Chapter 40
I’ve Lost Him but I’m Not Lost
The morning after the party, the sky is already slipping toward grey. Western light—soft, seaworn, a little apologetic—seeps through Gavin’s kitchen window and lands on a note, folded over with just an ‘A’ on the front. I stare at it, afraid to read it and longing to read it at the same time.
When I open it, I’m crushed a little bit more, which should make it easier to let him go, but it doesn’t. A single piece of paper. The handwriting is his, but the tone is not.
Gavin: Ava—Take your time moving out. I won’t be back for three months—NYC stuff. Make yourself at home until then. —G
It’s the kind of message that reads like permission, not goodbye, and that hurts in a new way. It feels like I’m a subletter he barely knows instead of the woman who kissed him like her lungs depended on it, then walked away because she thought it was the right thing to do. There’s nothing sentimental here. No clue what he’s feeling, except I’m easy enough to let go that it only takes a two-line text.
By late morning, I’m back at the garden.
The air still smells like night-blooming jasmine and burnt sugar. There are champagne corks in the flower beds. Candle stubs leaning sideways in the dirt. The aftermath of Marisol’s party is everywhere—but Gavin isn’t. I walk the path we danced on. Stand under the same tree where I told him a lie dressed up as logic.
What we had... it was a moment.
I scrub until my knuckles sting and my eyes blur, the ache in my body a welcome distraction from the one in my chest. When Kiki arrives, I tell her everything. She gives me a good hug, then understands that I need to work, to move, to distract. We stack glasses. Re-line the prep tables. Rewire the market lights. Re-pot fallen rosemary bushes. The soil is still thick under my nails, but I feel hollow. Like I packed my heart into one of the catering crates and sent it off to be sterilized.
We’ve accepted dinner reservations for locals through the next month, which feels like both a tether and a dare. I throw myself into prep. I map out menus. Rotate seasonal ingredients. Start a spreadsheet Kiki will mock for being neurotic and then secretly copy.
It helps. Until it doesn’t.
Because when I stop moving, the questions flood back in.
Should I have told him the truth?
Did he believe me when I said he didn’t matter?
If I convinced him to walk away in one conversation, how much did he really care?
After the garden has been restored, Kiki and I drink a bottle of Syrah and talk about future options. We could go back to Brooklyn. Marisol made it clear that we are both welcome to return, with promotions and raises. Kiki could keep up with her freelance event jobs. I could scrounge up some remote editing work. We say it like we mean it. Like we’re not both looking at the sky here, as if it holds secrets we haven’t finished uncovering.
Three days after the party, the press requests start coming in.
A food editor from Portland—one I’ve been quietly stalking for years— calls.
A podcast on relationships wants to talk to us.
Padma wants to feature us on her show.
A woman from New York—the kind of cookbook editor whose authors win James Beard awards and casually thank her in their acknowledgments—emails to ask if I’ve ever considered writing one.
She mentions the way I plate. The way my menus read like a story. And, most of all, how I seem to understand heartbreak well enough to cook someone out of it.
I reread her email three times.
It would be easier to say yes if I knew where I’d be in three months.
Out of what we say is just curiosity, Kiki and I tour a cottage for rent with a questionable smell. Then, a tiny house with a composting toilet that makes Kiki say she’d rather die. We look at a space above a bait shop that shakes whenever someone closes the cooler. I start to wonder if this whole experience was a beautiful, painful summer fantasy. A fever dream with heirloom fruit.
One morning, I walk the long loop around Mountain Lake. The wind slices through the cedars, cold enough to make my breath visible. Fallen leaves skitter across the path in wet clumps, and the lake looks dark and endless. I walk until my fingers go numb and my thoughts don’t. Until I’ve circled the entire thing and I still don’t know what I’m doing here without him.
Then I step back into the garden for a pro bono reception for HALO—the Hub for Arts a third of its small shops, with hand-painted signs, are shuttered for the season. Still, a few windows glow warmly behind glass, and I nod to the familiar faces inside. I didn’t plan to make a life here. But somehow, piece by piece, I did.
The garden is no longer lush, but it’s not entirely dead either.
Most of it has gone to seed or sleep. But there’s a kind of beauty in that, too—the way something can be pared back to almost nothing and still insist on being alive.
The wind has teeth now. The winter sky is pearl-grey and swollen with rain, but it hasn’t broken. Not yet.
He never said he loved me, but I know I loved him. And I know I’m not sorry. And in the hush before the downpour, maybe, for now, that has to be enough.