“Yes.”
“Is this—did you put this here?”
I don’t know how to answer that in a way that doesn’t make this more of a conversation than I intended, so I nod.
“Why? Is this some kind of threat?”
“You don’t have groceries.”
She stares at me. Her mouth opens—and then it starts.
“Okay, so—first of all, thank you? I think? I mean, it’s neighborly, which I didn’t expect because last night you said one word—maybe one and a half words if we’re being generous—and then disappeared into the forest like some kind of flannel Bigfoot. Not that—I’m not calling you Bigfoot. You’re a normal-sized—you’re a large person, but normal-large, not cryptid-large. And the salmon is—I don’t know what to do with a whole salmon. I’m a pastry chef. I work with butter and sugar and things that come in measured amounts. This is a fish. A whole fish. It still has a face.”
She pauses. Breathes.
I wait.
“It still has a face,” she repeats, quieter, like the fish’s face is a personal affront.
“The face comes off,” I say.
“I know the face comes off. I’m not—I went to culinary school. I know how to break down a fish. I just didn’t expect to find one on my porch at six in the morning left by a man I don’t know who communicates primarily in grunts.”
“I said welcome last night.”
“That was a grunt.”
It was, probably. I’m not great at distinguishing between my words and my sounds. Hank used to say I had two modes: silent and accidentally honest.
She wraps the flannel tighter around herself and shivers. June in Alaska. Fifty-two degrees. She is not dressed for this in any version of her life, and the flannel she found is one of Edna’s lighter ones, which means she’s cold and too stubborn to go back inside and find a better one.
She has dark eyes. Brown, almost black. The kind that looks like they’re always calculating something—processing, assessing, running numbers on the situation. Her jaw is set like she’s decided not to be scared even though she’s clearly scared, and her hands are gripping the flannel closed at her throat like she’s holding herself together.
She looks like chaos. Beautiful. Verbal. Overwhelming.
I should go.
“I’m Jace,” I say, which is more information than I planned to give.
“Gabby.” She shifts on the porch. “Gabby Diaz. The—I’m Edna’s great-niece. Apparently. We never met. My family didn’t—it’s complicated.”
I nod. Everything about Edna’s family was complicated. Edna told me once, near the end, that she’d sent letters for thirty years and received exactly two responses. She said it the way she said everything—matter-of-fact, slightly amused, like the cruelty of it was just another ingredient she’d learned to bake with.
“I maintain the property,” I say. “The generator, the plumbing, the roof. For Edna.”
“She’s been dead for two years.”
“Yes.”
Gabby waits for me to explain why I’ve been maintaining a dead woman’s property for two years. I don’t explain, because the explanation involves Hank and Edna and a love story thatexisted in letters and silences and a promise I made to a man who was dying and had nobody left to ask but me, and I’m not telling that story to someone I met eight hours ago who’s standing on a porch in borrowed socks.
“The coffee maker works,” I say instead. “Left side of the counter. The water takes a minute to heat.”
“That’s not an explanation for why you’re maintaining the property.”
“I know.”
Jasper, who has followed me down the trail because he follows me everywhere and has zero concept of personal boundaries, pushes past my legs, trots up the porch steps, and lies down directly at Gabby’s feet. His tail thumps against the wood. He looks up at her with an unguarded adoration he usually reserves for beef jerky and swimming.