Jace is still on the porch when I come out with the first batch of scones. He hasn’t left. He’s just been sitting there, in the sun, with Jasper at his feet, waiting.
He’s always been waiting.
“Salmon scone?” I ask.
He takes one. Eats it. Nods once.
“Those are right,” he says.
Same words. Same sentence. Same man who stood in this kitchen six weeks ago and gave me the first compliment that felt like it meant something.
I sit down beside him with my own scone and we eat in a silence that is warm and full and nothing like a wall.
The ledger page is still on the step where he set it down. The wind catches it, lifts it, carries it off the porch and into the grass.
Neither of us goes after it.
Chapter 20
Jace
She bakes through the night.
I know this because the light in Sugar & Flour’s kitchen doesn’t go off. I’m sitting on my porch—our porch, mine and Jasper’s, the one that faces the trail—and through the trees, if I look at exactly the right angle, I can see the glow of the bakery’s kitchen window. A warm yellow square in the darkness, steady as a heartbeat.
She’s not stress-baking. I can tell the difference now. Stress-baking has a rhythm to it—frantic, uneven, an energy that produces quantity over quality. This is different. This is purposeful. This is a woman who’s made a decision and is translating it into flour and butter and heat.
Jasper is lying across my feet, which he’s been doing since he came back from Gabby’s yesterday. He’d spent three days with Gabby after I shut down—three days of choosing the woman over me, which I deserved, which I understood, which still felt like a specific kind of punishment that only a dog who loves you can deliver.
He came back with his tail low and a look that said: I’m here because she told me you needed me, not because I’ve forgiven you.
I’ve been judged by a dog. Not for the first time, but this feels more official. Like he’s filed paperwork.
Fair.
The night is cool. Late summer in Alaska, so the sky never fully darkens—it just thins, goes pale at the edges, turns the mountains into charcoal outlines against a sky that can’t commit to being night. The kind of almost-dark where you can read a book outside at midnight if you need to. Where colors don’t disappear, they just shift into something other. Silver. Indigo. The blue that exists between night and day.
I’ve always loved this light. The in-between. The almost-dark that still holds enough color to see by. It’s the light Hank used to work in during summer, leaving the workshop door open so the dusk poured in across the bench, saying “good wood shows itself in half-light.” He’d stand there with a piece of cherry or maple in his hands and turn it slowly, letting the changing light show him the grain from different angles. “The light changes, the wood changes,” he’d say. “You have to know how to see it in every version of itself.”
I’m learning that’s true about people too.
I think about Hank. About the promise I made. About how promises are just words until someone needs you to keep them.
He’d been in the chair—his chair, the one by the window in the workshop, the one I built for him when his back started going. The wood is walnut. The joints are hidden. It’s a chair built to last. He looked smaller by the end. Like he was disappearing gradually. He said: "Edna’s place. Take care of it."
Not a question. Hank never asked questions he already knew the answer to. He knew me like wood knows the grain. He knew what I would do before I did.
“Yes,” I’d said.
“And if someone comes for it,” he’d said, and his voice was thinner than paper, barely there, a candle going out in a roomwith no wind. “If someone from her family comes. You’ll take care of them too.”
“Yes.”
He’d closed his eyes. Opened them one more time. “She was the best person I ever knew,” he’d said. “And I never told her.”
That was the last thing he said to me. Not goodbye. Not I love you. A regret. Forty years of love and he never said it.
I almost did the same thing.