The line went dead.
I stood there for a moment with the phone in my hand, the cold from the glass door seeping through my jacket. Through the window, Lily had given up on the cup. She was holding the rabbit up, examining one of its ears with a small, focused frown, checking for a loose stitch or a new tear.
Monday. Two days away.
I went back inside, the warmth of the shop hitting me like a physical weight.
"Everything okay?" Lily asked. She didn't look up from the rabbit, her small fingers busy with the fabric.
"Yeah," I said, sliding back into the booth. "Got a job."
She looked up then. She processed the news for a moment with those serious, dark eyes, searching my face for what it meant.
"Is it a good job?" she asked.
"I think so," I said. "Fixing cars."
She considered this, her thumb tracing the curve of the rabbit's ear. "Mommy said you worked on an oil rig."
"That's right." I settled back into the booth. "Out in the middle of nowhere. Flat land, no trees. Just wind and steel."
She frowned. "Like the North Pole?"
"Not quite that far, but it felt like it."
"Did you see polar bears?"
"No polar bears," I said. "Just a lot of mud and a lot of other guys who needed haircuts."
She watched me for a moment, weighing that image and deciding it wasn't quite as interesting as she’d hoped. "Mommy said you used to cut down trees, too."
"For a bit, yeah. Up in Canada."
"Why?"
"Someone had to," I said.
She seemed to accept that. Necessity was a language she understood. She looked down at the rabbit, then back up at me. "Did you like it?"
I thought about it. The Rockies at five in the morning, the cold so clean it hurt to breathe, the bone-deep crack of a tree finally coming down. "Yeah," I said. "I did."
"Why did you stop?"
"Moved on to the next thing."
She turned this over, her small face serious. "What's the next thing now?"
I looked at her across the table. She had Cassie's eyes—that same direct way of asking a question, like the answer was a coordinate to be found rather than a conversation to be had.
"This," I said.
She looked at me for a second longer. Then she went back to the rabbit.
I sat there and finished my ice cream. Outside, the light was turning into something that might actually become sun. For the first time since that phone rang in North Dakota, the shape of the future wasn't just a problem to solve.
It was right here, sitting across from me, holding a one-eyed rabbit.
Chapter Twenty-Three