Chapter 13 #2
I don't ask. Not yet. The asking will change the shape of the morning, and this quiet is the closest thing to peace I've had in years.
I wash the breakfast dishes because they're there.
Dash dries them because he appears at my elbow with a towel without being asked.
He's the youngest of the four, the one who left and came back, the one whose energy fills a room differently than his brothers'.
Bryan is still water. Cameron is steady current. Alex is the tide. Dash is the weather.
"You're thinking loud," he says.
"I'm washing a plate."
"You're washing a plate and thinking loud. There's a difference."
I hand him the plate. He dries it with the efficient carelessness of years of drying dishes in this kitchen.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"You can ask me anything. Whether or not I answer is yet to be determined."
"When you were running." He sets the plate on the stack. "Did you know where you were going, or did you just know what you were leaving?"
The question lands with the precision of someone who has asked it of himself. I look at him. The grin is gone. The face underneath it is young, sharp, carrying the particular awareness of a person who has spent time in motion for reasons that had nothing to do with fitness.
"I knew what I was leaving," I say.
He nods. "Same."
The word sits between us with more weight than a single syllable should carry. I hand him a glass. He dries it and holds it up to the light, checking for spots the way he was taught when he was young enough for the lesson to stick.
"Where did you go?" I ask.
"South first. Then east. Then wherever felt far enough, which turned out to be nowhere.
" He sets the glass down. "The thing about running is that the distance never adds up the way you think it will.
You put as much distance as you can between yourself and the thing you're leaving.
Then you wake up one morning and the thing is right there in the room.
It was never behind you. It was in you."
The accuracy of it tightens my throat.
"You came back."
"I found something worth coming back to." He picks up another plate. "Took me a while to figure out that stopping and settling are two different things. Stopping is giving up. Settling is choosing."
"Which one did you do?"
"I chose." He looks at me. The look is direct, as all Sawyer looks are, but his carries a warmth that Alex's doesn't. Alex's directness is heat and pressure. Dash's is sunlight. "You planning to keep running?"
"I stopped running the day I decided Gary Simmons doesn't get to choose my geography."
"That's stopping." He hands me the towel. "Choosing is harder."
I take the towel. He's right, and the rightness of it settles into the space between my ribs where the bruise used to be.
He settles back against the cabinets. The grin comes back, but it's different now. Quieter. The version of Dash that lives underneath the noise.
"Alex is a lot of things," he says. "Gentle isn't usually one of them. Whatever he's doing with you, it's different from anything I've seen."
"Is that a warning?"
"That's a compliment. My brother doesn't slow down for anything. The fact that he's slowing down for you means you're worth the effort it takes him to hold still."
He pushes off the cabinets and takes the towel back. The conversation is over. He folds the towel over the oven handle with the practiced ease of a man who knows exactly where things go in this kitchen, and the domesticity of the gesture hits differently after what he just said.
I lean against the counter after he leaves and look at the kitchen.
The stoneware is stacked. The skillet is clean.
The coffee pot is half-full and still warm.
Every surface in this room has been touched by members of the Sawyer family for longer than I've been alive.
The history in the wood and the stone is so different from the gleaming surfaces Gary kept in Anchorage that the comparison feels obscene.
Gary's kitchen was a showroom. Marble counters, commercial appliances, a range only the caterers ever used.
The beauty of it was sterile. This kitchen has grease stains on the ceiling above the stove and a deep gouge in the counter that nobody has bothered to sand out, and the imperfection of it is the most welcoming thing I've ever stood inside.
Choosing is harder than stopping. Dash is right about that. Stopping is a reflex. Choosing requires looking at what's in front of you and deciding it's worth the risk of staying still long enough for the thing behind you to catch up.
The afternoon is warm enough to stand on the porch without a coat. I lean against the railing and watch the light change across the ridge. The snow is softening. I can hear melt running somewhere beneath the surface, the sound of the world unlocking.
The door opens behind me. Alex's footsteps on the porch boards are heavy enough that I feel them through the railing before I hear them.
He stands beside me. He doesn't lean against the railing.
He braces his hands on it and looks out at the road below.
The posture is watchful in a way that goes beyond enjoying the view.
"It's beautiful," I say.
"It is."
"You're not looking at the view."
"I'm looking at the road."
The honesty is what gets me. Gary would have lied. Gary would have looked at the mountains and agreed and never mentioned the road. Alex tells me where his eyes are, and the difference between the two men expands another inch.