Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
River
December came to Maple Ridge the way it always had, reluctantly and then all at once.
The first real snow fell on a Saturday, which meant Finn was off duty and I had canceled my afternoon appointments, and we spent the better part of the morning doing nothing in particular in a house that was becoming, slowly and by degrees, mine.
Maybe even ours. The furniture was the same, I hadn’t gotten around to the changes I’d planned, but there were books on the shelves I’d brought with me, and a coffee maker that wasn’t my mother’s, and a lamp in the study that cast the kind of light I liked to read by. Small adjustments, but enough.
Finn was at the kitchen table with the newspaper and a mug that had been refilled twice.
He had the patient, unhurried quality of someone who had nowhere to be and had decided to be entirely present in the nowhere.
He looked comfortable in this house in a way that had surprised me at first and then hadn’t.
He’d been here before, all those years ago, at the kitchen table with my parents and then just my father, in the backyard in summer, in the ordinary geography of a mixed family who had been close.
The house already knew him. It had just been waiting for me to catch up.
I was in the study with a patient file I kept reading the same paragraph of and a view of the backyard going white.
Through the window, the pine tree my father had planted the year I was born grabbed my attention. It was taller than the roofline now. The garden beds were empty and waiting. The particular stillness of snowfall was a hush, the way it absorbed sound and returned a different quality of quiet.
I had a good set of steady patients now.
Actual ones, in actual sessions, in the office space I’d made mine before I even stepped foot back in Maple Ridge.
Two were town residents I hadn’t known before, a woman in her forties processing a difficult year and a teenage boy referred by the school counselor.
The third was Evan, remote, every Thursday at two, which was never easy and also, I thought, exactly the kind of work I’d been trained to do and had been doing at a distance for too long.
The practice was small. I’d built it deliberately that way as something manageable, something I could grow into.
The AG’s case against Grant was moving through pre-trial at the pace federal cases moved, which was slow and implacable and nothing like the urgency of the seasons.
Solis had told me I’d likely be called as a witness in the spring.
Sean’s cooperation had resulted in the charges against him being formally filed; he’d entered a plea that his attorney had negotiated over six weeks of careful work.
The trial, when it came, would be public and long and would require things from me I was still preparing to give.
I was preparing. And that was enough for now.
I walked into the kitchen.
“It’s sticking,” Finn said.
I walked over.
“The snow,” he said. “Sticking to the street. Winter’s actually committing this time.”
I went to stand beside him at the window, and we watched the street go white. Finn’s badge was on the counter where he’d set it earlier, the scratch on the lower right corner catching the light.
“Libby’s going to want another meeting,” I said. “She texted last night. Something about the 1998 case.”
“Mmm.”
“Myra’s coming, too. Apparently, she has something else. Something about the Roberts family.”
He looked at me over his shoulder. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not yet,” I said. “Let her bring it in.”
He turned back to the window. I bumped my shoulder against his arm, looking at the same street, the same snow, the same town.
Maple Ridge in December. In the distance, I saw the hardware store with its window lights on.
The coffee shop with the steam from its exhaust. Thought of the civic center, still there, its plaque still on the wall—Grant’s father’s name still in bronze, which was a thing the town would have to decide what to do with in its own time.
These things took time. The machinery of justice was slow; the machinery of a town reckoning with itself was slower.
Both were running. That was what mattered.
Eleanor Jenkins had a headstone now in the Maple Ridge cemetery.
Her family had come for the service—her sister from out of state, two former students, a colleague from the school she’d taught at, and of course, her husband.
Finn and I had stood at the back. The entire club had come.
It had been a clear day, cold, with the particular blue sky that only showed up in November after the weather had finished being dramatic.
It had been the right kind of quiet.
“You’re thinking loud again,” Finn said.
“Occupational habit.”
“Mmm.” He set his coffee down and turned to face me fully, the way he did when he was going to say something he’d been carrying. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can always ask.”
“Are you happy?”
The question sat between us. It wasn’t a challenge, it was a genuine inquiry, offered carefully, with the attentiveness of someone who understood that the answer might be complicated and was asking anyway.
I thought about it the way I always thought about things that deserved a real answer.
The practice. The house. The club. The work still ahead with the AG’s case.
Evan at two on Thursdays. The snow on the street.
The coffee maker that was mine. The man standing in my kitchen asking if I was happy like it was the most important question, which right now, it was.
“Yes,” I said.
He held my gaze for a moment, reading it the way he read everything, looking for the truth underneath the word, deciding whether the word was the truth.
He found it.
“Good,” he said.
He reached out and tucked some hair back from my face with the same careful attention he’d been giving me for longer than I wanted to see it, and I leaned into it the way I had before everything changed.
I took a step forward, looking into his gorgeous gray-green eyes, and kissed him tenderly as the snow kept falling on Maple Ridge.
I was home.
THE END