No joke attached. No deflection. Just gratitude, naked and unadorned. Her hair is up in a bun. There are flour streaks on her cheek. She’s looking at me like she’s trying to see something specific in my face.
Most honest thing she’s said to me.
“I know,” I say.
Callback. The salmon scone. When she arrived and made something impossible work. I said: I know. Just that. I was watching.
But now those two words carry everything—the flour dust in her hair, the kiss, the dress at the festival, the way she’s stoppedrunning away from Alaska long enough to be here. The way I’ve been here the whole time, terrified and building anyway. The baker’s bench. The property I maintained for two years before I knew why I was maintaining it. Hank’s promise. All of it.
She understands the callback. Her face shifts. The understanding lands: I’ve been paying attention. I remember moments she probably thought were small. I’ve been waiting.
“I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know that too.”
She laughs once, short and real. “This was supposed to be temporary.”
“It is,” I say. “That’s still true.”
“So why does everything feel permanent?” Her voice is small. The small voice of someone who realizes she’s been marked by something she thought wouldn’t stick.
I sit with that for a moment. The way she’s looking at me. The way the light is hitting her face. The way I’ve been waiting for this conversation for days and now that it’s here, I don’t know how to have it without breaking something.
I don’t have an answer that won’t destroy us both. So I do what I do—I sit with her in the not-knowing. I don’t offer solutions. I don’t try to fix the temporal problem. I just stay across from her at the small table, in the space where she made something impossible into something people wanted.
The sun is still up outside. It’s not going to set for hours. The light is pale and golden and exactly how everything feels when you’re trying to hold something temporary like it matters.
I think about Hank. About how he built a promise that lasted longer than he did. How he asked me to maintain Edna’s property without telling me why. How he died before he could see the outcome of the thing he started. I built that bench for someone I didn’t know yet, because Hank believed Edna wouldmatter to the future, that this place would matter, that someone would come and want what Edna built.
He was right.
But he didn’t get to see it. Hank died before Gabby got here. He died before the kitchen got filled with flour and intention. He died before someone decided to stay long enough to make salmon croissants real.
“Morris destroyed a fence,” I tell her, because sometimes useless information is easier than the thought that you built something beautiful and the person who asked you to build it is already gone.
“Of course he did,” she says.
“I built it. He chewed through it.”
“In what timeframe?”
“Overnight.”
She smiles like she expected nothing less from chaos. From Morris. From the general refusal of the world to cooperate with planning.
“I built something that Morris immediately destroyed,” I continue. “So I’m building a better fence. One he can’t eat through. Might fail too. Probably will. But at least I’ll know more next time.”
She understands what I’m saying underneath what I’m saying. That trying things that might break is the only way to build anything worth building. That temporary doesn’t mean worthless. That the kiss and the presence and the days of not talking about it are all part of something real, even if the real thing has an expiration date we both agreed to before we knew better.
That Hank built something and trusted me to keep building it even after he was gone. That some promises are longer than lives. That some things matter because someone decided they mattered.
There’s a thing that happens to me when I’m afraid of losing someone. Hank saw it first—the week after my parents’ plane went down, when I stopped speaking entirely. Seven days of silence. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Hank sat with me in the workshop every one of those days, not pushing, not asking, just present. He told me later that silence was my armor, and that armor is only useful if you remember how to take it off. I told him I’d remember. I’m not sure I was telling the truth.
“I’m scared,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“I’m scared I’m going to want to stay, and I’m scared I’m going to leave, and I’m scared both of those things are true and I’ll have to pick between them.”