Chapter 10
TREYTON
I worked through the dark. She had drawn flowers. I was going to carve them.
I measured twice because I didn't trust my memory and then again because I didn't trust my hands.
Two boards. Front and back. The size of her sketchbook.
The front board stayed plain, just the wood, oiled smooth with a small columbine carved offset in the corner where her thumb would rest when she held it. The back board required all the work.
The alpine meadow I carved on the inside included every flower from her book.
The glacier lily she'd been lying beside the day she arrived.
The pearly everlasting from the west fence.
The forget-me-not she'd named Piper. The paintbrush.
The columbine. All of them scattered across the back board the way they scattered in the high meadow where I'd first wanted to kiss her.
I worked from memory. I didn't need the sketchbook. I'd been watching her draw for weeks. I knew which flowers she came back to. I knew which ones got names.
My mind strayed but I didn’t let myself think about Soleil or about Bison’s last words. I didn’t think about what I was going to say to her in the morning or what the morning might look like or what I would do if she had already loaded the SUV by the time I got there.
I worked the way Mama Mae had taught me to work when I was thirteen years old and falling apart for the first time after she took me in. Your hands know what they're doing, Treyton. Let them. Your head will catch up.
The columbine took the longest. Five petals, five spurs, the center dense with stamens fine enough they didn't look like splinters. I'd carved columbines before, but this one had to be right. It had to be perfect.
By five-thirty the carving was done.
I sanded both boards, oiled them with the linseed I used for everything I cared about, and left them on the bench to dry. Then I walked out of the workshop into the pre-dawn cold with the light coming up gray over the east ridge.
The valley was full of fog and my breath misted in the air. Biscuit wasn’t on my porch. He was where I'd left him last night, a hundred yards down the ridge on her porch step. Even in the early gray light, I could see him. He knew what love was. He’d sat at her door all night and waited.
I walked down to my cabin and got cleaned up. Then I wrapped the two boards in a piece of clean canvas, carried them under my arm, and walked down the ridge to Soleil’s door.
The light was on in her kitchen. I wasn’t surprised to see she was already awake.
I had known that, in some way that lived in the same place as my hands — she had been awake the whole time I had been working, and we had been awake on the same ridge in the same dark for the same six hours, and the only difference between us was that I had been carving so I could convince her to stay while she’d been packing to leave.
Biscuit raised his head when I came up the gravel path. He didn’t bother to get up. He just looked at me with the patient look of a dog reserving judgment.
I stopped at the bottom of the porch step and looked at him.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
He thumped his tail once. I hadn’t earned his full forgiveness yet, but it would come.
I knocked. Two times, soft, the way Mama Mae knocked when she didn't want to wake up everyone all at once.
Soleil opened the door. She was already dressed in a pair of jeans and the sweater she'd had on the night she arrived. A black tie held her hair away from her eyes. Her face was the closed-sketchbook face from last night. She’d been crying at some point and had decided to stop. She was holding a coffee in both hands.
“I made you something,” I said.
She looked at the canvas under my arm, then back at my face. She didn't move.
“Can I come in?”
She stepped back from the door.
Boxes stacked by the table and her open suitcase spread across the bed. The scent of coffee lingered in the air.
I unwrapped the boards on the kitchen table and laid them side by side.
She set her coffee down, crossed the small kitchen, and stood at the table looking down at the carving.
I watched her face.
My plan hadn’t included what I would do if she just looked at it and didn’t react.
It had included her crying. It had included her being angry.
It had included her telling me to take it and leave and even included what I should do if she told me to fuck the hell off.
But my plan hadn’t included what her face actually did.
It settled, the same settling I'd seen at the bench at the lookout, at the underside of the kitchen drawer in this cabin, at the workshop the day she undid the buttons on my shirt.
Like she was confirming something she already knew.
“You knew,” I said.
She nodded.
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“Every one?”
“Every one I could find.”
She didn't say seven. She didn't list them. She just stood at the table with her hand hovering above the meadow, and her thumb did the small slow trace it always did, and after a long beat she lowered her hand to the wood and set it flat and closed her eyes. Her fingers traced the petals without pressing, the way someone might touch something they’re afraid might disappear.
“Soleil.”
She opened her eyes but didn't look at me. Her attention stayed on the carving.
“I was going to ask you,” she said. “Last week. After my meeting with Evelyn. I was going to ask you if I could stay.”
“I know.”
“How did you —”
“I knew it in the same way you knew about the carvings.”
She turned to look at me. The closed-sketchbook face was gone. What replaced it was something I hadn’t earned and was being given anyway, the way she gave most things — without making me beg.
I’d been practicing the sentence since one in the morning, broken into three pieces because that was the only way my mouth could form it.
“You belong here,” I said.
I stopped, not anticipating the way the first part would feel coming out. I’d been afraid saying the words would be hard, but they weren’t hard, just new. I made myself keep going.
“You belong with me. I'm done pretending you don't.”
She bit down on her bottom lip and held my gaze. What I saw in her eyes gave me the strength to go on.
“You're mine, Soleil. And I’m yours if you'll have me.”
Silence crashed down around me and I waited.
I hadn’t let myself plan past that. All I could do was stand in the kitchen and let her decide if I was worth the trouble.
She slowly set her hand on mine. Her thumb moved against my knuckle. Then she stepped around the corner of the table and pulled my face down to hers.
She kissed me first.
She kissed me with the coffee still on her breath and the cold of the kitchen still on her skin and her sweater bunched up against my chest, both hands flat against my jaw.
She kissed me the way I’d hoped she would but didn’t deserve.
And when I kissed her back, she made a sound against my mouth, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and I pulled her closer.
She didn't say yes. She didn't have to.
For a long time we stood there with my hands at her back in the cold of the kitchen with Biscuit on the porch step waiting.
After a while she stepped back half a step. “I found the first one on the bench. Then I found the rest. I never said anything because they didn’t belong to me, they belong to you.”
“I know.”
“I drew the table because I had to draw it. I didn't draw it to —”
“I know.”
“You said —”
I ran my thumb over her bottom lip. “I know what I said. I know what I said and I know why I said it, but I was wrong.”
She nodded.
“I'm slow,” I said.
“You're not slow.”
“I'm slow with this. I was slow in the cabin with the storm. I was slow at the bench. I was slow last night. I would have been slow this morning if I hadn't started working at midnight and let my hands do the work I was too afraid to say out loud.”
Her mouth curved into something not quite a smile. Something better. She put her hand on the carving. On the columbine at the center.
“They're yours now,” I said. “All of it. The carving. The shop. The cabin. The dog, which you already have. The ridge. You don't have to take it. You just have to know it's yours if you do.”
“I want all of it,” she said. “I want a winter up here. I want to know what your ridge looks like in February. I want to be cold with you. I want to know what you carve when there's nothing on the bench.”
“I'm going to need a minute to catch up to that.”
“Take it.”
I pulled her in against my chest and she let me, her forehead against my collarbone the way it had been at the storm shelter, her hands closed in the back of my shirt.
We stood by the kitchen table with the carving on it and the boxes by the door and the coffee getting cold and Biscuit waiting for us to catch up to what he knew all along.
Her heart was going too fast. After a beat, mine was matching it.
“Soleil.”
“Yeah.”
“The boxes.”
“They can stay packed for a few days. I have to figure out what to tell the residency people. I have to call my agent. I have to call my mother.” She paused. “I might have to call your mother.”
“Probably.”
“You should warn her.”
“She's going to find out before I have a chance to warn her. The gossip mill around here works fast.”
“Good.”
I held her. After a long minute, she whispered against my collarbone. “Can I open the door for him?”
“He's not coming in until you tell him to.”
She turned her head toward the door. “Biscuit.”
The dog came through at a polite trot, registered the two of us, and sat down at my feet with his chin against my boot. Forgiveness, finally.
Soleil laughed against my chest. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh in over a week. I’d stolen her smile away from her, but now she had it back. I never wanted to be responsible for doing that again.
I held her. I held the back of her head with my hand.
I closed my eyes against the gray morning light coming through the kitchen window and let myself, for the first time since I was a kid in the back room of a house in Broken Bend that had become mine in stages I hadn't noticed at the time, believe I had landed.
She tipped her face up to look at me.
“Can we have coffee,” she said. “And can you open the box on the table by the window. There's something inside I never told you about.”
I walked to the table and picked up the mountain ash box. I set my hand on the lid and looked back at her.
“Open it, Treyton.”
I opened it.
A folded piece of paper sat inside. It was sketched in pencil, dated three weeks ago. My hand rested on the underside of the bench at the lookout, with the columbine carved in. She had drawn it that night and folded it and put it in the box the morning after I gave it to her.
She had been keeping it.
I looked at her.
“They were yours,” she said. “All of them. And one of them was mine.”
I closed the lid, set the box down, and crossed the room to pull her into my arms again.
“I love you,” I said it against her hair. I’d been carrying it with me so long, the words had started to feel like part of my own body.
She didn't answer right away, just held on. Then she tilted her head back and smiled up at me. “I know. I love you too.”
Biscuit thumped his tail against my boot, satisfied.