Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
ELISE
Day nine. The prairies have swallowed us whole.
Manitoba stretches flat in every direction, wheat fields running to the horizon under a sky so wide it makes me dizzy.
There's nothing out here. No rock cuts, no forests, no lakes materializing around every bend.
Just land, sky, and the highway cutting through it all in a line so straight it could've been drawn with a ruler.
My itinerary says Winnipeg by 4 PM. We're on schedule. The Thunder Bay rental was clean, the couch was adequate, and we left by 8 AM without a single detour. Jaxon has been quiet today, not his usual humming-and-commentary quiet but an internal quiet, like his thoughts are somewhere else.
His phone buzzed at breakfast. He looked at the screen, set it face-down on the table, and poured himself a second coffee without comment. Kenzie's name was visible for a split second before the screen went dark.
I didn't ask.
I'm learning that Jaxon's silences are weather systems. Some are sunny, loose, comfortable. Others carry weight. This one has been building since we crossed the Ontario-Manitoba border, and I don't know whether to wait it out or offer an umbrella.
"You're staring," he says, eyes on the road.
"I'm observing."
"From three feet away, with direct eye contact, that's staring."
"Fine. You're quiet."
"I'm driving."
"You drove through all of northern Ontario narrating the geological history of the Canadian Shield, and now you're silent through the most boring stretch of highway in the country. Something's on your mind."
His thumb taps the wheel. Three times, rhythmic. "Today's my mom's birthday."
Everything in me goes still.
"Kenzie texted this morning. She's visiting Mom's grave in Edmonton. Brought tobacco and sweetgrass. That's the tradition. Mom always said you bring an offering, not just yourself, because showing up empty-handed means you forgot what they gave you."
The wheat fields scroll past. A grain elevator rises in the distance, white against the blue.
"What would you bring?" I ask.
"A photo." His jaw works. "Mom loved looking at my photos.
Had this whole wall in her living room, floor to ceiling, every print I ever sent her from wherever I was.
Iceland, Morocco, New Zealand. She'd call me and say, 'I'm drinking my coffee and looking at the glacier you sent me from Reykjavik, and I think it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and I wish you'd been in the picture. '"
My chest aches.
"She always wanted me in the pictures. Said there were plenty of photos of mountains but not enough of me." His voice catches, barely, on the last word. "I'm behind the camera in every single one. She didn't have any of me."
"Kenzie must have some."
"Yeah. But not from the places I went. Not from the things I saw. She saw the world through my lens and never saw my face in it."
The highway unfolds ahead, ruler-straight. Wind pushes through the cab, warm, carrying dust.
Reaching across the console, I pick up his camera from the seat between us. He glances over, startled.
"Eyes on the road."
"What are you doing?"
The camera is heavier than expected. Professional grade, buttons and dials everywhere, a lens that probably costs more than my rent. My thumb finds what looks like the shutter button.
"Elise."
"Driving. Eyes. Road."
His mouth opens to protest, but I've already raised the camera. The viewfinder shows his profile against the Manitoba sky, jaw tight, one hand on the wheel, dream catcher swaying in the corner of the frame. I press the button. The shutter clicks.
"Did you just take my picture?"
"You're behind the camera in every shot. Somebody should fix that."
His eyes are shiny when he looks over, and he blinks fast, twice, before turning back to the road. We drive in silence for a full minute.
"Thank you," he says, rough and quiet.
"Don't thank me yet. I have no idea if the photo's any good."
"It's perfect."
"You haven't seen it."
"Doesn't matter."
The ache in my chest spreads. Lower, warmer, settling into a place I've kept walled off for years. The place where wanting things lives. The place I boarded up after the salad bowl broke and Dad moved away and I decided that if you don't need anyone, nobody can take anything from you.
Jaxon Mills is prying boards off that wall with his calloused hands, and he's not even trying. He's just driving through Manitoba being sad and grateful simultaneously, and it's the most dangerous thing anyone has done to me in a decade.
Winnipeg is flat, sprawling, and has better food than I anticipated.
The rental is a second-floor apartment near the Forks, with a balcony overlooking the river and a kitchen stocked with actual cookware.
Jaxon inspects the pots like a man who's been eating gas station sandwiches for a week and has finally found religion.
"I'm cooking tonight," he announces.
"You cook?"
"My mom was an incredible cook. I'm a passable one. You'll survive."
He disappears to a grocery store around the corner and returns with a bag containing chicken, peppers, onions, rice, and a bottle of hot sauce I'm fairly certain could strip paint.
"Stir-fry," he says, setting the bag on the counter. "Mom's recipe. She'd make it every Friday. Called it 'fridge cleaner' because she'd throw in whatever was left from the week. The hot sauce is non-negotiable."
"I can see that. The label has a skull on it."
"Decorative."
"That's not reassuring."
He cooks the way he does everything, without a plan, refusing to measure anything. The onions go into the pan by feel. The garlic gets chopped unevenly. Rice goes into a pot with water he eyeballs instead of measuring, and I physically restrain myself from pulling out a measuring cup.
"You're wincing," he says without turning around.
"You didn't measure the water."
"You don't measure water for rice."
"You absolutely measure water for rice. It's a two-to-one ratio."
"My mom never measured anything in her life, and her rice was perfect every single time."
"Your mom had years of practice."
"I've been making this since I was fifteen." He stirs the vegetables, tosses the chicken in, and adds hot sauce in a quantity that makes my eyes water from four feet away. "Trust me."
Trust. The word sits in the apartment between the kitchen counter and the balcony door. Jaxon says it casually. As if trusting another person's instincts over your own measured judgement is something people just do.
My parents trusted each other once. Stood in a church and said vows and bought a salad bowl on their honeymoon. Trusted that the plan would hold.
The rice comes out perfect.
"Told you," he says, spooning it onto two plates with an expression of mild smugness that is, against my better judgment, attractive.
We eat on the balcony. The river moves below, lazy and brown, reflecting city lights. The stir-fry is good. Better than good. The hot sauce has a slow burn that builds until my eyes water.
"Too much?" he asks.
"Perfect." My voice is hoarse. "I'm crying because it's perfect."
He grins, and the city lights catch his face, and I look away before I do something stupid.
How's Winnipeg?
Sloane. Checking in, as she has every night since Ottawa.
Fine. He cooked dinner.
HE COOKED FOR YOU?
It's stir-fry, not a proposal.
Elise Marie Boyd. You are eating a home-cooked meal on a balcony overlooking a river with a man who has been driving you across the country for eight days. Do you hear yourself?
I hear a woman eating stir-fry.
You hear a woman falling for someone and trying to file it under "logistics."
My thumb hovers over the keyboard. Through the balcony door, Jaxon is washing the dishes.
He didn't ask, didn't make a production of it, just picked up both plates and took them to the sink.
The dream catcher is visible through the apartment window, hanging from the truck's rearview mirror in the parking lot below.
Blue and white threads in the streetlight.
I'm not falling for anyone. I'm getting a ride to Calgary. Plus you faked a whole engagement for a week in Virginia, you can’t do logistics without feelings involved like I can.
Sure babe. Keep me posted on those logistics.
My phone goes dark. Jaxon comes back out with two mugs. Tea, because he remembered I drink it in the evenings, and coffee for himself because the man would drink coffee at midnight and sleep like a log.
"Sloane?" he asks, handing me the mug.
"How'd you know?"
"You get a specific look when you're texting her. Fond but exasperated."
"That's my permanent expression."
He sits in the other balcony chair, stretching his legs out. His feet are bare. His flannel is unbuttoned over a faded t-shirt, and his hair is messy from the wind, and I need to stop cataloguing the details of this man.
"Can I show you something?" He pulls out his phone, scrolls, and turns the screen toward me.
It's the photo I took. His profile against the Manitoba sky. The dream catcher is slightly blurred in the foreground, his jaw is set, and the light catches the line of his nose. Behind him, the prairie stretches to infinity.
It's a terrible photograph, technically. The exposure is wrong, the composition is off-centre, and my thumb is a pale blur in the bottom left corner.
"You edited it," I say.
"Cropped your thumb out. That's it." He looks at the screen. "I'm sending it to Kenzie."
"Jaxon, it's not good. Let me retake it tomorrow when the light's better and I can actually hold the camera properly."
"The light was exactly right." He looks at me, brown eyes steady in the porch glow. "This is the first photo of me in three years. The first one my mom's wall would've gotten from this side of the camera. It's exactly right, Elise."
My name in his mouth does something to my pulse that no amount of itinerary revision will fix.
"Okay," I manage.
"Okay." He sends it. His phone buzzes thirty seconds later, and he reads the reply with a smile that starts slow, then takes over his whole face. He angles the screen toward me.
jax. you look happy. who took this???
a friend
a FRIEND. with the good light and the dream catcher and that look on your face. sure jan. bring her home for christmas
He pulls the phone back, laughing, and I'm laughing too, and the river is moving below us, and the tea is warm in my hands, and somewhere in the back of my planner there's a schedule for tomorrow that says we drive six hours to Regina, check in by 3 PM, and maintain a professional distance from the man sitting two feet away who makes my mother's recipe with no measurements and calls imperfect photographs exactly right.
The schedule doesn't account for the way my chest feels right now. Full and frightened and awake.
Five more days.
My tea is cooling. His coffee is almost gone. The city hums below us, and neither of us moves to go inside, because going inside means separate rooms and closed doors and the version of us that is just a driver and a passenger heading to the same city for different reasons.
Out here, on this balcony, we're something else. We're not saying it. We're not naming it. But the naming will come.
I can feel it approaching, and there's nothing to hide behind.