Chapter 7 #2
The first voice I hear is the loudest one.
“Marissa Dodson.” Koda is at the bar with a beer and a grin that takes up half his face.
The woman next to him (Tate, his wife, who I met at New Year’s) is already shaking her head like she knows what’s coming.
Koda is enormous and he knows it and he uses his volume the way other people use handshakes.
“The woman who came for a week and fell in love with a river guide. I need everyone to know I predicted this.”
“You predicted nothing. You don’t even know me.”
“I met you at New Year’s. I took one look at you and said, ‘that woman is going to end up on this mountain.’ Ask anyone.”
“He did not say that,” Noah says.
“He did not say that,” Tate confirms. “He said ‘she’s loud. I like her.’ Which is not a prediction.”
“I said it internally. It counts.”
Jules leans over to me. “I like him.”
“You would.”
“He’s me if I were a six-foot-four lumberjack.”
“That is exactly why I’m concerned.”
Koda and Jules find each other within ten minutes.
I watch it happen the way you watch two weather systems collide: with fascination and mild terror.
They’re both too loud and too funny and too unwilling to let someone else have the last word.
Tate sits between them looking entertained, like a woman who’s used to her man being the loudest person in any room and has just discovered someone who can match him.
Koda tells a story about a tree falling on his truck. Jules tells a story about a shipping container of vintage denim lost in customs. The stories become a competition. Neither of them is willing to concede the other’s story was better.
“Your tree story has no stakes,” Jules says. “Nobody cares about a truck.”
“My TRUCK had stakes. The stakes were four thousand dollars in body work.”
“My denim was worth twelve thousand.”
“Your denim was in a shipping container. It wasn’t in danger. It was in transit.”
“It was in LIMBO, Koda. Limbo is worse than danger.”
Tate catches my eye across the table. “This is going to go on for a while,” she says. She doesn’t seem bothered. She seems like a woman who fell in love with a hurricane and learned to enjoy the wind.
Sam is at the other end of the bar with Cayden. She waves. I remember her from New Year’s. She asks if I’ve tried the cinnamon rolls at Peak Bites yet and whether they changed my life. They did. She nods like this is the only correct answer.
Kai is at the end of the bar. Quiet as always. He lifts a hand when he sees me and I lift one back and that’s the whole conversation. I notice he has a clear sightline to the dartboard where Tori is setting up. Interesting.
The evening is warm and full and loud and exactly what the last night should feel like.
My friends are mixed in with lumberjacks and their wives and the noise level is unreasonable and nobody cares.
Jenna is photographing the string lights.
Claire is talking to Noah about property assessments or timber yield or something that should be boring but they’re both leaning in.
Paige is sitting next to Leena and they’re talking quietly and Paige is smiling and Leena has her hand on Paige’s arm and I love my sister for knowing exactly who needs the gentle attention without being told.
I watch this. All of it. My people and Leena’s people in the same room and the mountain outside and the life I could have if I choose it.
It’s not only about Levi. It’s about a mountain that gave Paige back to herself.
That let Tori breathe. That showed Jenna something worth chasing.
That made Claire run numbers on a different life.
That gave Jules someone to argue with who can keep up.
And that gave me a sister five minutes away instead of a flight away.
Atlanta isn’t disappearing. My clients are remote. My lease can be handled. My business can move because I have built it to survive anywhere. The only thing that can’t survive is me pretending this mountain hasn’t already become home.
The evening winds down. People finish drinks. Claire calculates the tip to the penny. I find Leena by the door, pulling on a light jacket.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” She looks at me. My sister. The one who moved first. The one who jumped.
“I’m going to stay,” I say.
Her face does something I’ve never seen it do. Leena is composed. Leena is analytical. Leena is the sister who thinks before she reacts and measures before she speaks and processes data before she forms conclusions.
Leena grabs me and holds on so tight my feet almost leave the floor.
“I knew it,” she says into my hair. “I knew it. I KNEW it.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I knew the SECOND you texted me asking about Levi like it was a casual question. You have never asked a casual question in your entire life, Marissa.”
“I ask casual questions.”
“Name one.”
“I can’t right now because you’re breaking my ribs.”
She pulls back. Her eyes are wet. My composed, analytical, scientist sister has tears running down her face in the doorway of a Montana bar because her little sister chose her mountain.
“Noah!” she calls across the room. “She’s staying!”
“I know,” Noah says. Calm. Like he knew before either of us. He probably did. Noah is Noah.
The bar hears. My friends hear. Koda raises his beer from across the room. “Welcome to the mountain, Dodson!”
“Nobody asked you, Koda!”
“Public service!”
My friends are looking at me. Jules. Claire. Tori. Jenna. Paige. Five women who came to a mountain for a week and watched me fall in love with a river guide and lose my carefully organized mind and find something I didn’t know I was missing.
Jules walks over. Looks at me.
“You’re sure.” Not a question.
“I’m sure.”
She hugs me. Tight. Quick. Jules doesn’t do long hugs. This one lasts three seconds and says everything.
“Then I’m sure too,” she says.
I look at the mountain through the open bar door.
Dark shapes against a sky full of stars.
This is where my sister lives. This is where my friends breathed and laughed and healed and argued with lumberjacks about vintage denim.
This is where I fell for a man who built a business on a river and told me his worst thing and asked me to stay and meant it.
I haven’t told him yet. That’s tomorrow.
Tomorrow I’m going to walk into Outfitters and tell a man with a painted-over sign and a one-desk office that the desk situation is about to change.