Chapter 2
Jace
The salmon isn’t going to catch itself, which is why I’m standing knee-deep in water at five in the morning instead of sleeping like a normal person.
Normal people sleep. Normal people don’t wake before dawn to check if the tenant survived, don’t talk themselves out of walking the trail, don’t redirect that restless energy into the river like it’s a problem fish can solve.
Jasper sits on the bank, watching me with the patient, slightly disappointed expression of a dog who has seen me do this exact thing a thousand times and still doesn’t understand why we can’t just eat kibble.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him.
He tilts his head. Looks at me exactly like that.
I wade deeper. The water’s cold enough to remind me that I’m alive, which is sometimes the only reason I come out here—the shock of it, the way the current pushes against my shins and says stay or don’t but make a decision.
The Kenai Mountains are still holding the last blue light of what passes for night this time of year—in late June, Alaska doesn’t get dark so much as it gets dim, like someone turned the world’s brightness down to thirty percent and forgot to finish the job.
The sky is silver. The water is silver. Everything is quiet except for the river and the wind and Jasper’s snoring, which is loud enough to scare fish if fish had ears.
I cast. Wait. Cast again.
The new tenant. Gabby. The lawyer’s voicemail had called her Gabriela.
I’d stopped expecting anyone to show up.
Two years of maintaining Edna’s place, patching the roof, keeping the generator fueled, clearing the trail—and I’d started to think the cabin would sit there, slowly folding back into the forest like everything does eventually.
Then the lawyer called, and a woman accepted the clause, and last night she appeared at midnight in heels and a sundress, holding a rolling pin like she was going to fight Morris with it.
Morris, who weighs nine hundred pounds and has eaten the porch railing of every building in Ashwood Falls at least once.
She was going to fight him. With a rolling pin.
The line tugs. I set the hook, reel in a red salmon—good size, firm—and toss it in the cooler on the bank. Jasper lifts his head, sniffs toward the cooler, and I give him the look that means not for you, and he gives me the look that means we’ll see about that.
I wade out, dry my hands on my jeans, and clean the fish on the flat rock.
Same rock since I was twelve.. My grandfather taught me here.
Hank. Same rock, same knife, same river.
He’d stand behind me and correct my grip—”angle the blade, Jace, not your wrist”—and I’d get it wrong three times before I got it right, and he’d say nothing when I got it right, which was how I knew it was right.
Hank.
My chest tightens. The muscle remembers the loss before my brain does.
Three years. Three years since I found him in the workshop, still in his chair, tools laid out on the bench like he’d planned to keep working but his body had other ideas.
Peaceful, people said. He went peacefully. As if that’s supposed to help.
I finish the salmon. Wrap it in wax paper. I’ll leave it on the cabin porch—Edna’s porch, the new tenant’s porch now—because that’s what I did for Edna every week for the last five years of her life, and some habits don’t stop just because the person who started them is gone.
It’s not about the woman. It’s about the routine. About keeping a promise to a dead man who kept a promise to a dead woman, and if that sounds like I’m burying myself in obligation to avoid dealing with anything real, well---Jasper judges enough for both of us.
The trail between my cabin and Edna’s is about four hundred yards through spruce and birch. Short enough that sounds carry. Long enough that the walk gives me time to decide what face to wear when I get there.
This morning, my face is: neutral. Disinterested. Dropping off fish, checking the generator, leaving.
I set the wrapped salmon on the porch steps—new teeth marks on the railing from Morris, which means he came back after I shooed him away last night; typical Morris—and turn to go.
The cabin door opens.
She’s wearing clothes that don’t belong to her.
An oversized flannel—one of Edna’s, from the closet—that hangs past her hands, and wool socks bunched at the ankles, and her hair is piled on top of her head like she fought with it and lost. No makeup.
Eyes still swollen from what might have been sleep or might have been crying, and I don’t look long enough to tell because it’s not my business.
She sees me.
She sees the salmon.
She looks at the salmon like it’s a threat.
“What is that?” she says.
“Salmon.”
“On my porch.”
“Yes.”
“Is this—did you put this here?”
I don’t know how to answer that in a way that doesn’t make this more of a conversation than I intended, so I nod.
“Why? Is this some kind of threat?”
“You don’t have groceries.”
She stares at me. Her mouth opens—and then it starts.
“Okay, so—first of all, thank you? I think? I mean, it’s neighborly, which I didn’t expect because last night you said one word—maybe one and a half words if we’re being generous—and then disappeared into the forest like some kind of flannel Bigfoot.
Not that—I’m not calling you Bigfoot. You’re a normal-sized—you’re a large person, but normal-large, not cryptid-large.
And the salmon is—I don’t know what to do with a whole salmon.
I’m a pastry chef. I work with butter and sugar and things that come in measured amounts.
This is a fish. A whole fish. It still has a face. ”
She pauses. Breathes.
I wait.
“It still has a face,” she repeats, quieter, like the fish’s face is a personal affront.
“The face comes off,” I say.
“I know the face comes off. I’m not—I went to culinary school. I know how to break down a fish. I just didn’t expect to find one on my porch at six in the morning left by a man I don’t know who communicates primarily in grunts.”
“I said welcome last night.”
“That was a grunt.”
It was, probably. I’m not great at distinguishing between my words and my sounds. Hank used to say I had two modes: silent and accidentally honest.
She wraps the flannel tighter around herself and shivers. June in Alaska. Fifty-two degrees. She is not dressed for this in any version of her life, and the flannel she found is one of Edna’s lighter ones, which means she’s cold and too stubborn to go back inside and find a better one.
She has dark eyes. Brown, almost black. The kind that looks like they’re always calculating something—processing, assessing, running numbers on the situation.
Her jaw is set like she’s decided not to be scared even though she’s clearly scared, and her hands are gripping the flannel closed at her throat like she’s holding herself together.
She looks like chaos. Beautiful. Verbal. Overwhelming.
I should go.
“I’m Jace,” I say, which is more information than I planned to give.
“Gabby.” She shifts on the porch. “Gabby Diaz. The—I’m Edna’s great-niece. Apparently. We never met. My family didn’t—it’s complicated.”
I nod. Everything about Edna’s family was complicated.
Edna told me once, near the end, that she’d sent letters for thirty years and received exactly two responses.
She said it the way she said everything—matter-of-fact, slightly amused, like the cruelty of it was just another ingredient she’d learned to bake with.
“I maintain the property,” I say. “The generator, the plumbing, the roof. For Edna.”
“She’s been dead for two years.”
“Yes.”
Gabby waits for me to explain why I’ve been maintaining a dead woman’s property for two years.
I don’t explain, because the explanation involves Hank and Edna and a love story that existed in letters and silences and a promise I made to a man who was dying and had nobody left to ask but me, and I’m not telling that story to someone I met eight hours ago who’s standing on a porch in borrowed socks.
“The coffee maker works,” I say instead. “Left side of the counter. The water takes a minute to heat.”
“That’s not an explanation for why you’re maintaining the property.”
“I know.”
Jasper, who has followed me down the trail because he follows me everywhere and has zero concept of personal boundaries, pushes past my legs, trots up the porch steps, and lies down directly at Gabby’s feet.
His tail thumps against the wood. He looks up at her with an unguarded adoration he usually reserves for beef jerky and swimming.
He has known this woman for approximately twelve seconds.
The betrayal is immediate and total.
“Oh,” Gabby says, and her whole face changes.
The calculation leaves her eyes and something softer replaces it—something that looks like it costs her to show.
She crouches down, and the flannel pools around her, and she puts her hands on Jasper’s face, and he pushes his head into her palms like he’s been waiting for her specifically.
“Hey, buddy,” she says. Her voice drops to something warm and unguarded that she probably doesn’t realize I can hear. “Aren’t you a good boy. Aren’t you the best boy.”
Jasper’s tail is a blur. He rolls onto his back. Full belly exposure. Maximum vulnerability. Total surrender.
He has never done this for me.
Not once.
I’ve had him for six years. I raised him from a pup.
I feed him, walk him, built him a bed in the workshop that he ignores in favor of sleeping on my feet.
And in six years he has never offered his belly to anyone—not Trace, not Dotty, not even Ryder, who sneaks him bacon when he thinks I’m not looking.
“His name is Jasper,” I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I intend, which is impressive because my baseline is already pretty flat.
“Jasper.” She scratches his belly, and he makes a sound that’s closer to purring than anything a seventy-pound Malamute should be capable of. “You’re the friendliest thing I’ve met in Alaska so far. The bar is low, but you’re clearing it.”
She looks up at me. Smiles. It’s small and tired and doesn’t fully reach her eyes, but it’s real enough to make me aware of my own hands, which are apparently just hanging at my sides doing nothing, which is what they always do, but suddenly it feels conspicuous.
Morris chooses this moment to emerge from the tree line at the edge of the clearing, casually, as if he’s returning from a morning stroll. He ambles toward the porch with the confidence of something that has never once been told no.
Gabby spots him and scrambles to her feet so fast she steps on Jasper’s tail.
Jasper yelps. Gabby gasps. Morris pauses mid-stride and stares at them both with the bored authority of a landlord inspecting his property.
“Morris,” Gabby says, and her voice is doing the thing again—the rapid escalation from calm to panicked rambling. “He was eating the porch. Is he always eating the porch? Is this a regular occurrence? Should I be concerned about structural integrity?”
“He comes and goes.”
“He comes and goes? Like he has a schedule? Like the porch is his lunch reservation?”
“He likes the salt in the wood.”
Gabby stares at me. Then at Morris. Then back at me. “This is my life now,” she says to no one in particular. “My life involves a moose who eats my house and a man who brings me fish and a dog who loves me more than he loves his owner.”
Jasper’s tail thumps in confirmation.
I should correct her—Jasper loves me, he just loves everyone, he’s a dog—but the correction dies somewhere between my brain and my mouth because she’s standing there in Edna’s flannel with her hair falling out of its pile and her feet in wool socks on the cold porch, and for one unguarded second she has the same expression as the photograph Hank kept in his workshop.
The same way of standing in a doorway like she’s deciding whether to step in or back out.
“Generator’s behind the cabin,” I say. “Pull cord, three times. The well pump sticks sometimes—hit the side and it frees up. Don’t leave food on the porch unless you want Morris to move in permanently.”
“Wait—”
But I’m already turning, already walking back toward the trail, because four hundred yards is exactly the right distance between me and whatever this is, and I’ve said more words in the last five minutes than I usually say in a day, and Jasper is still lying at her feet like a traitor, and if I stay any longer I’ll have to explain the salmon and the property and Hank and Edna, and I’m not ready for any of that.
I whistle for Jasper. He doesn’t come.
I whistle again. Sharper.
He lifts his head, looks at me, looks at Gabby, and puts his head back down on her foot.
“Jasper. Come.”
He sighs—a full-body sigh, dramatic, entirely performative—and hauls himself to his feet. He gives Gabby one last look that I can only describe as longing and then trots down the steps and falls in beside me on the trail.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
He wags his tail.
Behind us, I hear the cabin door close, and the sound of it—soft, careful, like she’s trying not to disturb the silence—follows me all the way home.
Back in the workshop, I pick up the chisel I left on the bench last night and turn it over in my hands.
The piece I’m working on—a dining table, cherry wood, commissioned by someone in Fairbanks—sits half-finished in the center of the room.
I usually know exactly what a piece wants to be by this point.
The grain tells me. The weight tells me.
This morning, I stand there, turning the chisel, thinking about wool socks and borrowed flannel and the way she said Jasper like it was a word worth saying carefully.
Jasper puts his head on my boot.
“Don’t start,” I tell him.
His tail thumps once. Twice.
I pick up the chisel and get back to work, and I absolutely do not think about the woman in Edna’s cabin for the rest of the morning.
Mostly.