Chapter 10 #2
She laughs so hard she has to put her head on my shoulder, and her laugh is echoing against the rock face and bouncing off the water like it’s the most important sound that’s ever existed in this space.
She’s laughing at the absurdity of it—the precise timing, the inevitability, the cosmic joke of a moose appearing exactly when everything was about to shift.
“He has the worst timing,” she gasps between laughs.
“He’s actually perfect timing,” I say, and I don’t sound happy about this. “He’s showing us exactly what’s about to happen.”
“What’s that?” She’s still laughing, still leaning against me like this is easy, like we haven’t just moved into a territory we can’t move back from.
“Everything else,” I say flatly. “Morris is a metaphor. A large, very destructive metaphor. He’s a warning about what happens when you stop pretending this isn’t real.”
She laughs harder at that, and Morris—satisfied that he’s completed his mission—snuffles and wanders back into the brush to destroy something else or sleep or do whatever moose do with their time.
And now Gabby knows how I’m thinking about her. The way Hank thought about someone. The way someone arranges their entire life around another person’s existence.
She’s still sitting on this rock next to me, laughing.
And I can’t look away.
Morris has completely disappeared now, satisfied that he’s done his duty as the universe’s most perfectly timed cock-blocker.
The rocks are still wet from the falls’ spray, and I can feel Gabby’s shoulder against mine, and I’m acutely aware that we’re at the point in this where laughing is the only remaining way to avoid what’s actually happening.
But laughing won’t work much longer.
“That moose is unhinged,” she says, still catching her breath.
“He’s not unhinged. He’s right.” I’m watching the water cascade down the cliff face, trying to figure out how to say what needs to be said.
“He’s basically nature’s way of telling us that timing doesn’t matter anymore.
That we can plan and calculate and decide exactly when we’re going to have a serious conversation, but something will always show up to destroy the precise moment we choose. ”
“So what, we accept the chaos?”
“No.” I finally look at her. “We accept that the chaos doesn’t change anything. Morris can crash through the trees a thousand times and it won’t matter. Everything that was about to happen in that moment before he showed up—everything is still going to happen anyway.”
She stops laughing. Her head is still on my shoulder, and I can feel the pressure of it—the specific gravity of her attention.
“Jace,” she says, and my name in her voice sounds like a warning.
“I’m not going to,” I say.
“Not going to what?”
“Kiss you. Not right now. Not here, not with Morris probably about to come back, not when there’s so much you don’t know yet.
” I take a breath. “But I wanted you to understand that I’m thinking about it.
That I’m thinking about you the way someone thinks about a person they can’t imagine their life without.
And I wanted you to know that I’m aware of how insane this is, given that you came here to be alone and figure things out for only sixty days. .”
She’s quiet. For a long time.
“You’re very direct,” she finally says.
“I don’t have words for much,” I tell her. “But the words I do have, I try to use them right.”
The walk back to the truck is quiet. Not uncomfortable quiet. A quiet that only exists when two people are rearranging everything they thought they understood about each other and themselves.
We don’t talk during the drive back, except for the radio, and even that feels like too much noise.
I can feel what I’ve said hanging between us.
I can feel the way she’s processing it, analyzing it, running it through whatever internal logic she uses to decide whether something is a threat or a possibility.
The truck’s engine rumbles. The forest passes in dark silhouettes. Somewhere Morris is probably eating or knocking trees down or perfecting his timing.
When we get close to town, she reaches over and turns the radio down.
“I read some of Edna’s journal,” she says quietly, like she’s been holding these words for a while and finally decided it was safe to release them.
“Yeah?”
“She was funny. Actually witty. Sharp. And she loved someone in a way that was so—” she stops, reaching for language like it’s a physical object. “—so complete that she couldn’t tell anyone about it. Even the people who should have known. Even her own family.”
I keep my eyes on the road, on the dark asphalt stretching ahead of us, because looking at her right now feels dangerous. Feels like it would confirm something we’re both trying not to admit.
“She was scared,” Gabby continues quietly. “Scared it would disappear if she made it real. Like saying it out loud would jinx it somehow. Like keeping it private was the only way to keep it safe.”
“Did it?” I ask, and my voice sounds different—lower, rougher. “Did it stay safe?”
“I don’t know. She died before mentioning it. But there’s something in the journal that suggests she was willing to keep loving him anyway. Even if nobody else knew. Even if it was only real to her.” Gabby pauses. “Even if it meant being alone with it for her entire life.”
The road curves. A sign passes warning about moose on the highway.
“That’s not how it has to be,” I say, and I sound like someone who’s terrified and out of protective options.
Like someone who just realized that all the careful distance he’s been maintaining isn’t actually protecting anything anymore.
“You don’t have to keep it private. You don’t have to be alone in what you’re feeling. ”
There’s a long moment of silence. The truck fills with the sound of the engine and the hum of tires on asphalt.
“No,” she agrees after what feels like forever. “I guess it doesn’t have to be.”
She reaches over and turns the radio back up. Some song about summer and inevitability and the way good things are always worth the risk of losing them. The kind of song that’s trying to tell us something we’re not ready to hear yet.
But her hand stays on the console between us.
Our pinkies are almost touching—close enough that I can feel the heat of her skin, close enough that the air between them seems to shimmer with possibility. Close enough that everything has changed and cannot be changed back.
I can feel the moment she makes some kind of internal decision. The way her hand shifts just slightly, the way her breathing changes, the way she stops trying to pretend that this is casual or manageable or something that can be easily walked back.
By the time we pull into town, our pinkies are touching.
Not holding hands. Not yet. Just this small point of contact that feels more honest than anything else that’s happened between us.
When I drop her off at Edna’s house, her house now, she gets out of the truck slowly, like there’s a script we’re supposed to follow and she’s trying to figure out what the next line is.
“Tomorrow?” she asks.
“Tomorrow,” I confirm. “And the day after that. And however long you’re staying.”
She nods like she’s accepted something. Like she’s made a choice that mirrors the choices Hank made, and Edna made, and everyone who’s come before us made when they decided that the risk of complete, overwhelming love was worth taking.
She closes the truck door.
And I sit in the darkness with my hands on the steering wheel and I think about the letters I found in Hank’s desk. The ones addressed to someone he could never give them to. The ones that explained everything about how love works when it’s real enough to break you.
In the morning, I’ll remember that I told her about the letters but never told her that they were addressed to Edna—that Hank spent decades loving someone he couldn’t have, and it shaped everything he was and everything he gave to me.
Never told her that my grandfather’s entire architecture was built on the foundation of a love so complete that it existed in secret.
But the falls knew.
And Morris knew.
And now, somehow, she knows too.
The keeping-secret part comes later. The protection, the fear, the moment where she realizes she’s become the thing she was terrified of becoming—someone who loves completely and can’t say it out loud, who builds lives out of actions instead of words.
For now, she walks across Edna’s front yard with her jacket wrapped around herself like armor.
For now, everything is crashing down.
For now, the ledger is still unbalanced.