“I’m not doing that.”
I take her hands. They’re flour-covered and warm and shaking slightly, and I hold them the way I hold wood when I’m about to make the cut that determines everything—steady, certain, committed.
“I love you.”
Three words. The most important sentence I’ve ever said. Not accidentally profound, not a one-liner that lands harder than I intended. Deliberate. Chosen. The opposite of silence.
She doesn’t deflect. She doesn’t joke. She doesn’t ramble or calculate or run the numbers on what this means for the ledger.
She says one word.
“Stay.”
And I know she doesn’t mean stay on this side of the counter, or stay in the kitchen, or stay for breakfast. She means stay the way I’ve been staying for weeks—present, constant, showing up at dawn with whatever I have to offer. She means stay the way Hank never quite managed. She means: choose this. Choose me. Choose the mess and the moose and the oven and the four-hundred-yard trail that is exactly the right distance between your life and mine.
I pull her into me. She comes like she’s been waiting—not patiently, not Gabby, never patiently—but with the specific intensity of a woman who decided what she wanted and then stood still long enough for it to arrive. She’s small against me. Her head fits under my chin. Her hands grip the back of my shirt and the flour transfers to the flannel, white handprints on dark plaid, evidence of the thing that’s happening.
“You have flour on my shirt,” I say into her hair.
“You have fish smell on your hands.”
“Fair.”
She laughs against my chest. The sound vibrates through both of us and it is, without question, the best thing I have ever felt. Not the carpentry. Not the river at dawn. Not the silence of a workshop where everything makes sense. This. Her laughter against my ribs. The weight of her choosing to stay.
Jasper appears in the kitchen doorway. He looks at us—tangled together, flour-covered, his person and my person finally in the same place at the same time—and he walks over and puts his head in both our laps at once. One ear on Gabby’s thigh, one ear on mine. His tail sweeps the floor.
“Even the dog,” Gabby says, her voice muffled against my chest. “Even the dog knew before we did.”
“He always knows.”
Morris appears through the bakery window. He’s standing on the porch—of course he’s standing on the porch, because Morris treats every porch in Ashwood Falls like his personal real estate—and he’s chewing on the railing with the slow, methodical confidence of a moose who has seen everything and is untroubled by any of it.
“Morris is eating your porch again,” I say.
“Let him.” Gabby pulls back just enough to look up at me. Her eyes are wet and bright and fierce and so full of something I can see its shape even if I can’t name it. “He lives here too.”
Outside, the sun is fully up. The morning light fills the bakery in gold and dust and the smell of whatever she baked last night—rosemary and butter and salmon and sourdough, a thing that shouldn’t exist but does, a thing that only works because she’s the one who made it.
I kiss her forehead. She tilts up and I kiss her mouth instead. It’s brief and certain and tastes like flour and salt and the kind of morning you only get once.
“I should tell you something,” I say.
“What?”
“The whole town already knows.”
“Already knows what?”
“That you baked all night. Dotty saw your kitchen light at midnight and called Piper. Piper called Ryder. Ryder texted Jax. Jax texted Trace, who told Patrice, who told Birdie, who posted something on the town’s Facebook group at two a.m. that I’m told includes the phrase ‘the mute and the motormouth are finally getting their act together.’”
Gabby stares at me. “How do you know this?”
“Piper texted me.”
“Piper texted you? You don’t even respond to texts.”
“I responded to this one.”