Chapter 14 #2
“You haven’t tasted them lately,” she says. “For all you know, they’re toxic. You’re just being nice.”
I taste a piece she’d left in the case. It’s good. The butter is laminated perfectly. The salmon is seasoned but not overwhelming. The croissant itself is flaky, delicate, exactly what a croissant should be. It’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t exist and yet it does.
“They’re good,” I say.
“Ryder bought four. Four. And Marnie said my baking was better than hers. Do you understand what that means? Dotty has lived here her whole life. She’s the standard. And I beat the standard.”
She’s giddy. Punch-drunk on success. Her hands are shaking slightly, and there’s a wildness in her eyes that says she hasn’t let herself believe this would work until it actually worked.
“You made something people want,” I say.
“I made salmon croissants and a moose ate one and we’re friends now. That’s insane. That’s not a business plan. That’s chaos.” She hesitates, "I wasn’t sure I could do it without Marco and Valentina. I thought I needed them to be successful, but I did it. All on my own.”
“It’s working.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are bright. There’s flour dust in her hair and on her face, and she looks exactly like someone who just survived something difficult and came out the other side whole.
She looks like someone who might stay.
“Thank you,” she says.
No joke attached. No deflection. Just gratitude, naked and unadorned. Her hair is up in a bun. There are flour streaks on her cheek. She’s looking at me like she’s trying to see something specific in my face.
Most honest thing she’s said to me.
“I know,” I say.
Callback. The salmon scone. When she arrived and made something impossible work. I said: I know. Just that. I was watching.
But now those two words carry everything—the flour dust in her hair, the kiss, the dress at the festival, the way she’s stopped running away from Alaska long enough to be here.
The way I’ve been here the whole time, terrified and building anyway.
The baker’s bench. The property I maintained for two years before I knew why I was maintaining it. Hank’s promise. All of it.
She understands the callback. Her face shifts. The understanding lands: I’ve been paying attention. I remember moments she probably thought were small. I’ve been waiting.
“I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know that too.”
She laughs once, short and real. “This was supposed to be temporary.”
“It is,” I say. “That’s still true.”
“So why does everything feel permanent?” Her voice is small. The small voice of someone who realizes she’s been marked by something she thought wouldn’t stick.
I sit with that for a moment. The way she’s looking at me. The way the light is hitting her face. The way I’ve been waiting for this conversation for days and now that it’s here, I don’t know how to have it without breaking something.
I don’t have an answer that won’t destroy us both. So I do what I do—I sit with her in the not-knowing. I don’t offer solutions. I don’t try to fix the temporal problem. I just stay across from her at the small table, in the space where she made something impossible into something people wanted.
The sun is still up outside. It’s not going to set for hours. The light is pale and golden and exactly how everything feels when you’re trying to hold something temporary like it matters.
I think about Hank. About how he built a promise that lasted longer than he did.
How he asked me to maintain Edna’s property without telling me why.
How he died before he could see the outcome of the thing he started.
I built that bench for someone I didn’t know yet, because Hank believed Edna would matter to the future, that this place would matter, that someone would come and want what Edna built.
He was right.
But he didn’t get to see it. Hank died before Gabby got here. He died before the kitchen got filled with flour and intention. He died before someone decided to stay long enough to make salmon croissants real.
“Morris destroyed a fence,” I tell her, because sometimes useless information is easier than the thought that you built something beautiful and the person who asked you to build it is already gone.
“Of course he did,” she says.
“I built it. He chewed through it.”
“In what timeframe?”
“Overnight.”
She smiles like she expected nothing less from chaos. From Morris. From the general refusal of the world to cooperate with planning.
“I built something that Morris immediately destroyed,” I continue. “So I’m building a better fence. One he can’t eat through. Might fail too. Probably will. But at least I’ll know more next time.”
She understands what I’m saying underneath what I’m saying.
That trying things that might break is the only way to build anything worth building.
That temporary doesn’t mean worthless. That the kiss and the presence and the days of not talking about it are all part of something real, even if the real thing has an expiration date we both agreed to before we knew better.
That Hank built something and trusted me to keep building it even after he was gone. That some promises are longer than lives. That some things matter because someone decided they mattered.
There’s a thing that happens to me when I’m afraid of losing someone.
Hank saw it first—the week after my parents’ plane went down, when I stopped speaking entirely.
Seven days of silence. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Hank sat with me in the workshop every one of those days, not pushing, not asking, just present.
He told me later that silence was my armor, and that armor is only useful if you remember how to take it off.
I told him I’d remember. I’m not sure I was telling the truth.
“I’m scared,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“I’m scared I’m going to want to stay, and I’m scared I’m going to leave, and I’m scared both of those things are true and I’ll have to pick between them.”
I reach across the table and hold her hand. This is a simple gesture. It’s not sex. It’s not the kiss. It’s just presence. Just choosing to touch her across this small table in her empty bakery when she’s scared and I’m terrified and neither of us has any certainty about what comes next.
She turns her hand over in mine like she’s checking whether it’s real. Like she needs to feel the warmth in my palm to believe this is happening.
“You don’t have to pick today,” I say.
“What if I wait too long and miss the deadline?”
“Then you miss it. Then you renegotiate. Then you make a new choice based on what’s actually true, not what you decided before you knew me.”
She looks at me. She’s crying a little, tears at the edges of her eyes, but she’s not hiding it.
I think about what I would say if I could say true things.
If I could tell her that the bench I built is waiting.
That Hank was waiting. That I’ve been waiting since the moment I saw her standing on Edna’s porch in borrowed socks, deciding whether to stay or leave.
That I’ve been waiting so long I stopped noticing I was waiting.
But that’s not the kind of thing you say to someone who’s trying to figure out if they can breathe in the same town as you.
“I’ll kiss you tomorrow the same way I kissed you the first time,” I say instead. “And we figure out what temporary means when we have to. For now, we… keep building.”
She doesn’t cry. She’s not that kind of person. But something in her settles, like she’s been holding her breath and finally decided it was safe to let it out.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Okay, we keep building. We figure it out. I don’t have to know the ending before we get there.”
“That’s very reasonable,” I say.
“Don’t get used to it,” she says. “I’m terrible at reasonable. I’m definitely going to panic and stress-bake at three AM again.”
“I know,” I say. This is also callback—her panic baking after the competition. Her fear made into carbohydrates. “That’s fine.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. It means you’re here and you’re terrified and you’re making salmon croissants that people want to buy.
It means the bread bench I built is being used the way it was always supposed to be used.
It means the property Hank asked me to maintain finally matters again. That’s the whole game right there.”
She squeezes my hand.
In the empty bakery, with the sun still up at six PM because we’re still in the endless daylight of an Alaska summer, I hold her hand across the table and we sit in the space where temporary hasn’t expired yet.
Where she can stay without staying forever.
Where I can let her leave without letting go entirely.
The salmon croissants sold out today. The ledger isn’t being written in anymore.
Morris is probably chewing through another fence somewhere.
Jasper is probably sleeping with his head on something that belongs to her.
And Gabby is sitting across from me looking terrified and real and like she’s decided to build something with me, at least for the next chapter.
The light is still pale and golden. The day hasn’t ended. Somewhere in the workshop, a cabinet is waiting. Somewhere in this space between staying and leaving, we’re figuring out what building together means when the foundation is temporary.
I can work with that. I can work with temporary that stretches long enough to matter.
I can work with anything she builds if I’m building it with her.
I think about Hank. About whether he’s watching from wherever Hank watches from.
About whether he can see that his promise got handed to the right person.
That I kept the property intact long enough for someone to make it matter.
That I built a bench and waited, and the thing I was waiting for arrived in heels and a sundress, terrified and trying to hide it.
Hank believed in this. In this place. In this moment.
Maybe wherever he is, he knows.
The sun is circling the horizon. It’s not going to set for hours.
And in the golden light, holding her hand across a small table, I think maybe this is what permanent looks like when you’re afraid to use that word.
Maybe this is what love looks like when it comes with an expiration date you’re both too scared to acknowledge.
Maybe Hank knew something about promises that I’m only just beginning to understand. That they’re not about forever. They’re about the space between now and later, where real things happen.
Maybe this is enough.
For now, it has to be enough.