I pair it with heels. Actual heels. The burgundy ones that Dotty mentioned to everyone apparently, the ones I wore when I didn’t know better. Makeup. The works. Not for anyone. For myself. For the particular statement that I will not hide in practical clothes and flour dust. I will own the fact that I arrived here playing a character, and maybe that character was okay, and maybe I’m more than one thing. Maybe I’m the woman who bakes at three in the morningandthe woman who has a life elsewhere. Maybe I get to be both.
I’m wearing the dress when I walk into the festival grounds, and Piper clocks the heels from forty feet away.
“The heels,” she says, eyes narrowing with theatrical delight. “The woman who told me wearing burgundy stilettos were a crime against Alaska. Those heels.”
“A woman is allowed to evolve, Piper.”
“A woman is committing,” Piper says, and steers me toward the booths before I can argue.
Then Jace hits my senses before I see him.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s an actual physical sensation—like the air changes temperature, like the atmosphere shifts toward something electric. Like the world recalibrates around him and suddenly I can feel his presence like a weight, like gravity, like he’s pulling me toward him even though he’s across the field and we haven’t touched since the kiss.
He goes completely still. Like someone hit pause on him. He’s across the field, maybe two hundred feet away, holding a cup of lemonade or coffee or something that I can’t identify at this distance, and he stops existing for a moment and then comes back wrong—like he’s reassembling himself from pieces that don’t quite fit anymore. Like the pieces have rearranged themselves in the time since the kiss and now the person he was before doesn’t fit the space he’s taking up.
His eyes find mine. He watches me walk. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t do any of the normal things you do when you see someone you’ve kissed. He watches, and the watching is more intimate than the kiss was. The watching is: I see you. I see you choosing to be visible. I see you wearing the dress that says you have another life and you’re wearing it anyway. The watching is: I see you.
I walk past him close enough that the hem of my skirt brushes his jeans. Close enough that I feel the heat coming off his forearm where it almost meets mine on the railing. My knuckles pass an inch from his and neither of us moves, and the not-moving takes more effort than anything I’ve done all day. I don’t say anything. Neither does he. But it runs like a current through the air between us, like electricity. Something real moves through the air between us. and we’re both pretending we didn’t notice, we’re both operating on the principle that if wedon’t acknowledge it, it won’t be real, and we both know that’s not how this works but we’re trying anyway.
The festival itself is sprawling and colorful and so aggressively Alaskan I feel like I’ve landed on another planet. There are booths everywhere—people selling local crafts, local food, local fish, jam, honey, knitted things, carved things, things that have clearly been made by people who live here and know how to use their hands. The sun is still high in the sky because it’s only three in the afternoon and the sun doesn’t set until practically midnight. There’s blue sky that stretches endlessly, mountains in the distance that look like they’ve been painted by someone with specific ideas about scale, and everywhere—everywhere—the sense of something wild being temporarily contained within a fairground.
I try the salmon caramel corn which is surprisingly good, why does everything with salmon work here I don’t know, and watch people move through the space like they belong here, which they do. Like they’ve been here forever. Like the mountains and the daylight and the impossible fishing are all things they understand inherently.
Birdie appears at my elbow while I’m waiting for regular kettle corn—the non-salmon variety, because even I have limits—and this is shocking in the way that surprise is always shocking. Birdie, who beat me with a three-tiered blueberry masterpiece that was objectively perfect, who represents everything I’m not, rooted, practical, belonging, the kind of person who builds things here instead of just visiting them, is standing next to me like we’re friends or something.
“Your éclairs are good,” she says. Direct. Not a compliment exactly, just a statement of fact. “I tried one at the bakery yesterday.”
I’m looking at Birdie properly for the first time, not just as competition but as a person. She has laugh lines—deep ones,the kind that come from years of actual laughing. She has the weathered skin that comes from living outside in a place where the sun literally never quits, where your face gets exposed to endless daylight and you just accept that this is your life. She has a band-aid on her thumb—fresh, probably from this morning—like she was baking this morning and cut herself and didn’t bother to stop for it, just wrapped it up and kept working.
“Oh,” I say, which is approximately the least eloquent response I could give to someone offering me a compliment.
“I want to teach you about local ingredients,” she continues, and now her voice has shifted from competition to something else, something like offer. “Not like—” She waves a hand at the sky, at the mountains, at the whole situation. “Not like I’m fixing your failure. Not like that. Just. I like what you’re doing. I like the way you’re using things that shouldn’t work together. And you could do it better if you knew the real stuff. The deep stuff. Not the tourist version you’re pulling from whatever supplier you found. The actual local ingredients—fireweed honey that you can get from Marnie, spruce tips that you have to know where to find, mushrooms from people who actually know the woods.”
I stare at her.
“Also,” she adds, and her voice is different now, softer, like she’s about to tell me something she doesn’t tell everyone. “Everyone crashed and burned on their first summer festival competition. Everyone. Granted, Morris wasn’t helping you at all, but my failure was seventeen years ago, and I made something that looked like a cake committed suicide. Literally. It just—collapsed. Fell over mid-table. In front of like fifty people. There were several witnesses. People I’m still going to community events with. People who remember it. And I came back and I did it again and I kept doing it until I was good. So.”
She’s offering me community. An olive branch. Actual belonging to something that isn’t temporary, isn’t borrowed time, isn’t just something I get to use while I’m here. She’s telling me that my failure didn’t disqualify me. That every person who belongs here has also publicly failed here. That failure isn’t permanent; it’s the process.
“Thank you,” I say, and I mean it. Community. An olive branch. The possibility of staying. The possibility that temporary doesn’t have to be the only thing I get.
“Also,” Birdie adds, like she’s reading my mind, “Jace is still staring at you.”
I don’t look. I look at the kettle corn. “I’m aware.”
“He’s been staring for like ten minutes. Since you walked up.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You should probably talk to him at some point.”
“I’m managing the festival situation,” I say. “Talking to Jace is not part of the management plan.”
Birdie smiles like she knows something I don’t, which she probably does because she’s lived here forever and I’ve been here for only weeks, and then she leaves me to my kettle corn and my inability to look at the person who kissed me like he meant it.
Later—maybe an hour later, maybe two, the sun doesn’t move so time has become abstract—I’m standing near the gazebo where they’re announcing next month’s events, and Piper Lockwood finds me. Piper, who is married to Ryder Lockwood and seems to have existed in Ashwood Falls forever but hasn’t, seems rooted here the way I’m still learning it’s possible to be rooted anywhere. She’s holding a conversation with me like I’m not someone who will leave. Like I’m not someone with a life waiting in Portland and a departure date circled on a calendar somewhere.
“I almost left,” she says, seemingly out of nowhere. “Ashwood Falls, I mean. I almost left.”