Chapter 10
Jace
Ifind the notebook on a Tuesday afternoon when I’m delivering the desk—the one I’ve been building for weeks, the one Piper probably mentioned to Gabby, the one I’ve been using as an excuse to exist in this kitchen in a state of perpetual half-commitment.
It’s tucked under a stack of clean towels in the kitchen. Dark green leather. Her handwriting on the cover in what I recognize as her anxiety-scrawl: Mental Ledger - DO NOT READ.
So of course I read it.
The entries are organized by person, which is worse than if they’d been chronological. Like she’s conducting a personal audit of human relationships, tallying up what the world owes her in exchange for her presence in it.
Marco - ex-husband - owes me: emotional intelligence, basic human kindness, an apology that will never come, my self-esteem, the illusion that marriage is supposed to be easy
Dotty - owes me: nothing. She’s perfect. If she asks, I owe her. This goes negative. She’s in profit with my existence.
Morris - moose - owes me: two trays of salmon croissants, any future therapist bills, an explanation for your timing
Piper - owes me: discretion. She has none. She knows things and won’t stop smiling about them. Send help.
And then:
Jace – I owe him: forty-seven pies.
I read that last one three separate times, trying to understand the specific math of it. Forty-seven pies. Like the losses are compounding.
I’m still holding the notebook when she arrives, coming through the kitchen door the way she’s learned to—with the confidence of someone who’s earned the right to be here.
Her entire life has reorganized itself around this kitchen and that oven named Lucifer, and watching someone build a life in real-time is its own kind of dangerous.
Her expression goes through seven distinct phases in approximately 0.8 seconds.
Shock. Horror. Panic. Resignation. Attempted comedy. Actual fury. Acceptance.
“You’re reading my private journal,” she says flatly.
“Mental ledger,” I correct, because if I’m going down, I’m doing it with the truth. Because she deserves honesty even when she’s terrified of it. “And it’s—this is accurate. Forty-seven pies is fair.”
She reaches for it. I raise it above my head.
Here’s the problem: I’m 6’3" and she’s not.
She’s jumping like her body doesn’t understand physics, like she believes she can reach something a foot above her head.
She’s jumping and grunting slightly with the effort, and I’m standing there holding the notebook and not laughing because laughing feels like it would destroy the careful equilibrium of what’s about to happen.
“Give it back,” she says, breathless.
“Forty-seven pies,” I repeat. “That’s a lot of pies, Gabby. That’s like—that’s the kind of debt that suggests something.”
“That I’m keeping score?”
“That you notice everything I do.” I flip to the next page, watching her expression shift. “That you’re accounting for everything I do.”
“Because you keep showing up!”
“Yes.”
“And fixing things!”
“Yes.”
“And making me feel like maybe I belong here when everything in me is screaming that I’m supposed to leave!
” Her voice has climbed and she’s still jumping, one more attempt, and this time her fingers actually brush the leather edge of the notebook.
“So yes, Jace, I’m keeping score because keeping score means I’m not just floating around waiting for something to hurt me.
Keeping score means I’m paying attention, and keeping attention is the only way I know how to not lose people. ”
I lower the notebook slowly. She stops jumping.
We stand there in the kitchen with the ovens humming in the background, and I understand in a clear way why she needed to write this down.
Why she needed to catalog what she owes the world—it’s not about debt, it’s about proof.
Proof that she matters. Proof that she’s been seen.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say quietly.
“Yes, I do. You’ve—” she stops, gathering words like they’re scattered on the floor and she has to pick them up carefully.
“You’ve cost me my peace of mind. You’ve cost me the ability to pretend I can do this alone.
You’ve cost me forty-seven pies worth of effort and twice my dignity and the comfortable lie that I came here just to process my divorce. ”
I set the notebook down on the desk I built. The unnecessary desk. The one with the intricate joinery that took weeks because I was looking for reasons to exist in this kitchen, to orbit her like I’m operating under some gravitational pull I don’t have the language for.
“Come with me,” I say instead of answering. “I want to show you something.”
“Jace—”
“Come with me.”
She grabs her jacket without asking why, which tells me everything I need to know about where we are in this. We’re past the point of caution. We’re in the part where she trusts my insanity without explanation, and I’m terrified of what I’m about to tell her.
The drive to the lake takes twenty minutes. Neither of us speaks. The radio plays quietly—something about small towns and summer leaving and the inevitability of change. I keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and I try to remember why I thought this was a good idea.
The waterfalls are another ten minutes in, down a trail that Hank carved out when he wanted a place to exist without anyone asking him why.
When I was nineteen and angry about everything—angry about my parents being dead, angry about being alive, angry about the unfairness of a world that takes you by surprise—he brought me here and we didn’t talk.
We just sat on these rocks and let the water do all the talking for us.
Gabby sees the falls and actually stops moving.
For someone who talks constantly, who fills silences with observation and humor and the particular self-awareness of someone who knows she’s using words as armor, she goes quiet.
She stands there and watches the water crash down from the cliff face, and I can see the moment she understands why Hank brought me here.
Why some places are so big that the smallness of your own problems becomes irrelevant.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s like that.”
We sit on the rocks without discussing it. The water fills the space between us—completely, thoroughly, leaving no room for small talk or deflection. Just the sound of falling water and the smell of mist and pine and the weight of whatever I’m about to say.
“My parents died when I was nineteen,” I tell her. “Bush plane crash. They were doing a supply run to the villages. They were supposed to be back in three days. They weren’t.”
I can see her shoulders get tighter, like she’s bracing for something.
“Hank raised me after that,” I continue.
“He was already older. Already set in his ways. Already the kind of man who understood that love was built in actions, not explanations. And suddenly he was responsible for fixing a person who was fundamentally broken. Who was angry in a way that didn’t have a direction—just this general rage at the world for being unfair. ”
The falls crash against the rocks with relentless precision.
“He didn’t try to fix it,” I say. “Didn’t try to make me feel better by telling me things would get easier.
Didn’t try to explain why it happened or what it meant or how I was supposed to live with it.
He just—he showed up. Every day. He fixed the cabin.
He fixed the truck. He built things. He existed in the same space as my anger until eventually the anger got smaller because I was busy watching him move through the world with this particular kind of quiet intention. ”
I haven’t talked about Hank like this—not in full sentences, not in explanations. I’ve held him in silence the way he held me.
“He died a few years ago,” I say. “And I found letters afterward. Letters he’d written but never sent. I didn’t know until I found them what the letters were about. Didn’t know for a long time. But in those letters, he was explaining himself. Not to me. To someone else.”
Gabby is completely still. I can see her breath coming shallow. Her jaw is clenched. She’s understanding something without me having to say it.
“That what?” she asks quietly. “The letters were to who?”
The water fills the space where words should go. I let it for a long moment.
“He knew exactly what he was doing,” I finally say.
“Everything he taught me about patience and presence and showing up for people—he didn’t figure that out on his own.
Someone showed him. Someone taught him that love is an action, not a feeling.
That you don’t have to say anything if you’re already doing everything.
That sometimes the most honest thing you can do is exist completely in another person’s life without needing them to acknowledge it. ”
I turn to look at her and she turns to look at me, and there’s a moment—a specific, very dangerous moment—where nothing exists but the falls and the realization that I’ve just said more words in a single continuous stretch than I’ve said to anyone in years.
The water crashes. A bird calls. The world keeps moving.
Her eyes are bright.
Her lips are close.
The air between us has changed into something heavier, something that tastes like inevitability and electricity that terrifies me completely.
And then—
Crash.
Not the water. Something wrong. Large, splintering branches. The sound of something massive moving through the tree line about fifteen feet away, completely indifferent to the fact that it’s about to destroy a moment that felt like the architecture of my life was rearranging itself.
Morris emerges from the brush like he’s auditioning for a nature documentary. He’s massive. He’s covered in mud. He’s completely oblivious to the specificity of what he’s interrupted.
Gabby laughs.