Or I’m going to break. Or we’re both going to break and we’ll have to figure out how to build something from the pieces. But at least it will be real. At least it will be true.
Later, I walk her through the house. The light is long and slow through the windows—it’s getting close to evening in a place where evening moves like honey. The hallway between the bakery and her cabin cuts through tension and silence, and somewhere outside us the birds are making sounds that don’t make sense because the sun won’t set for hours.
She’s quiet beside me. Her hand is still covered in flour. There’s cinnamon dust in her hair that she’ll find later and wonder about.
“You’re thinking loudly,” she says.
“There’s flour on my shirt,” I say. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to finish a cedar commission with your flour handprint pressed into it.”
She laughs, short and surprised, and the sound does something uneven to my ribs.
“I’m thinking about Hank.”
She doesn’t ask me who Hank is. She already knows—my life is full of him, in the way I move, in the choices I make. He’s the ghost that taught me everything.
“The man who died?” she asks.
“Yeah. He loved someone for a long time. Before they ever actually—” I pause. “It was complicated.”
“Was the love worth the complication?”
I don’t answer right away.
“I think,” I say, “that Hank wouldn’t change it. The loving. Even knowing how it ended.”