Chapter 5
five
Peyton
I wake up to the sound of the river.
For a second, I don't know where I am. Then the woody, smokey scent of the cabin catches me, I know exactly where I am.
Last night I wasn't scared.
This morning I am very scared.
He's already up. The morning light is coming in low through the window over the river, creeping through the open door.
His dog, Koda, is running around in the yard.
I can hear him in the kitchen and it is all so unbearably, specifically domestic that something in my chest starts to close off. I know this feeling.
He comes into the bedroom with two cups and sets one on the nightstand and looks at me. “Morning.”
I look back at him and I see it clearly: this man is not ambiguous. There are no signs to miss here, no version of Silas Fisher that is secretly something else. What he showed me last night… that's just what he is. I didn't mistake that. I read it correctly.
And that is somehow more frightening than if I'd been wrong.
Because I was wrong about Craig. I was wrong for two years and I built a whole life around that wrongness and then I cancelled a venue and drove north and ended up here, in this cabin, with this man, three weeks later.
That is not a timeline that allows for trust. That is a rebound.
That is someone in freefall grabbing the nearest handhold and calling it a landing.
I have to be honest about that.
"This was a mistake," I say.
“What?” He frowns. His eyebrows raise and then furrow. His expression changes so suddenly it’s like whiplash.
"I'm rebounding. I know what rebounding looks like.
I've seen it in other people and I know the mechanics of it and this is it.
I'm three weeks out of a cancelled wedding and I don't trust my own read on things right now.
I told you that." I look at him. He is holding his coffee cup and watching me with those dark, steady eyes and I feel sick but I keep going.
"You've been patient with me and kind and I don't want to use that.
I don't want to be the woman who blew through Silver Ridge and left a mess behind her. "
Silence.
I wait for him to argue. To push back. To give me something to press against so I can either fight it or fold, either way feeling like I made a real choice. I need him to give me a real choice.
He takes a slow drink of his coffee. "Okay," he says.
I can’t tell if I’ve hurt him. He’s unreadable. And I hate that most of all.
I get dressed and drive back to the hotel. I am furious with him for being so reasonable about it, which I recognize is completely irrational. He gave me exactly what I asked for. He didn't fight it. He respected my decision.
I hate it.
I sit on my hotel bed and stare at the river out the window and I try to sort through what I'm actually feeling. It’s all gotten very tangled since Vancouver.
The thing is: I don't feel like I made the right call.
I feel like I made the safe call. And those have never been the same thing for me professionally, and I've always known the difference, and I know the difference right now too.
That's the problem. I know the difference and I made the safe call anyway because the right call terrifies me.
I pick up my phone and call my sister Dani, who’s been texting me non-stop since the break up and I’ve only checked in a few times.
She picks up on the second ring.
"Finally," she says. “Girl, do you know how worried mom and dad are?”
"I did something."
"I know. I figured. I mean, you’ve been MIA for days."
"There's a man."
“Tell me everything."
I tell her everything. The river, the way he moves and talks and doesn't talk, the private bend, his hand on mine on the rod, the porch last night and what happened after. She doesn't interrupt once, which is not like her. When I finish there's a long pause.
"Okay," she says. "Can I say something that's going to be annoying?"
"Don’t you always?"
I hear her chuckle on the other end of the line before her voice goes serious. "You're describing a man who has shown you exactly who he is. No mixed signals. No contradictions. No version of him that doesn't line up with another version." A pause. "How is that like Craig?"
"The timeline," I say. "The speed of it. I told a man I barely know that I wanted to stay and then I slept with him. That's not— I don't do things like that."
"Okay but you did do that. And the question I'm asking is: were you wrong to? Not was the timeline fast, but were you wrong about him?"
I open my mouth. Close it. I don’t know what to say.
"Did you miss signs?" she says, more quietly. "With him?"
I think about Silas on the porch with two cups of coffee, not assuming, just offering. The way he fixed my grip and stepped back. The way he said “okay” this morning without argument even though I saw something tighten in his face when I said “mistake”.
"No," I say. "I didn't miss anything."
"Then your system isn't broken," Dani says. "You're just terrified of what it looks like when it's working."
I stare at the river out the window.
"That doesn't make it less fast," I say. But I hear my own voice and it sounds like someone arguing a case they've already stopped believing in.
"Nobody's asking you to get married," she says. "But you drove six hundred kilometres to get away from your life and you found something that feels real and your response was to panic and leave." A pause. "That's not wisdom. That's just running. Again."
After I hang up I sit there for a long time.
I think about what Silas said on my second day, the most personal thing he'd said to that point: the river's patient. At the time I thought it was about fishing. I'm starting to think it was about something else entirely.