“Show up,” Trace says. “Keep working. Don’t pretend the difficult parts aren’t there. That’s all there is. That’s all there’s ever been.”
In the flour dust and the sawdust and the space between what I want and what I’m terrified to want, that has to be enough.
Gabby will go back to her kitchen and keep creating things. I’ll go back to the workshop and keep building things. And between the flour and sawdust, the permanent space in my chest where she’s taking root, we’re going to try to make something that matters.
Even if it only lasts for a summer. Even if the expiration date is already written on the calendar.
Even if Jasper has made his choice and I’m jealous of a dog and Gabby is terrified and I can taste flour dust every time I breathe.
Even if I’m terrified.
That’s the whole game right there.
Chapter 13
Gabby
Ibake at three in the morning because it’s the middle of the night in Alaska and I cannot sleep and moving my hands is easier than thinking about his mouth.
The sun is still up. This is the thing I’m still not used to—the midnight sun, the way it stays light from early morning until late evening, the way the darkness never quite arrives. It’s summertime and the night is maybe three hours long and I am awake in what should be the middle of the night, standing in a kitchen at three AM, and the light is pale and strange and exactly how everything feels right now. Like the world is operating on someone else’s timeline and I’m a visitor watching it happen, which is accurate. I’m a visitor. I’m leaving. This is temporary.
This is what spiraling looks like at three AM in midnight sun: the repetition. The temporary-temporary-temporary like a stuck record that someone is playing specifically to torture me. Temporary job. Temporary town. Temporary man with permanent hands and a silence that says more than Marco’s entire vocabulary. My therapist would have a field day. My therapist doesn’t know I’m in Alaska talking to an oven, so I’m probably off her radar.
Fireweed honey éclairs. Spruce tip shortbread. A wild-mushroom galette with a sourdough crust that makes absolutely no sense—mushrooms in pastry?—but tastes exactly like the woods smell here, like wet earth and pine and something ancient that’s been growing in the shadows. I work in silence except for the hum of Carl, I’ve started calling Lucifer ‘Carl’ because Lucifer was too on-the-nose, and the gentle obsession of someone who has decided that creation can be a substitute for feeling, which is the kind of lie I tell myself best at three AM when the sun is still up and the world feels like it’s operating on someone else’s logic.
Carl the oven is being temperamental. He’s an oven that makes you doubt your skills and also your ability to follow basic instructions, and I’ve spent the last hour coaxing him into the right temperature while arguing with him in my head like he can hear me and might be persuaded to cooperate if I just explain the situation correctly.
“Come on, Carl,” I mutter, pulling out the first batch of éclairs. “We’ve been through this. You heat up. I put things in. You bake them. This is not revolutionary.”
Carl, in response, hums at an inconsistent frequency and makes a sound like he’s digesting something uncomfortable.
I kissed Jace Maddox. This is the thought I’m trying to flour away, the thought I’m kneading into dough, the thought I’m laminating into pastry layers. Fold, fold, fold. Butter between the layers. Each fold supposed to push it farther down, bury it under technique and muscle memory. It is not working. My croissants are going to taste like poor decisions and sexual tension.
This is the thought I’m trying to flour away, the thought I’m kneading into dough, the thought I’m laminating into pastry layers. Fold, fold, fold. Butter between the layers. Each fold seals the thought away, the way you seal things in amber. Stop it moving. Stop it existing.
He lives here. I live in Portland—or I’m supposed to, which is where I’ve been eyeing an apartment I can barely afford and a job offer for August and a departure date that we agreed we both were aware of after we kissed. The kiss was not in the plan. The kiss was a terrible, gorgeous accident that I allowed to happen in a moment of weakness that lasted approximately forty-five seconds, and now I can’t stop replaying it lithe way corruption happens from replaying something too many times. The kiss has become corrupted in my memory, which is fitting because everything I touch gets corrupted eventually.
That’s not fair. That’s the Marco voice in my head, the one that tells me I ruin things, and I need to stop listening to it.
He said, "Okay," and meant it. Like he’d already made peace with the temporary nature of a thing he kissed like it was permanent. Like he understood the mathematics of this situation better than I did—that some things can matter while having an expiration date. That some things can be real and temporary at the same time. That you can build something knowing it’s going to end and do it anyway because the building is the point, not the permanence.
I don’t understand him. I also don’t want to stop understanding him, which is THE PROBLEM. Because if I understand him, that means he’s real. Real things can leave. Real things can devastate you in ways that hypothetical things can’t, and I’ve already been devastated once by a man I thought was real, and look how that turned out—I’m baking stress pastry in Alaska at three AM while having a philosophical crisis over a man who communicates primarily through fish.
I pull the éclairs out of Carl. They’re perfect. Golden brown. Delicate. The kind of éclair that says “I made this with intention and my hands and also probably some kind of magic because none of this should work but it did.” They look like they belong in a fancy restaurant, not in a kitchen where a woman is stress-baking at three in the morning in the continuous daylight, but maybe that’s exactly where they belong. They’re beautiful. That matters.
I reach for the rolling pin. French maple. And my hand stops short because it’s resting on Jace’s pastry bench—the one he built and left without a note—and for a second the two objects next to each other feel like a sentence someone else is writing for me. The thing I carried out of a burning marriage. The thing a man I’m trying not to love built for me anyway. Old life. New life. Touching at the edges like they’re not sure whether they’re allowed to.
I pick up the rolling pin. I roll out the next sheet of dough. I do not look at the bench again.
So I bake. At three in the morning. Under the midnight sun. In a kitchen in Alaska that doesn’t feel temporary because nothing feels temporary when the day never ends and your hands are in dough and the person you kissed is in a workshop somewhere—I know where he is, I can feel it like a magnetic pull—probably building something that will last longer than you’ll stay, which is a useful reminder that some things are permanent and some things are temporary and some things don’t get to be both.
He’s probably awake too. Jace doesn’t strike me as a person who sleeps a lot. I imagine him in his workshop, hands on wood, trying to build something that makes sense of this situation. Trying to make something permanent in a situation that feels fragile and temporary and like it could shatter if either of us looked at it too hard. And he’s probably thinking about me the way I’m thinking about him---like a problem I can’t solve. Like someone who said yes to temporary and is lying about it. and said okay the way you say okay when you’re accepting something that breaks your heart but breaks it in the right way, the way that teaches you something instead of just destroys you.
The kiss happened days ago, and it’s been days of silence, and I’m handling it the way any reasonable adult would: by baking enough pastry to feed a small European country and refusing to examine my feelings. Very mature. Very healthy. Carl approves, which tells you everything about the quality of my coping mechanisms.
Today’s the last day of the festival, so I decide to wear the dress.
The arrival outfit—the thing I stepped off the plane in, trying to perform “competent urban woman visiting Alaska”—I find it in the back of my closet and I pull it out. It’s still hanging there like I’ve been keeping it as evidence of who I was before, like I might need to prove that I was someone other than “flour-covered pastry chef in practical shoes.” Black. Sundress. A dress that says: I have somewhere else to be. Don’t get attached. A dress that’s been judging me from the back of my closet for the last few weeks like it knows something I don’t want to admit.