“That’s incredibly sad,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“And you’re thinking about that. Right now. While I’m standing next to you covered in flour having just kissed me.”
“I’m thinking about what matters and what’s temporary and the difference between them.”
Jasper appears next to us. He stops next to Gabby, and his whole body changes—his tail becomes a propeller, his entire being becomes about her. He doesn’t even look at me. I’ve stopped existing. This is the new geometry: Jace and Gabby and Jasper, and the dog has chosen his position in the triangle.
She crouches down and he pushes into her, and I’m thinking about how jealous I am of my own dog, which is absurd, which makes the kiss feel even more important. At least with Hank I can remember he got to choose. He got to love someone while they existed.
Later, Trace finds me in the workshop. I’m not building anything. I’m standing there in the smell of sawdust and varnish and the particular peace of a place where things make sense. My hands are in my pockets. I haven’t touched a tool since I left the bakery.
He takes one look at my face and says, “You built something.”
I don’t answer. There’s no answer that makes this better.
“You know what the best things I ever built were?” he asks. He’s leaning against the worktable like he’s settling in for this conversation. Like he already knows how long this is going to take. “The ones I was afraid to start.”
I’ve heard this before. Trace tells me this fairly often, usually after I’ve been standing in the workshop too long looking at materials and not touching them. He has a philosophy about fear. He thinks fear is a feature, not a bug. He thinks the things worth making are exactly the things that terrify you.
“The bridge to the new dock,” he says. “That summer thing I made for Patrice before we got married—took me three weeks because I was so sure I’d screw it up and she’d leave me. That cabinet with the hidden drawer. The whole addition on the house.” He pauses, taking a sip of coffee from a mug that’s probably been sitting on the worktable since 6 AM. “You can’t make something good if you never risk building it wrong.”
I think about the terrible joke. I think about Gabby’s face, the way she laughed through tears. I think about the kiss and how it felt like building something and burning it down at the same time.
“I kissed her. Now, I’m wondering what if it falls apart?” I ask.
“It might,” Trace says. He’s not trying to make this better. He’s not offering false comfort. “But you already knew that.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. You knew before you kissed her that she’s leaving. You knew before you did the kissing that this has an expiration date. You knew all of it, and you did it anyway, which means you’ve already accepted the risk. The question isn’t whether it’s going to hurt. The question is whether it’s worth hurting for.”
He’s right. I did know that. I’m still afraid anyway. The fear doesn’t go away just because you’re aware of it. The fear just sits there in your chest and tells you all the ways this can go wrong.
“There’s something else,” I say. “She keeps saying it’s temporary. Like she needs me to remember. Like the expiration date is more important than the thing itself.”
“Is it?” Trace asks.
“Is it what?”
“More important.”
I think about flour dust. The taste of salt and cinnamon. The way she grabbed my shirt like I was the only solid thing in a world that was dissolving. The way Jasper looked at her like he’d finally found what he’d been looking for.
“No,” I say.
“So tell her that.”
“I did. I told her it matters.”
“Not the kiss,” Trace says. “The whole thing. That even if it’s temporary, it’s real. That knowing the ending doesn’t make the middle less true. That some things are worth the hurt.”
“In the bakery, she’s stress-baking herself into tomorrow,” I say. “She’s trying to bake away the fact that she’s scared.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Trace says. “Or you could look at it as: she’s trying to build something that makes sense out of everything that doesn’t. And that’s what you do too. You make things that hold. That’s the one thing both of you know how todo—take the materials you’re terrified of and build something real.”
He’s right. The fear doesn’t change anything. The expiration date written on the calendar—none of it changes the fact that I kissed her and she kissed me back and we’re both standing in the wreckage of our careful plans, trying to figure out what to do with a thing we can’t control.