Chapter 9 #2
I think about Edna writing in her journal in the hours nobody else could see. Writing about Hank fixing fences wrong on purpose, just to exist in the same space as her. Writing about love like it was the only honest thing left.
“She was scared,” I say.
“Yes,” my mother agrees. “But she was also brave in a way that only scared people can be. She chose someone. She chose him completely. And she lived with that choice without needing anyone else to validate it.”
After we hang up, I sit in the quiet kitchen for a long time.
The next morning, I go to the general store specifically to talk to Marnie, who has that particular gift for knowing everything that happens in a small town. She’s older than my mother by a decade, which means she remembers Edna. Which means she remembers Hank.
“I wanted to ask you about the man my grandmother loved,” I say, sliding onto a stool near the register.
Marnie’s hands go still on the inventory she was counting.
“That’s not a random question,” she says carefully.
“I found her journal. I’m reading about him. And I’m trying to understand what their story was.”
Marnie finishes counting her current stack and sets her pencil down with intention.
“Edna and Hank met the way fairy tales don’t usually happen,” she starts.
“She came north as a drifter, a woman running away from something or toward something—nobody really knew which. He was already rooted here. Already building things. Already the kind of man who understood that love was an action, not a speech.”
She looks at me very directly.
“They were good together in a way that made sense if you could see them in the same room. But they kept to themselves mostly. Edna built her kitchen. Hank built things. They built a life. A quiet one. A private one. And when she died, Hank kept building, like the building itself was a way of keeping her alive.”
“Did they ever tell anyone?” I ask. “About how they felt?”
“Not in words,” Marnie says. “But anyone who paid attention could see it. In the way Hank would show up at the kitchen in the afternoons. In the way Edna would save him pieces of whatever she’d made. In the way they looked at each other when they thought nobody was watching.”
My chest is doing that thing again.
“I’m scared I’m becoming her,” I say without meaning to.
Marnie reaches over and squeezes my hand.
“Maybe that’s not the worst thing,” she says. “Maybe becoming her means you learned something important about yourself.”
That evening, I go back to the salmon croissants.
I make thirty-seven of them, even though nobody ordered them.
I make them because Edna made soup that tasted like salt water and someone chose to eat it anyway.
I make them because I’m beginning to understand that sometimes love looks like actions instead of words, and I’m terrified I’m about to spend my whole life understanding that and never being able to say it out loud.
The kitchen fills with the smell of butter and dill and fresh salmon.
The ovens hum their particular song. My hands know the work now—the lamination, the scoring, the precise placement of the salmon so it doesn’t leak when it bakes.
It’s become muscle memory, something I can do without thinking, which is dangerous because it means my brain is free to spiral.
Jace is Hank.
No. Jace is like Hank. There’s a difference, except there really isn’t.
He shows up. He fixes things. He doesn’t explain himself.
He exists in this space where I work and he doesn’t take credit or ask for recognition—he just builds a bench and leaves it like it’s nothing, like his time is just something he gives away freely to people who don’t know how to ask for it.
He’s doing the fence thing.
That’s what Edna meant. Hank was fixing a fence wrong on purpose just to exist in the same space as her, and Jace has been showing up at this kitchen for weeks finding reasons to be here, finding things to repair, finding excuses to exist in the background of my life like he’s content to just be present without being acknowledged.
I’m spiraling. I’m 100% spiraling and I know it.
I pull the croissants out of the oven when they’re golden—that perfect moment between pale and brown, where they catch the light like they’re made of actual sunshine—and I set them on the cooling rack and I try to breathe like a normal person.
But I can’t.
Because I’m realizing that Jace is in my mental ledger for a reason.
He’s in there with forty-seven pies and my dignity because I’ve been keeping track of what he’s cost me, and the cost is everything.
The cost is my carefully constructed plan to come to Alaska and process my divorce alone.
The cost is the comfortable lie that I could exist in this town without needing anyone.
The cost is forty-seven opportunities to pretend I wasn’t noticing the way he moves through the world like he’s made of intentionality.
I could stop making these croissants.
I could stop showing up in this kitchen. I could call Jace and tell him I’m handling the 60 days differently—that I need to be alone, that I need to figure out who I am without a man orbiting my life like gravity. I could be brave like that. I could protect myself.
But Edna didn’t protect herself. Edna read the directions to a man, a man she barely knew, and she stayed in Alaska anyway.
And then she spent her entire life making quiet choices that amounted to the same thing: she chose him.
In small moments, in actions that didn’t require explanation, in soup that tasted like failure but was served with intention.
She chose him. Every day.
I’m terrified I’m about to make the same choice. I’m terrified I’m about to look up one morning and realize that the entire geometry of my life has reorganized itself around someone I was supposed to keep at a distance.
I finish the croissants and arrange them in a box that I’ll deliver to Marnie in the morning, and I close the oven down for the night. The kitchen goes quiet. Just the hum of the refrigeration unit, the tick of cooling metal, the sound of my own breathing like I’m the only real thing in this space.
And I think about Edna writing in the dark.
Trying to make sense of her love. Keeping it private.
Keeping it real. How she understood that once you speak a thing out loud, it becomes subject to other people’s opinions.
It becomes up for debate. It becomes a thing that can be questioned or challenged or deemed foolish.
So she kept it in a journal instead. She kept it hidden. She kept it safe from the world’s judgment by never letting the world know it existed at all.
I’m beginning to understand exactly what she meant.
I’m beginning to understand that some truths are too fragile to speak.
And some loves are so complete, so overwhelming, so utterly consuming that the only way to survive them is to write them down in the dark and never, ever tell anyone they exist.