He has known this woman for approximately twelve seconds.
The betrayal is immediate and total.
“Oh,” Gabby says, and her whole face changes. The calculation leaves her eyes and something softer replaces it—something that looks like it costs her to show. She crouches down, and the flannel pools around her, and she puts her hands on Jasper’s face, and he pushes his head into her palms like he’s been waiting for her specifically.
“Hey, buddy,” she says. Her voice drops to something warm and unguarded that she probably doesn’t realize I can hear. “Aren’t you a good boy. Aren’t you the best boy.”
Jasper’s tail is a blur. He rolls onto his back. Full belly exposure. Maximum vulnerability. Total surrender.
He has never done this for me.
Not once.
I’ve had him for six years. I raised him from a pup. I feed him, walk him, built him a bed in the workshop that he ignores in favor of sleeping on my feet. And in six years he has neveroffered his belly to anyone—not Trace, not Dotty, not even Ryder, who sneaks him bacon when he thinks I’m not looking.
“His name is Jasper,” I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I intend, which is impressive because my baseline is already pretty flat.
“Jasper.” She scratches his belly, and he makes a sound that’s closer to purring than anything a seventy-pound Malamute should be capable of. “You’re the friendliest thing I’ve met in Alaska so far. The bar is low, but you’re clearing it.”
She looks up at me. Smiles. It’s small and tired and doesn’t fully reach her eyes, but it’s real enough to make me aware of my own hands, which are apparently just hanging at my sides doing nothing, which is what they always do, but suddenly it feels conspicuous.
Morris chooses this moment to emerge from the tree line at the edge of the clearing, casually, as if he’s returning from a morning stroll. He ambles toward the porch with the confidence of something that has never once been told no.
Gabby spots him and scrambles to her feet so fast she steps on Jasper’s tail.
Jasper yelps. Gabby gasps. Morris pauses mid-stride and stares at them both with the bored authority of a landlord inspecting his property.
“Morris,” Gabby says, and her voice is doing the thing again—the rapid escalation from calm to panicked rambling. “He was eating the porch. Is he always eating the porch? Is this a regular occurrence? Should I be concerned about structural integrity?”
“He comes and goes.”
“He comes and goes? Like he has a schedule? Like the porch is his lunch reservation?”
“He likes the salt in the wood.”
Gabby stares at me. Then at Morris. Then back at me. “This is my life now,” she says to no one in particular. “My life involvesa moose who eats my house and a man who brings me fish and a dog who loves me more than he loves his owner.”
Jasper’s tail thumps in confirmation.
I should correct her—Jasper loves me, he just loves everyone, he’s a dog—but the correction dies somewhere between my brain and my mouth because she’s standing there in Edna’s flannel with her hair falling out of its pile and her feet in wool socks on the cold porch, and for one unguarded second she has the same expression as the photograph Hank kept in his workshop. The same way of standing in a doorway like she’s deciding whether to step in or back out.
“Generator’s behind the cabin,” I say. “Pull cord, three times. The well pump sticks sometimes—hit the side and it frees up. Don’t leave food on the porch unless you want Morris to move in permanently.”
“Wait—”
But I’m already turning, already walking back toward the trail, because four hundred yards is exactly the right distance between me and whatever this is, and I’ve said more words in the last five minutes than I usually say in a day, and Jasper is still lying at her feet like a traitor, and if I stay any longer I’ll have to explain the salmon and the property and Hank and Edna, and I’m not ready for any of that.
I whistle for Jasper. He doesn’t come.
I whistle again. Sharper.
He lifts his head, looks at me, looks at Gabby, and puts his head back down on her foot.
“Jasper. Come.”
He sighs—a full-body sigh, dramatic, entirely performative—and hauls himself to his feet. He gives Gabby one last look that I can only describe as longing and then trots down the steps and falls in beside me on the trail.
“Don’t,” I tell him.