Chapter 3
TREYTON
It had been three days, and she'd already broken me of two routines.
The first was coffee at the Switchback at six.
I'd gone in Friday and she'd been at the counter talking to Mae about wildflowers in a way that made Mae look like she was enjoying herself, which Mae didn’t do at six in the morning, ever.
I'd turned around and gone home and made coffee on my own stove.
The second was checking the fence on the west pasture before the sun came up.
I'd gone out Monday morning, and Soleil had been in the meadow with her sketchbook before I made it past the first post. She'd waved at me like we’d been neighbors for decades, and I'd turned around and gone back to the shop.
I wasn’t avoiding her. I was adjusting my schedule. There was a difference. The fact that I couldn't have explained the difference to anyone, including myself, didn’t matter.
What mattered was that Biscuit had stopped sleeping at the foot of my bed.
He still came home at night. But he slept in the kitchen now. By the door. Facing the door. The dog had been mine for four years, and he'd never once slept anywhere except the foot of my bed. Now he was sleeping by the door like he was on call.
I knew what he was on call for. I wasn't going to talk to him about it either. He knew what he'd done.
Thursday morning I was on my screened-in porch with my own coffee when I heard her SUV come up the drive. The door opened, then closed. Footsteps crunched on the gravel. Then she came up the steps to my back porch.
“Treyton?”
I didn't get up. I looked at the screen door instead. She was holding a paper bag from the Switchback, and I could smell the cinnamon from ten feet away.
“I brought these as a thank-you,” she said. “For walking me down the trail the other day. Just a small gesture of appreciation between neighbors. Oh, and Mae says hi.”
“Mae did not say hi.”
“Mae said, and I quote, ‘Tell him I'm still mad about the gate.’ But I'm interpreting that as hi.”
I could have invited her onto the porch. Could have offered her some coffee and gone along with her charade of pretending we were the type of neighbors who sat around and made small talk, but I didn’t.
She set the bag on the railing. There was a long pause where she was clearly deciding whether to leave or whether to stand there and make me look at her, and I could see her waffling before she finally decided.
“Okay,” she said. “Enjoy them.”
She turned and walked back toward her cabin. I waited until she was past my truck before I got up.
The paper crinkled as I opened the bag. Two cinnamon rolls inside. Still warm. The icing on the underside was already starting to melt into the paper.
I'd been mad about the Switchback gate for two years.
Mae had built it wrong and refused to admit she'd built it wrong and the whole thing was now a kind of slow ambient warfare between us that included her never giving me the day-old rolls for free and me never volunteering to fix the gate even though I drove past it three times a week.
The fact that she'd told Soleil about the gate within a few days of meeting her was a betrayal I'd address with Mae directly the next time I saw her.
The fact that the rolls were warm meant Soleil had driven up the ridge with them on the passenger seat, which meant she'd asked Mae to make them fresh, which meant Mae had made them fresh, which Mae did not do. That was a lot to take in.
I ate one of the rolls standing in the kitchen, then walked back out to the porch. Biscuit was gone.
He’d been on the porch when I went inside, and he hadn’t been on the porch when I came back out. There were only two places Biscuit went when he wasn't with me. One of them was the meadow, and the other was Cabin Three. Damn dog.
Soleil’s laughter floated through the trees. I stood on my porch with the second cinnamon roll in my hand and listened to my dog and my tenant in her cabin through the open window and realized this was now my life.
My cabin was supposed to be a safe space, especially the attached workshop.
I'd built the shop before I'd built anything else on the property.
Nine years ago, my first summer up here, before there were cabins or fences, I'd put the door on the south side, so the morning light came in at the workbench.
I'd left two windows on the west wall and a skylight in the roof.
The shop was the only building on the ridge where I'd taken the time to do finishing work on the wood.
The door frame was tongue-and-groove, the windows were trimmed, the floor was set tight enough that sawdust didn't slip between the boards.
It was where I worked. It was where Biscuit slept when he wasn't sleeping by the door or, apparently, in someone else's cabin.
It was the one piece of the property I didn't rent and didn't show and didn't think about as anyone's space but mine.
The door was open because the morning was warm.
I stood at the workbench finishing the curved leg of a side table made from black walnut.
I’d put in three weeks of slow work, and the piece had already been paid for.
I was using the spokeshave because the curve wasn't quite where I wanted it, and the spokeshave was the only tool that let me feel the wood with the same hand that shaped it.
Fully absorbed by the task, I didn't hear her until she was already inside.
“I just wanted to —”
I turned around with the spokeshave still in my hand.
She stopped two steps in. “Sorry. The door was open.”
I slid my safety goggles to the top of my head, annoyed and somehow happy to see her at the same time. “It's open because it's warm.”
“Right.” Her gaze darted around the space.
She was looking around the way she'd looked at the lily on her first day, with the kind of focus most people only gave to screens.
She took in the workbench… the lumber stack against the wall…
the hand tools on the pegboard… the half-built rocking chair in the corner that I'd been ignoring for a month because I couldn't figure out the back angle.
She also took in the tool in my hand. “That's a spokeshave.”
I didn't respond.
“I had a teacher in college who used one. She made canoe paddles.” Soleil took another step in. “Can I — is it okay if I —”
“Why are you here, Soleil?”
She stopped. Looked at me. Recovered.
“Biscuit was at my cabin. I brought him back. I didn't think he should be wandering.”
My chest tightened. I’d invested four years in that dog, and this was how he repaid me? “He wasn't wandering. He was at your cabin.”
“That's wandering, by my definition.”
I set the spokeshave down on the bench. Slowly. Because if I didn't, I was going to hold it tighter than the wood deserved.
She wasn't looking at me anymore. Her gaze had moved to the table. She walked around it, not touching, just looking. She bent down to see the joinery on the underside. Then she straightened and ran her hand along the top, barely grazing the wood, then leaned in close enough to see the grain.
“This is careful,” she said.
Her comment set off warning bells. Careful wasn’t a word I'd heard anyone say about my work.
Careful was the word I used in my own head, when I was alone, in the moments before I did something I knew I shouldn't do.
Careful was a word my foster mother used to use when I was twelve years old and she'd caught me trying to lift something too heavy. Careful, Treyton. I’d never thought a stranger would walk into my shop and use the same word about a piece of furniture I was building for a buyer in Aspen who wanted reclaimed mountain timber for his second house.
She looked up. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't —”
“It's fine.”
“It's not. I keep walking into your space.”
“It's fine, Soleil.”
She didn't believe me, but she didn't push it. She took one more look at the table, at the underside, where I'd done the worst possible thing I could have done given the situation, and then she turned to go.
I opened my mouth. Then closed it.
She walked out of the shop with Biscuit at her heel. He didn't even look at me.
I'd worked through lunch by the time I could move.
I'd been carving on the underside of the side table for a week. It wasn’t the kind of carving anyone would see.
It was the kind that lived where the buyer's hand would find it once a year, maybe, when they tipped the table on its side to clean.
A column of paintbrush blooms, three of them, the way they grew on the south face of the ridge in late June.
I'd been working on the smallest one when she'd come in, and the small one was visible from where she'd been bent down looking at the joinery.
She'd seen it. I knew she'd seen it because she hadn't said a word about it. If she'd missed it, she would have said something about the joinery, but she hadn't.
I sanded the surface of the leg I'd been working on with the spokeshave. I cleaned the bench. I put the spokeshave back on the pegboard. The leg was salvageable. The leg had always been salvageable. The work would survive me being an idiot for an hour.
I picked up Biscuit's water bowl from the corner of the shop and refilled it from the spigot outside. He wasn't there to drink from it, but I refilled it anyway because that was my routine and my routine was the only thing keeping me upright.
By two I was facing the west fence with a roll of barbed wire and a tamping bar.
The fence didn't need work. I'd checked it last week. I was checking it again because the meadow was on the way to the west pasture and the meadow was where Soleil had been every other afternoon this week. If I happened to be in the meadow with a tamping bar and a roll of wire, it wouldn’t be because I was looking for her.
It would be because the fence was the fence, and the fence needed to be checked.
She was there. Sitting on a flat rock about twenty feet off the trail with her sketchbook open on her thigh and her hair pulled up off her neck, talking to a columbine. Biscuit curled up at her feet.
I walked past her like I hadn't seen her. Even made it eight steps before she said my name.
“Treyton.”
I stopped but didn't turn.
“I wasn't going to say anything,” she said. “About what I walked in on. I know you didn't want me in there. I'm sorry.”
I'd been waiting for her to apologize. I'd been waiting for an opening to be cold to her and have her wince and have her leave me alone the rest of the summer.
But instead of ignoring her like I’d planned, I turned around. “It's a side table. Black walnut. For a guy in Aspen.”
The sun was behind her lighting up her hair and creating a glow around her head like an angel. The flower she'd been talking to was leaning slightly toward her, which I knew was because of the wind but made it look like, in that moment, that the flower was listening.
I'd never seen the line of her throat in this light before. I could feel the pull of what I wanted to do next. I didn't move.
“He'll never know about the carving,” I said. “On the underside. He bought it because his designer told him reclaimed wood was in this year.”
She didn't say anything, just sat there looking at me.
“You saw it.”
She nodded. “I wasn't going to bring it up. It wasn't mine to bring up.”
As much as I wanted to, I didn't sit down next to her. That was a line I wouldn’t let myself cross.
Instead, I worked the section of fence twenty feet from her rock.
I went slow, taking longer than the section needed, and she went back to her sketchbook.
My traitorous dog went back to sleeping at her feet, and for about forty minutes the only sounds on the meadow were the tamping bar going into the dirt and the wind in the pines and Soleil murmuring to a columbine about how tired she was of drawing it in profile.
I didn’t know much about her background, but I could tell by the way she carried herself that we’d lived completely different lives.
I’d lived in the dark while the light seemed to follow her everywhere.
Still, we had a few things in common. Even though I’d never told a single person on this ridge that I knew them, I knew the names of every flower in the meadow.
When I stepped over a cluster of glacier lilies to get to the next post, she said, without looking up, “You went around them.”
“There are flowers there.”
“There are flowers everywhere. You went around those on purpose.”
I picked up the tamping bar.
“What's the small white one with the cluster of petals? It’s the one growing out of the rock by the east trail.”
The name slipped out before I’d decided to answer. “Pearly everlasting.”
She smiled and wrote it down on the corner of her sketchbook without looking up.
I worked the rest of the fence in silence.
When I was done, it was almost six and the light was going gold on the high side of the ridge. I picked up the tamping bar and the wire, and I started back toward the shop. Biscuit got up from her feet and trotted after me, which was the first time in three days he'd bothered to follow.
She didn't say goodbye.
I made it to the shop, put the tools away, washed my hands in the utility sink, and walked back out front to whistle for Biscuit one more time before I went inside.
Something felt out of place. Her sketchbook was on my workbench.
I hadn't seen her come in. She must have come in while I was washing my hands. The sketchbook was open. Not all the way open — folded back on itself. Like she'd left it that way on purpose.
The page on top was the glacier lily from her first day. The hopeful one.
The page underneath, when I turned it, was a flower with a face I recognized.
It was scowling.
The caption under it, written in pencil in a hand I was already learning, said: The stubborn flower.
I closed the sketchbook but didn’t put it back on the workbench. Instead, I carried it into my cabin, set it on the kitchen table, and stood looking at it for a long time without opening it again.
When I went outside, Biscuit was sitting on the porch waiting for me. He looked guilty… again.