Epilogue
ELISE
SIX MONTHS LATER
The boxes are in the closet of Jaxon's apartment in Calgary, right where he said they'd be. Three of them. Brown cardboard, packing tape slightly yellowed, MOM — PERSONAL written in Kenzie's handwriting across each one in black marker.
Two years and eight months. That's how long they've been sitting on the closet floor behind his hiking boots and a sleeping bag he hasn't used since August.
"We don't have to do this today," I say from the bedroom doorway.
He's sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, the first box pulled into his lap. The tape is still sealed. His thumb runs across the edge of it, back and forth.
"Yeah we do." His voice is steady, but his knee is bouncing. "You said I had to open them before I could start staying. And I've been staying for six months. So I'm behind schedule."
"Don't use my language against me."
"Your language is very useful."
The apartment is small but lived-in now.
Six months ago, when I first visited after the road trip, the place looked like a man had been using it as a storage locker between flights.
Bare walls, a couch with no throw pillows, a kitchen with exactly one pot and a bottle of hot sauce.
The dream catcher hung from a nail by the front door because the truck was parked outside and he wanted it close.
Now there's a bookshelf with actual books on it.
A french press on the kitchen counter next to a pour-over setup because we've reached the stage of the relationship where we keep duplicate coffee equipment in two cities.
My toiletries have a shelf in the bathroom, lined up in order of use.
His duffel bag sits in the hall closet of my Toronto apartment, next to a pair of hiking boots that track mud onto my floors every other weekend.
We split time. Two weeks in Toronto, two weeks in Calgary.
Sometimes a week here, a week there, depending on clients and shoots.
My planner has a colour-coding system for it: blue for Toronto days, green for Calgary days, and a new colour I added in November.
Gold. For the days we're in the same city at the same time, which happen more often than the geography should allow.
Jaxon picks at the tape on the first box. It peels back with a sound that makes him flinch.
Moving across the room, I sit down beside him on the carpet. Not touching. Close enough that my knee is an inch from his. Close enough that he can reach for me if he needs to.
He opens the box.
On top is a wool blanket, red and black, folded into a tight square. He lifts it out and presses it to his face. His shoulders shake once, then go still.
"She made this," he says into the fabric. "Star blanket pattern. She was working on it the winter before the diagnosis." He lowers it, and his eyes are wet. "She finished it in the hospital. The nurses let her bring her loom in. She said she wasn't going to leave anything undone."
My hand finds his knee. He covers it with his own.
Underneath the blanket are photos. A stack of them, loose, some in frames.
Jaxon as a kid, maybe eight, grinning in a canoe with a woman whose face is so much like his it makes my breath catch.
Dark hair, brown eyes, the same crinkles.
Kenzie as a teenager, laughing at something off-camera.
The three of them at a kitchen table covered in beading supplies, a half-finished dream catcher between them.
"That's the kitchen," he says. "In the Cochrane house. She taught classes there on Saturdays. Anyone who wanted to learn. She never charged."
"She's beautiful."
"She was."
The second box has more practical things.
Her reading glasses. A recipe book with handwritten additions in the margins, hot sauce quantities circled and starred.
A beaded bracelet in blue and white. A stack of birthday cards she'd saved, one from Jaxon every year, most of them sent from different countries with stamps she'd apparently kept.
"She saved every one," he says, turning a postmarked card from Iceland over in his hands. "I sent these from airports at the last minute. I'd grab whatever card the gift shop had. Half of them say 'Happy Birthday, Grandma' because that's all they carried." A rough laugh. "She saved them anyway."
The third box is smaller. Inside is a single envelope, unsealed, with Jax written on the front in careful handwriting.
His hand freezes over it.
"I didn't know this was in here."
"Do you want me to step out?"
"No." His fingers close around mine on his knee. "Stay."
He opens the envelope. A single page, folded twice. He reads it in silence, then reads it again. Then he hands it to me.
My Jaxon,
If you're reading this, I'm gone, and you've finally opened the boxes. Knowing you, it took a while. That's okay. You always did things on your own time.
I want you to know that every photo you sent me was a gift.
I put them all on the wall because I wanted to see the world through your eyes.
But my favourite thing was never the mountains or the glaciers or the oceans.
It was knowing you were out there, seeing beautiful things and wanting to share them with me.
The one thing I wished for was a photo of you. You were always behind the camera. You showed me the whole world but never yourself. Promise me you'll let someone see you, Jax. Not the photos. You.
I love you bigger than the sky.
Mom
The letter blurs in my hands. When I look up, Jaxon is crying. Quiet, steady tears, the kind that come when the grief is old enough to be gentle instead of sharp.
"She got her photo," I say. "The one I took. In Manitoba."
"She got her photo." He wipes his face with the heel of his hand. "Seven months late. With a thumb in the corner."
"It was a good thumb."
He laughs, wet and broken and real. Then he pulls me into him, and I press my face against his shoulder, and we sit on the carpet surrounded by blankets and birthday cards and a letter from a woman I never met who asked for the one thing I gave him without thinking.
After a while, his breathing evens out. My hand is in his hair. The apartment is quiet except for the February wind against the windows and the faint sound of traffic on the street below.
"I love you," he says against my temple. Unhurried, steady, the same way he says it every time. Like he wants me to hear every letter.
"I love you too." My fingers trace the back of his neck. "Even though you still don't measure rice."
"The rice is always perfect."
"The rice is always a gamble."
He pulls back, and his face is blotchy, his eyes red, and his smile is the wide, crinkled one that still makes my stomach flip after six months.
"Kenzie wants us in Edmonton for Easter," he says. "She's making a roast. She told me to tell you to bring your planner because she wants to see the colour-coding system in person."
"I like Kenzie."
"She likes you more than she likes me. She's been very clear about that."
My phone buzzes on the nightstand across the room. The screen lights up with Sloane's name.
So remember Ivy Hollow last August? The wine festival at the vineyard and that little town where everyone knows everyone and the barista remembered your coffee order after one visit?
My mouth curves. Of course I remember. We flew from Calgary three days after the road trip ended, still jet-lagged and sunburned, straight into a vineyard festival in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Jaxon spent the whole weekend photographing the town while I followed Sloane around and tried to pretend my life hadn't just changed completely somewhere on the Trans-Canada.
The vineyard owner poured us wine at sunset, and a woman named Maren told me she could tell we were "being very weird about it," which was accurate.
I remember.
Griffin's moving there this summer. Got a teaching job at the high school. And he wants us to come back for the festival again in August. Bring Jaxon, bring the camera, stay at the inn. Nora's already holding a room.
My thumbs move fast.
I think I need to check with Jaxon but he'll say yes to anything involving a road trip.
YOU'RE DRIVING AGAIN??
We're driving.
Elise Marie Boyd. You WANT to drive across the country again.
I want to drive across the country with him. There's an August colour on my planner now. It's copper.
I'm screaming. I'm literally screaming. Finn thinks something's wrong. I have to go explain that my best friend has feelings now. SEE YOU IN IVY HOLLOW.
My phone goes dark. Jaxon is watching me from the floor, the blanket draped over his knees, birthday cards spread around him.
"Sloane?"
"Griffin's moving to Ivy Hollow this summer. He wants us back for the festival in August."
His eyebrows lift. "Road trip?"
"Road trip."
"I'm bringing the canoe."
"You're bringing the canoe. I'm not getting in it."
"You'll get in it."
"I absolutely will not."
He grins. The crinkles. The dimples. Six months, and the grin still lands the same way it did in a Tim Hortons parking lot in August. Like a dare I don't want to refuse.
The boxes are open. The blanket is draped over his lap, red and black, made by hands that loved him before I did.
The letter is on the carpet beside a stack of birthday cards sent from airports around the world by a man who was always moving because standing still meant missing someone so much it broke him.
He's still now. Sitting on his apartment floor in Calgary, surrounded by his mother's things, crying and laughing and looking at me like I rearranged his whole world by taking one bad photograph in Manitoba.
My planner is on the nightstand, open to today's page.
February 14. Valentine's Day, though neither of us mentioned it this morning because we're not particularly sentimental people.
Except that he opened his mother's boxes today, and I sat beside him while he did, and that's the most romantic thing either of us has ever done.
In blue ink, today's schedule reads: Calgary. Jaxon's apartment. No work. No clients. No agenda.
It's the first page in the planner's history with no agenda.
Underneath, in gold ink, I've written one line.
Be here.
And I am.
Thank you so much for reading Lost With My Enemy.