Chapter 13 #2
He goes completely still. Like someone hit pause on him.
He’s across the field, maybe two hundred feet away, holding a cup of lemonade or coffee or something that I can’t identify at this distance, and he stops existing for a moment and then comes back wrong—like he’s reassembling himself from pieces that don’t quite fit anymore.
Like the pieces have rearranged themselves in the time since the kiss and now the person he was before doesn’t fit the space he’s taking up.
His eyes find mine. He watches me walk. He doesn’t smile.
He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t do any of the normal things you do when you see someone you’ve kissed.
He watches, and the watching is more intimate than the kiss was.
The watching is: I see you. I see you choosing to be visible.
I see you wearing the dress that says you have another life and you’re wearing it anyway. The watching is: I see you.
I walk past him close enough that the hem of my skirt brushes his jeans.
Close enough that I feel the heat coming off his forearm where it almost meets mine on the railing.
My knuckles pass an inch from his and neither of us moves, and the not-moving takes more effort than anything I’ve done all day.
I don’t say anything. Neither does he. But it runs like a current through the air between us, like electricity.
Something real moves through the air between us.
and we’re both pretending we didn’t notice, we’re both operating on the principle that if we don’t acknowledge it, it won’t be real, and we both know that’s not how this works but we’re trying anyway.
The festival itself is sprawling and colorful and so aggressively Alaskan I feel like I’ve landed on another planet.
There are booths everywhere—people selling local crafts, local food, local fish, jam, honey, knitted things, carved things, things that have clearly been made by people who live here and know how to use their hands.
The sun is still high in the sky because it’s only three in the afternoon and the sun doesn’t set until practically midnight.
There’s blue sky that stretches endlessly, mountains in the distance that look like they’ve been painted by someone with specific ideas about scale, and everywhere—everywhere—the sense of something wild being temporarily contained within a fairground.
I try the salmon caramel corn which is surprisingly good, why does everything with salmon work here I don’t know, and watch people move through the space like they belong here, which they do.
Like they’ve been here forever. Like the mountains and the daylight and the impossible fishing are all things they understand inherently.
Birdie appears at my elbow while I’m waiting for regular kettle corn—the non-salmon variety, because even I have limits—and this is shocking in the way that surprise is always shocking.
Birdie, who beat me with a three-tiered blueberry masterpiece that was objectively perfect, who represents everything I’m not, rooted, practical, belonging, the kind of person who builds things here instead of just visiting them, is standing next to me like we’re friends or something.
“Your éclairs are good,” she says. Direct. Not a compliment exactly, just a statement of fact. “I tried one at the bakery yesterday.”
I’m looking at Birdie properly for the first time, not just as competition but as a person.
She has laugh lines—deep ones, the kind that come from years of actual laughing.
She has the weathered skin that comes from living outside in a place where the sun literally never quits, where your face gets exposed to endless daylight and you just accept that this is your life.
She has a band-aid on her thumb—fresh, probably from this morning—like she was baking this morning and cut herself and didn’t bother to stop for it, just wrapped it up and kept working.
“Oh,” I say, which is approximately the least eloquent response I could give to someone offering me a compliment.
“I want to teach you about local ingredients,” she continues, and now her voice has shifted from competition to something else, something like offer.
“Not like—” She waves a hand at the sky, at the mountains, at the whole situation.
“Not like I’m fixing your failure. Not like that.
Just. I like what you’re doing. I like the way you’re using things that shouldn’t work together.
And you could do it better if you knew the real stuff.
The deep stuff. Not the tourist version you’re pulling from whatever supplier you found.
The actual local ingredients—fireweed honey that you can get from Marnie, spruce tips that you have to know where to find, mushrooms from people who actually know the woods. ”
I stare at her.
“Also,” she adds, and her voice is different now, softer, like she’s about to tell me something she doesn’t tell everyone.
“Everyone crashed and burned on their first summer festival competition. Everyone. Granted, Morris wasn’t helping you at all, but my failure was seventeen years ago, and I made something that looked like a cake committed suicide.
Literally. It just—collapsed. Fell over mid-table.
In front of like fifty people. There were several witnesses.
People I’m still going to community events with.
People who remember it. And I came back and I did it again and I kept doing it until I was good. So.”
She’s offering me community. An olive branch.
Actual belonging to something that isn’t temporary, isn’t borrowed time, isn’t just something I get to use while I’m here.
She’s telling me that my failure didn’t disqualify me.
That every person who belongs here has also publicly failed here.
That failure isn’t permanent; it’s the process.
“Thank you,” I say, and I mean it. Community. An olive branch. The possibility of staying. The possibility that temporary doesn’t have to be the only thing I get.
“Also,” Birdie adds, like she’s reading my mind, “Jace is still staring at you.”
I don’t look. I look at the kettle corn. “I’m aware.”
“He’s been staring for like ten minutes. Since you walked up.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You should probably talk to him at some point.”
“I’m managing the festival situation,” I say. “Talking to Jace is not part of the management plan.”
Birdie smiles like she knows something I don’t, which she probably does because she’s lived here forever and I’ve been here for only weeks, and then she leaves me to my kettle corn and my inability to look at the person who kissed me like he meant it.
Later—maybe an hour later, maybe two, the sun doesn’t move so time has become abstract—I’m standing near the gazebo where they’re announcing next month’s events, and Piper Lockwood finds me.
Piper, who is married to Ryder Lockwood and seems to have existed in Ashwood Falls forever but hasn’t, seems rooted here the way I’m still learning it’s possible to be rooted anywhere.
She’s holding a conversation with me like I’m not someone who will leave.
Like I’m not someone with a life waiting in Portland and a departure date circled on a calendar somewhere.
“I almost left,” she says, seemingly out of nowhere. “Ashwood Falls, I mean. I almost left.”
“What?” I ask. I’ve been watching Jace across the field, and this is admittedly distracting.
He’s talking to Trace—I think it’s Trace, the one who looks like he knows how to build things with his hands—but he keeps glancing in my direction.
He keeps checking whether I’m still wearing the dress.
Whether I’m still here. Whether I’m still visible.
“Ashwood Falls. I almost left. I had a job offer. Somewhere else. Better opportunity, bigger city, the whole thing.” She’s looking at the festival like she’s seeing a specific memory through glass.
“I was going to say no to Ryder because I thought I had to choose between him and the rest of my life. Like you can only have one thing. Like staying means you give up the other part of you.”
“And?” I ask, though I know the answer. She’s standing here, not choosing.
“And I realized I was going to let fear make the decision,” she says. “That if I left, it wouldn’t be because I wanted to leave. It would be because I was scared to stay. There’s a difference. Huge difference. One is a choice and one is just running.”
I don’t know what to do with this information.
It’s wrapped around my chest like something that can’t breathe.
Like if I admit that I’m scared to stay, that admission becomes true and I have to deal with the consequences.
Like admitting I’m scared means I have to actually face the choice instead of just letting time decide for me.
“I don’t know what I want,” I say.
“That’s okay,” Piper says. “But be honest about whether you’re leaving because you want to or because you’re scared. There’s a difference. And you’re smart enough to know which one it is.”
She walks away before I can respond, which is probably intentional, and I stand there holding my kettle corn and thinking about choices and fear and the difference between running and leaving.
At home—back at the cabin, I’ve started thinking of it as home even though I’m supposed to be temporary—I find Edna’s journal sitting on the kitchen table.
The leather one, worn soft, with entries dating back decades.
I don’t remember putting it there. The kitchen was empty when I left.
But I open it anyway, and there’s a bookmark—actual physical bookmark—between the pages, holding a specific entry, like someone was trying to tell me something.
Thursday, June 20th, 1987. Made another three-layer cake today.
Got the order for the community hall. Martha said it was the best she’d tasted.
I stood in the kitchen and realized I’ve spent two months pretending like my hands know what to do while my heart is somewhere else.
I’ve been baking like someone who is leaving, not baking like someone who gets to stay.
When did I decide I didn’t get to stay? When did I decide that this thing I’m building doesn’t get to be permanent?
The handwriting is shaky. The ink has faded to brown, like it’s been aging for decades, which it has.
Edna was running away too. Or trying to.
She was baking away her fear of staying, making beautiful things with hands that knew what to do, trying to outrun a choice she’d already made by deciding the choice was made for her.
I read it a bunch of times, standing in the kitchen in the endless daylight.
In the kitchen, surrounded by my stress-baked pastries, the éclairs cooling on racks, the shortbread in boxes, the galette waiting to be plated, I sit at the table and I think about Edna’s fear and Piper’s choice and the dress I wore to the festival.
About owning what you arrived as instead of hiding from it.
About the difference between temporary and chosen.
Jace is temporary because we decided that together.
Because I said “this is a temporary situation” and he said “okay” and we both accepted the mathematics of it.
But maybe I’m letting that decide everything else—maybe I’m letting temporary mean unloved, means doesn’t count, means I can hold it at arm’s length and protect myself so when I leave it won’t hurt too much.
Maybe I’m making the same choice Edna made.
Baking myself away instead of staying. Building things like they’re going to be temporary anyway, so why bother making them last?
Maybe the thing I’m scared of isn’t staying.
Maybe the thing I’m scared of is being loved while I’m leaving.
Being loved and knowing it has an expiration date.
Being loved by someone who understands math better than I do, who can hold temporary and real at the same time, who kissed me like the kiss mattered while knowing full well that I’m leaving.
Can you do that? Can you love something knowing it’s going to end? Can you build something beautiful knowing it’s temporary?
Yes, the workshop is full of Jace’s answer. Yes, all those things he’s built with his hands, all those real and beautiful things—yes.
The sun is circling the horizon. It’s nine PM on the festival day and the light is still pale and golden, like the world hasn’t quite finished with the afternoon yet, like it’s going to stretch this day out indefinitely.
I stand in the kitchen at nine PM, which looks like three PM and might as well be three AM, and I understand that Edna didn’t think she could stay because she’d already decided she was leaving.
She’d already written the ending before she lived the middle.
She’d already told herself the story of the temporary woman in the permanent town, so of course she became that story… until she didn’t.
My ledger sits on the counter. Empty of new tallies.
I’ve stopped counting toward Portland without noticing I’d stopped.
I’ve stopped tracking the days like they’re marching toward some inevitable deadline.
And that terrifies me more than the kiss did.
That terrifies me more than the dress. That terrifies me more than Jace watching me across the field like he’s seeing something in me that I don’t see in myself.
I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. I don’t know if I’m staying or leaving. I don’t know if I’m scared or brave or just prolonging the inevitable. But the dress is still on, and I’m still here, and sometimes that’s the only honesty available.
Sometimes that’s enough.