Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
ELISE
Day three. Somewhere north of Parry Sound, Ontario has decided to stop pretending it's civilized.
The highway narrows to two lanes, trees pressing in from both sides so thick the GPS signal stutters every few minutes.
Rock cuts rise in sheer pink granite walls, dynamited flat when they built this road decades ago.
Cell service dropped out forty minutes back, which means my email hasn't refreshed, my weather app is frozen on yesterday's forecast, and my carefully mapped route is operating on cached data and optimism.
Jaxon hasn't noticed. Or if he has, he doesn't care.
He's been humming something under his breath since Huntsville, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the open window frame.
The wind pushes through the cab, warm and green-smelling, ruffling the edges of my itinerary where it sits on the dashboard.
We survived Ottawa without killing each other.
The rental was clean, the couch was adequate, and Jaxon was asleep within five minutes of lying down, which I know because I could hear him breathing through the bedroom door.
Slow, even breaths. The breathing of someone whose body has learned to sleep anywhere because nowhere has been permanent long enough to matter.
The Sudbury rental fell through. The host cancelled at 10 PM last night via a single-sentence message: Sorry, pipe burst. Full refund issued.
My backup option was booked. My backup to the backup wanted a three-night minimum.
By 10:47, Jaxon found a listing on his phone for a cabin near Lake Ramsey, one bedroom with a pull-out couch, available tonight only.
"It's got a fire pit," he said, as if that was a selling point and not an invitation for mosquitoes.
We booked it. We had no choice. Control, it turns out, is a limited resource on Highway 400 North.
"Detour request," Jaxon says now, slowing the truck.
"What is it?"
"Sign back there said lookout point, two kilometres."
"We're twenty minutes behind schedule because you took the wrong exit in Barrie."
"I took a different exit in Barrie. It added seven minutes and we saw a bald eagle."
"We saw a large bird."
"It was definitely a bald eagle."
"It was definitely large."
He grins, and there it is again. That full-face thing where his eyes crinkle before anything else moves. My stomach does something inconvenient in response, which I attribute to the gas station coffee I drank an hour ago.
"Thirty minutes," he says. "Veto power. That was the deal."
The lookout is two kilometres down a gravel road. The truck bounces over ruts while my laptop bag slides across the back seat, and every jolt makes me grip the door handle tighter. When we pull into a small clearing, Jaxon cuts the engine and I understand immediately why he stopped.
Northern Ontario opens up below us in a sweep of forest and lake that goes on until it meets the sky. The trees are every shade of green that exists, broken by silver veins of water cutting through rock. A breeze moves across the canopy, and the whole landscape ripples.
Jaxon is already out of the truck, camera in hand, crouching at the edge of the lookout to frame something.
His ball cap is backwards now, brim against his neck, and he's completely still.
Focused in a way I haven't seen from him yet.
Every other version of Jaxon Mills I've observed over the last three days is loose, easy, unhurried.
This one is precise. Intentional. A person who knows exactly what he's doing.
"Come look at this," he says without turning around.
The edge of the lookout has a low wooden railing that doesn't inspire confidence. My shoes aren't meant for gravel, and the wind is stronger up here, pulling at my blouse. But his voice has something in it I can't refuse, so I walk over and look at the camera screen he's holding up.
It's the view, but not the obvious one. He's shot a single birch tree growing sideways out of a rock face, roots gripping granite, trunk bent toward the light. Behind it, the whole expanse of wilderness blurs into bokeh.
"That tree shouldn't be growing there," I say.
"No."
"It has no business surviving in solid rock."
"And yet." He pulls the camera back, looks at the screen himself. "Sometimes things grow where they're not supposed to."
My chest tightens. The gas station coffee defense is starting to feel thin.
Back in the truck, the silence changes texture. Not uncomfortable, but aware. I'm conscious of the space between my knee and the gearshift, the angle of his forearm on the armrest, the way the dream catcher turns slowly in the breeze from the open window.
"Tell me about the dream catcher," I say, because it's been three days and I've been wanting to ask since the parking lot.
His thumb taps the steering wheel once. "My mom made it."
"You said that. The first day."
"Yeah." A pause, longer than any silence he's offered so far.
Jaxon fills spaces. He fills silences, fills pauses, fills the cab with humming and commentary about the landscape.
This quiet is different. "She died two years ago.
Pancreatic cancer. Fast, once they found it. Four months from diagnosis."
My hand moves to the gearshift console without permission from my brain. Not touching him. Just closer.
"Four months is cruel."
"It is." His jaw works for a second. "She was Cree. My dad's white. Grew up outside Cochrane. She made dream catchers, beadwork, moccasins. Taught classes at the community centre on weekends. Spent her whole life making sure Kenzie and I understood both sides of where we came from."
"Kenzie?"
"My sister. She's twenty-seven. Lives in Edmonton. Works in Indigenous education policy. She's the one who actually does useful things with her life." A small smile, complicated. "Mom would've loved that."
The highway unfolds through granite and pine. A lake appears on the left, glass-still.
"My parents divorced when I was twelve," I say, and the words come out before I've decided to offer them. "My dad moved to Vancouver. My mom stayed in Toronto. They fought over everything. The house, the cars, the furniture. They fought over a salad bowl."
"A salad bowl?"
"Ceramic. Hand-painted. They bought it on their honeymoon in Portugal. My mom said it was hers because she packed it. My dad said it was his because he'd picked it out. They spent eleven thousand dollars in legal fees arguing over a forty-dollar salad bowl."
Jaxon's eyebrows lift.
"Eleven thousand dollars."
"The salad bowl became the thing they were actually fighting about, which wasn't the salad bowl at all, obviously. But nobody could say what it was really about, so they just kept fighting about the bowl."
"Who got it?"
"Neither. It broke during the move. My mom dropped it carrying boxes out of the house.
It shattered on the front steps. She stood there looking at the pieces for about ten minutes.
Then she swept them up, put them in the recycling, and drove to her new apartment.
" My throat tightens, unexpected and unwelcome. "She never mentioned it again."
The cab is quiet. Not Jaxon's usual comfortable quiet, and not my controlled quiet either. A raw quiet, stripped of pretence.
"That's why you plan everything," he says. Not a question.
"If I control the details, nothing breaks."
"Things still break, Elise."
"Fewer things."
He nods slowly, eyes on the road. "Fair."
We don't talk for a while after that. The highway passes through Sudbury's outskirts, nickel stacks rising against the late afternoon sky, and Jaxon follows my GPS directions to the cabin without asking for a single clarification.
The cabin is small. Wood-panelled walls, a kitchen with a two-burner stove, a bedroom through a narrow doorway, and a pull-out couch that looks like it was manufactured during the Cold War. But the windows face the lake, and the light coming through them is golden.
Jaxon carries my suitcase inside without being asked, sets it by the bedroom door, then goes back for his duffel.
I unpack my toiletries, line them up on the bathroom shelf in order of use, and change into leggings and a sweatshirt I brought specifically for evenings where the dress code is "nobody's watching. "
He builds a fire in the pit outside. Because of course he does.
By the time I come out with two mugs of tea from the box I found in the kitchen, he's sitting in an Adirondack chair facing the water.
The fire crackles low, throwing light across his face.
The ball cap is off. His hair is thick, dark, slightly wavy where the cap pressed it down.
Without the cap, he looks younger. More open.
"Tea?" I hold out the mug.
"Thanks." His fingers brush mine during the handoff, and the contact sends a jolt up my arm that has absolutely nothing to do with caffeine.
The lake is turning colours. Pink, orange, copper. A loon calls from somewhere across the water, followed by its mate. The fire pops. The tea is mediocre.
"Can I tell you something?" he says.
"You've been telling me things all day. Why stop now?"
A quiet laugh. "This one's different." He turns the mug in his hands.
"I almost didn't come back to Canada after my mom died.
I was in New Zealand when Kenzie called.
Shooting a tourism campaign in Queenstown.
I flew home for the funeral, stayed two weeks, then left again.
Flew to Iceland. Then Scotland. Then Portugal.
Kept moving for four months before Kenzie called me and said, 'You can't outrun this, Jax. It'll be waiting wherever you land.'"
"Smart sister."
"The smartest. She was right, too. I came home, walked into my apartment, and Mom's boxes were still in the closet. Right where I'd put them after we cleaned out her house. I haven't opened them."
"In two years?"
"In two years." He looks at me across the firelight. Brown eyes, steady, unguarded in a way that makes my pulse do something I don't want to examine. "Kenzie says I keep moving because I'm scared that if I stop, I'll have to feel all of it."
"And?"
"And she's probably right about that too."
The fire settles, sending sparks up into the darkening sky. The lake is silver now, the pink gone, the loon quiet.
"For what it's worth," I say, my voice lower than intended, "I think your mom would be glad the dream catcher isn't behind glass."
His head turns. The firelight catches the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth. He's close. Not because either of us moved, but because the chairs are angled toward each other, and the fire is small, and the night is getting cool.
"Elise."
"What?"
"You're not what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
"Someone who reviewed me on Instagram and pre-booked fourteen days of restaurants." A pause, warm. "You're more."
My breath catches. The fire crackles. His eyes drop to my mouth for a fraction of a second, and every nerve in my body lights up simultaneously.
My phone buzzes on the arm of the chair.
Hi Elise, this is Margaret Weston. Confirming the venue walkthrough on August 25. Please advise re: dietary restriction spreadsheet by end of week. Also, the napkin situation has been escalated. Call me.
The napkin situation has been escalated.
Reality floods back in, cold and immediate. Calgary. The Weston-McAllister retreat. The reason I'm in this truck, in this province, on this trip in the first place.
"I need to take this," I say, standing up too fast, the tea sloshing. "It's my client."
"It's 9 PM."
"Napkins don't observe business hours."
He laughs. A real one, startled out of him. And I retreat to the cabin with my phone and my racing heart and a growing suspicion that the thing I'm most afraid of on this trip isn't the schedule falling apart.
It's wanting it to.