Marco leaves on Sunday.
Morris moves out of the way—I don’t know why or how, but he decides he’s done blocking the car and he wanders back into the forest like he was never there. The rental car drives away with a man who flew to Alaska wearing loafers and left understanding that some places don’t want what he has to offer.
And I still haven’t spoken to Gabby.
The silence has won. It’s colonized my entire life. It’s made me safe and isolated and completely incapable of being the person she needs, which is a person who shows up and uses words and doesn’t retreat into the comfortable distance of not-feeling.
I am the silence. The withdrawal. The thing I told myself I wouldn’t become.
The workshop is quiet. Jasper is gone. Gabby’s at home. Probably realizing she was right to keep moving. Probably understanding that the man she loves is the same as the man she was running from—someone incapable of staying, someone incapable of presence, someone whose silence is a form of abandonment.
I destroyed it. With the silence. With the fear I thought I was done carrying. I’ve used fear as an excuse for cruelty. I’ve used safety as a shield against love.
And now she’s gone.
Not gone from Ashwood Falls—she’s not going back to Austin. I believe her when she said that. But gone from me. Gone from the possibility of us. Gone from the place where I was building something that might have lasted.
The silence is loud now.
It’s the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
Chapter 19
Gabby
Marco leaves on a Sunday, and by Monday morning I’ve already decided to sell.
Not because of him. He was never the problem. A reminder of something I thought was fixed. His car disappears down the road. No relief. No regret. Just flatness. Everything to do with a man who won’t come out of his workshop.
I told Marco the truth. Not the dramatic version, not the tearful confrontation that would make a good story at dinner parties. Just the truth, plain and undecorated, delivered while standing behind the bakery counter with flour on my hands and Jasper growling at his ankles.
“You don’t actually want me back,” I’d said. “You want the woman who didn’t know she deserved better. She doesn’t exist anymore. I baked her out of my system with salmon croissants and a possessed oven and a moose who eats my porch.”
He’d stared at me like I was speaking a different language. Which, in a way, I was. Many weeks in Alaska had given me a vocabulary he couldn’t parse—one built on sourdough starters and generator pull cords and the specific silence of a man who said more in a single sentence than Marco ever said in an entire marriage.
“You’re staying,” Marco had said, not a question. “In Alaska. For a guy who builds furniture.”
“I’m staying for me,” I’d told him. “The furniture guy is a bonus.”
Except the bonus had stopped talking to me. The bonus was locked inside his workshop, sanding wood like the grain held answers, and every time I walked the four hundred yards between our cabins, the trail stretched longer every time.
Monday afternoon, I start packing.
Not much to pack, really. My entire previous life is in storage in Austin. Boxed up. Paying rent on memories I can’t throw away.
What I have here: Edna’s flannel collection, which I’ve adopted without permission. My rolling pin. A few pairs of shoes that are wrong for every possible Alaskan activity. The pastry tools I ordered online during week three, when I’d finally admitted to myself that I was going to try—really try—to make the bakery work. Edna’s journal, which I’ve read cover to cover three times now, underlining passages in pencil like it’s a textbook for a life I’m studying.
I fold the flannels into the suitcase first. Then the journal. Then the pastry tools, wrapped in kitchen towels because I don’t have proper packing materials and because everything in this cabin is both temporary and irreplaceable.
The rolling pin goes in last. It always goes in last. It’s the first thing I unpack and the last thing I pack and the thing I’d grab if the cabin caught fire, same as always, same as before Alaska, same as before Jace?—
Jasper appears from somewhere—the bedroom, maybe, or that spot under the kitchen table where he’s taken to sleeping when he stays with me—and walks directly to the open suitcase on the bed. He sniffs the flannels. He sniffs the journal. He turns around three times and sits down directly on top of my clothes.
“No,” I tell him.
He settles deeper. Puts his chin on his paws. Gives me the look—the one that says I’ve made a decision about this luggage and my decision is that it’s a bed now.
“Jasper. Move.”