Chapter 6
Jace
The wood pile behind my workshop is the reason Gabby's standing in my back yard, holding an axe she has no idea how to use, talking about her inability to chop wood like it's a personality flaw that requires extended commentary.
"—and I'm not built for this kind of thing, like structurally my hands are too small, or my leverage is bad, or maybe I just have a fundamental fear of sharp objects and failure simultaneously, which is probably saying something psychological about me that I don't want to examine right now—"
I step behind her. Jasper is already there, sitting about six feet away with an expression I've come to recognize as disappointed in both of you. He's been following her around for three days like she might disappear if he doesn't watch closely enough.
"Here," I say, and I reach around her. My hands wrap around hers on the axe handle. Her hands are small—she was right about that. Flour is still under her fingernails. She smells like vanilla and burnt sugar, which should not be appealing and is absolutely appealing.
She’s tense. Shoulders drawn up. Breath catching.
I adjust her grip. "Wider. Your left hand here." My left hand is over her left. "Don't choke it. You need room to swing."
She’s quiet. Unusual. Suspicious.
"Are you listening?" I ask.
"Yes," she says, immediately. "Left hand wider. Room to swing. I'm listening."
I reposition her left hand another inch down the handle. This brings her back closer to my chest. I can feel her breathing. Hers is faster than it should be for standing still, holding an axe.
"The swing comes from your hips," I tell her. "Not your arms. Your arms are just guiding. If you're tensing your arms, you're doing it wrong."
"Okay, so I should relax my arms while simultaneously holding an extremely sharp implement over my head and trying to split wood, which feels contradictory but I'll trust you because you're presumably not trying to kill me, though we've only just met, so technically—"
"Swing," I say.
She swings. The axe hits the log at an angle, bounces off with enough force to take her with it—she stumbles back two steps, overcorrects, and sits down hard in the dirt.
A beat of silence.
I look at a point somewhere above her head and work hard at my expression.
"I'm fine," she says, before I can ask. She's sitting in the dirt, the axe behind her, both hands still on the handle, with the specific dignity of someone who needs everyone to pretend they didn't see that.
"Again," I say.
She tries again. Same result. The angle is wrong. I reach down and position her hands differently. This is the third time I'm adjusting her grip, and she's stopped talking, which is its own kind of progress.
"You're not using your hips," I say.
"I'm trying—"
"You're thinking too hard. Stop thinking about it."
She laughs. "That's not how brains work. That's not how literally any human function works."
I step back. Let her try on her own.
She positions herself. Adjusts her grip one more time, though I didn’t ask her to. The muscle memory is faster than thinking. The body learns before the mind catches up.
She swings. The angle is right. The timing is right.
The axe hits clean and buries itself about a third of the way through the wood.
The wood splinters slightly at the impact but doesn't separate.
Not a complete split, but the kind of swing that proves she understands the principle now.
She's not thinking anymore. She's just moving.
She pulls the axe free and looks at it, then at me. Her chest is moving fast from the exertion. There's color in her cheeks that wasn't there before. She holds still for a second — chin up, jaw loose, not a smile but adjacent to one.
"Better," I say.
"Can we do it again?" she asks.
So we do. I stand beside her this time instead of behind.
Her grip tightens and loosens as she learns the rhythm.
Her hair is coming loose from her braid.
Pieces of it are escaping around her face, and there's a single strand that keeps sticking to her cheek when she swings.
She brushes it back with the back of her hand, and I have to look away because noticing the way she moves is becoming a problem.
Twenty minutes: rhythm. Thirty: four logs. Forty: six logs. The pile of split wood is building. Her breathing is hard. Sweat is starting to show at her temples.
"I'm doing it," she says, pulling the axe out of the seventh log. "I'm doing this. This is—I'm competent at wood-chopping. Who am I? What timeline is this?"
The question isn't really a question. It's a statement of surprise at herself.
I've seen this before—people discovering they're capable of things they never tried.
It's one of the reasons I like teaching.
The moment where someone's estimation of themselves shifts.
Where they stop believing the story they've been telling about their limitations.
"You were always competent at it," I say.
"No, I wasn't. I was terrible. Ninety seconds ago I was the worst person alive and now I'm—"
"You were only missing instruction," I say. "That's different than being bad at something."
She stops. Lowers the axe. Turns to look at me like I've said something in a language she doesn't speak and she's trying to translate it. The translation is happening in real time. I can see her processing it. Not agreeing yet, just processing.
"That's not—" She stops. Starts again. "People don't usually just tell me I'm fine the way I am.
They usually tell me I could do better if I tried harder, or if I was smarter, or if I was someone else entirely, or—" She stops again.
Takes a breath. "Sorry. That's a lot of words about my personal trauma.
You just taught me how to chop wood. This doesn't require my emotional deposition. "
I think about Hank. About how he taught me the same thing—that the difference between being bad at something and being new at something is just instruction.
That most people are fine. They're just untaught.
And the person who teaches them, if they do it right, doesn't change the person.
They just reveal what was already there.
She sets the axe down and sits on the log pile.
The wood beneath her is still warm from summer.
Jasper immediately gets up and walks over to sit beside her—not as close as he would like, but close enough that his flank is against Gabby's thigh.
Traitor dog. My loyal, betraying dog is now completely devoted to a woman who's barely unpacked.
She's won Jasper's loyalty almost immediately through nothing but genuine affection and a willingness to sit still and let a dog rest his head on her leg.
I should be concerned about this. I'm not. I'm just watching it happen and understanding that some people have this quality—this capacity to make things want to stay near them.
I sit on another log.
I've always found people like Gabby exhausting — someone who fills silence with words, with stories, with the constant running monologue of her own internal life.
My parents were both quiet. Hank was the same way.
We could spend hours in the workshop with maybe a hundred words exchanged, and it felt like a full conversation.
Except I'm still on this log. I've been here forty minutes and I haven't once thought about the workshop or leaving.
"You're cut out for this," I say.
Her eyes shift color in the afternoon light. Warmer. Less calculating. More like deciding.
"Chopping wood?" she asks.
"Being here."
She doesn’t say anything for a while. Jasper has his head on her lap. She’s running her fingers through his fur absently, like she’s been doing this her whole life.
"I don't know how to do that," she says finally. "Show up somewhere and not be waiting for it to fall apart before I'm ready. I keep thinking any minute now there's going to be a moment where I prove I was never actually capable of this — and it all goes under before the sixty days are even up."
"That's not how it works," I say.
"How do you know?"
I think about my parents. I think about being nineteen and coming to Hank's place because there was nowhere else to go, and how he just made room.
"Because you're still here," I say. "Every morning. That's not nothing."
She's quiet. I can see her processing. I can see the machinery of her mind moving behind her eyes, sorting through what I've said to find the trap door, the hidden meaning, the way it's supposed to hurt.
"You're really weird," she says finally. "Like, just objectively. You show up, you say one sentence that destroys something in me, and then you leave. Who does that?"
"Someone who thinks you should know you're doing okay," I say.
There's a sound from the direction of the main road. Voices. Footsteps on the path leading back to my property. Tessa emerges first, then Gage, then their dogs — Rocco and Toby, two mutts that have enough energy between them to power a small town.
Tessa takes one look at the situation — Gabby on the log pile, Jasper's head in her lap, me sitting six feet away with fresh wood chips on my boots — and her face does this thing.
I know that face. It's the face that means she's putting together information and arriving at conclusions I'm not interested in confirming.
"Jace." She looks at me. Then at Gabby. Then back at me. "Who's your friend?"
"Gabby," Gabby says, before I can answer. She gestures at the split logs. "I've been learning to do that, apparently."
"Tessa." She's already grinning. "And that's Gage. He doesn't talk much."
"Completely normal," Gage agrees, which is Gage-speak for I'm already amused and also I'm not going to say anything. He sits on a log. Rocco and Toby immediately go to Jasper like he's the security blanket for all canines in the area.
"Six logs," Gabby says, and there's something in her voice that wasn't there an hour ago — a quiet satisfaction she's trying not to make too much of. "I came out here convinced my hands were structurally unsuited to this. Turns out they needed someone to stop letting me overthink it."
Tessa's grin gets wider.
"She needed to learn," I say.
"I'm sure," Tessa says. "Very practical skillset for a pastry chef to develop."
Gage makes a sound that might be a laugh.
Gabby glances toward the path. "I should get back. Those scones won't box themselves." She looks at the log pile once more, like she's making sure it's still there, still real. "Today was a good day."
She's not spiraling. She's just going.
"Gabby," I say.
She stops.
"You're doing okay," I say.
She looks back at me. Her throat moves.
"You keep saying that," she says.
"It keeps being true," I say.
Tessa is watching this exchange with absolute delight. Gage is looking at the trees like they're the most interesting thing he's ever seen in his entire life.
Jasper gets up and follows Gabby toward the path. Rocco and Toby immediately move to follow — a full canine exodus — and Gage puts out a hand without looking.
"No," he says.
They stop. They watch Jasper go with the betrayed expressions of dogs who know they're being left behind.
Even my dog has made his choice.
"Thank you," Gabby says, from the path. "For the instruction. And the everything else." A pause. "I'm going before I say something embarrassing."
She leaves. Jasper follows. She walks down the path, disappears into the tree line, doesn't come back.
"So," Tessa says, and her voice is dangerous in that gentle way she has. "Wood chopping instruction."
"She needed to learn," I repeat.
"Sure," Tessa says. "And it has nothing to do with the wood chips on your boots. Or the way you just watched her walk away like you were memorizing the exact shade of her eyes."
I don't argue. Arguing would be a lie, and I'm not interested in lying to Tessa about this.
"She's scared," I say instead.
"Of what?" Tessa asks.
"Failing before she gets a chance to leave on her own terms."
Gage stands up. "We should get these dogs home before Toby eats something he shouldn't." He looks at me once — a look that says he's clocked everything and isn't going to say a word about it — and heads down the trail.
Tessa follows. At the tree line she glances back.
"Nice to meet your friend," she says.
They're gone.
Jasper comes back an hour later. He smells like the forest and probably like Gabby. I don't say anything about it.
He drops into the grass at the edge of the clearing. I pick up the axe and start splitting the rest of the logs.