Chapter 8
Levi
The drive to Outfitters takes five minutes. Today it takes forever.
She didn’t answer. Two days ago, in my bed, with my arms around her and her head on my chest and the truth between us like something we’d both just survived, I said “stay.” One word. The biggest word I’ve said since the day I told Danny I was sorry.
She put her head on my chest. She didn’t leave.
But she didn’t say yes.
Yesterday she spent the day with her friends.
The text came at nine in the morning: Going on a hike with the girls.
Last full day. Talk later? Warm. Normal.
Not the text of a woman who’d just decided to rearrange her life for a mountain and a man.
I wrote back something easy. Told her to have fun. Didn’t hear from her again.
I told myself that was fine. It was their last day. The reunion she’d planned for six months. Of course she spent it with them. Of course she did.
But I kept checking my phone. Not constantly. Every ten minutes. Then every five. Then I put it in a drawerand lasted forty-five minutes before I pulled it out again. Nothing. The screen as empty as the second desk slot.
I went to bed early because being awake was worse. Lay there in the dark in the cabin I built and thought about how it’s going to feel to walk into Outfitters every morning knowing she sat in that chair and measured my failures and saw potential and then went back to Atlanta.
Now it’s the morning after the last day.
Flights are getting caught. Bags are getting packed.
The itinerary is complete. And I’m pulling into the Outfitters lot at 6:15 because I couldn’t lie in bed anymore staring at a ceiling I built with my own hands and wondering if the woman I want to share it with is already gone.
I unlock the office. Everything is the same. Except nothing feels the same. I look at those dents in the floor every morning. Most days they’re just dents. Today they’re a question I asked that didn’t get answered.
I should call Danny. She told me to. “Tell him you’re building something again.” I haven’t called because I don’t know what I’m building yet. I don’t know if the thing I want to build just got on a plane to Atlanta.
I sit at the desk. Open the laptop. Stare at the homepage she redesigned.
The stock photo is gone. The real canyon shots she took from the trail are up.
The booking system she rebuilt works in two clicks instead of five.
She did all of this in a week. She looked at my business and saw its future and built half of it before I even understood what she was doing.
If she leaves, I’ll still have the website. The brand. The Instagram strategy in a Google Doc with color-coded sections and a content calendar that runs through October. She left her fingerprints all over this business and they’ll be here whether she is or not.
That’s worse. That’s so much worse than if she’d never come.
I hear gravel. A car pulling into the lot.
I look through the window. It’s the van. The rental van that six women arrived in a week ago with sunscreen arguments and highlighted waivers and a laminated itinerary and a woman holding a clipboard who looked at me like I was something she was evaluating.
Marissa gets out.
She’s carrying something. A bag. I can’t tell what’s in it from here. She walks toward the office with the stride of a woman who has a plan and has no intention of explaining it before she executes it.
She opens the door. She doesn’t say good morning. She doesn’t say “we need to talk.” She doesn’t say anything about staying or leaving or flights or Atlanta.
She pulls a tape measure out of the bag. An actual tape measure. Yellow. Professional-grade. Not borrowed from someone’s junk drawer. She bought this.
She walks to the empty wall. The one with the dents in the floor. The one I’ve looked at every day for three years and seen absence. She crouches down, extends the tape, holds it against the baseboard, and starts measuring.
I watch her. My brain is doing something slow and seismic.
She’s measuring the wall. She’s measuring the WALL.
The empty wall. The Danny wall. The wall that’s been a monument to the thing I lost and she’s holding a tape measure against it like it’s a problem she can solve with sixty inches of retractable steel.
“What are you doing?” I ask. My voice doesn’t sound like my voice.
“Measuring for my desk.” She doesn’t look up. She notes something on her phone. Moves the tape to the other end of the space. “Yours is fifty-four inches. I want sixty. If we angle them toward each other there’s room for both plus a filing cabinet that isn’t from 1997.”
My desk is fifty-four inches. She measured my desk. She already has a floor plan. She has been PLANNING this. While I was lying in bed checking my phone every five minutes and bracing for goodbye, she was looking up desk dimensions.
“Your desk,” I say.
“My desk. This office is running a one-person operation with a two-person space. That’s inefficient.” She stands up. Looks at me. “I’m fixing it.”
I’m not breathing. I might not be standing. I’m not sure my legs are doing what legs are supposed to do because a woman just walked into my office with a tape measure and started planning the rest of my life and I think my heart just left my body.
“You’re staying,” I say.
“I’m staying.”
“In Montana.”
“On this mountain. In this office. With you.” She tilts her head. “I told Leena last night. She cried. I’ve never seen Leena cry. It was alarming.”
“You’re staying.”
“You already said that.”
“I need to say it a few more times.”
“Then say it while you help me measure. I need the distance from the window to the outlet.”
I cross the room. She’s holding the tape measure and looking at me with the expression of a woman who has made a decision and is already three steps into the execution. This is Marissa. She doesn’t say “I’m staying.” She brings a tape measure.
I take the tape measure out of her hand. Set it on the desk. Put both hands on her face. She looks up at me. Her eyes are bright and sure and she is the most certain person I have ever met and right now all of that certainty is aimed at me.
“I love you,” I say. “I should have said it before. I should have said it at the waterfall. I should have said it in my bed when you were lying on my chest and I was too scared to breathe. I love you, Marissa.”
“I love you too.” No hesitation. No deflection. No joke. Marissa, who has a comeback for everything, who has never let a moment pass without organizing it, just says the words. Clean and direct.
This is the right place. This office. This wall with the dents in the floor that are about to hold something new.
I kiss her. She kisses me back. Her hands on my chest, mine in her hair. We stand in the office that used to be the loneliest room I owned and it doesn’t feel lonely anymore. It feels like the first page of something.
When I pull back, she’s smiling. The big one. The one that reorganizes every room she’s in.
“Call Danny,” she says.
“Now?”
“Right now. Tell him.”
I pick up my phone. She doesn’t leave the room. She stands next to me, hand on my arm, while I call the number I call every couple of weeks with the same practiced update.
Danny picks up on the second ring.
“Levi. Hey, man. What’s up?”
“I met someone,” I say. “She’s staying. We’re going to fix this place up.”
There’s a beat. One second. I can hear Danny breathing.
“Yeah?” he says. And his voice sounds like it did when we were twenty-three and he unrolled a napkin sketch of a business plan on a picnic table and said “what do you think?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Danny says. “That’s really good, Levi.”
“She measured for a desk this morning. In your old spot.”
“She bring her own tape measure?”
“She brought her own tape measure.”
Danny laughs. It’s the best sound I’ve heard on the phone in three years. “I like her already.”
“You’ll meet her.”
“I’d better.” A pause. “I’m glad, man. I’m really glad.”
“Thanks, Danny.”
“Now go be with your girl and stop calling me at seven in the morning.”
I hang up. Marissa is looking at me. Her hand is still on my arm.
“He laughed,” I say.
“Good.” She picks the tape measure back up. “Now. About this desk.”
“About this desk.” I look at it. My desk. Fifty-four inches of scarred wood surface where I’ve run this business alone for three years. Where I’ve sat with the laptop and the permits and the weight of doing it all myself because I thought that was the safest way.
Marissa is measuring the window. She’s three steps ahead, building the future I haven’t caught up to yet.
I look at this woman in my office with a tape measure and a floor plan and I think about the fact that there are no trips booked today. The lot is empty. The river is the only thing within earshot. And the desk she’s measuring around is exactly the right height.
“Hey, trouble.”
She looks up. “What?”
“Put the tape measure down.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“I know. So am I.” I walk toward her. She reads my face and the tape measure retracts with a snap. “I have no clients today. The lot’s empty. It’s just us and the river.” I stop in front of her. Close. “And I’m going to need that desk clear for the next hour.”
“An hour is ambitious.”
“I’m an ambitious man.”
“You’re a man who called me trouble on a raft and didn’t know what he was starting.”
“I knew exactly what I was starting.” I put my hands on her waist. She puts her hands on my chest. “And I plan to finish it. At least three times.”
She laughs. The full one. The laugh that fills a canyon and started all of this. The one I heard on Day 1 when the wave hit and she came up grinning and I called her trouble because it was the safest word I had.
And it still means the same thing it’s always meant.
I love you. Stay. Let me build this with you.
I lift her onto the desk.