Chapter 18
Jace
Marco arrives on a Tuesday.
Piper texts a photo. Man in loafers. No socks. Alaska doesn’t forgive that.
“Incoming,” Piper’s text says. “Gabby’s ex. He’s at The Ashwood Café.”
I don’t go to Dotty’s immediately. I tell myself it’s because I have work—there’s a cabinet order waiting, something about hidden drawers and precision measurements—but it’s a lie and I know it’s a lie. I’m I avoid. Wait for him to disappear the way outsiders do when Alaska rejects them.
He doesn’t disappear.
By Thursday, Marco has been to the bakery. I know this because the whole town is talking about it, and small towns are the opposite of secret. He’s charming, apparently. He’s from Austin. He’s in the pastry business. He’s Gabby’s ex. He wants her back.
The problem is that she’s not there when he shows up at the bakery. Piper tells me this. She appears at my workshop like she does, with updates, like she’s my personal intelligence agency, which she absolutely is.
“He showed up looking for Gabby,” Piper says. “She was at a vendor meeting with Patrice. He waited for an hour. Bought a salmon croissant. Ate it. Looked like he was having a religious experience. Now he’s staying at the B&B and telling people he’s going to convince her to come back to Austin.”
I don’t respond. What’s there to say? The future that’s been lurking in the background for weeks is suddenly showing up in loafers and telling Gabby’s story to anyone who’ll listen.
“He seems slick,” Piper continues. “Very well-practiced. Very ‘I’m a successful man from a city and I’m here to remind you that you were meant for somewhere better.’ That energy. I don’t like him.”
I still don’t respond. But I stand up from the cabinet work and I put down my tools and I say, “Where is she now?”
“Café,” Piper says. “Probably looking for you. Wants to warn you that—”
But I’m already moving.
The walk from my workshop to Dotty’s takes about five minutes if you’re moving like you’re angry and someone’s made you remember why anger exists.
Marco is sitting in a window booth when I arrive.
He’s drinking coffee out of one of Dotty’s hand-painted mugs and he looks like he belongs there, which he absolutely doesn’t.
The café is full and it’s suddenly still.
Dotty takes one look at me and then at Marco, and she says clearly to everyone in the café, “Machine’s broken. We’re out of coffee.”
The machine is not broken. I can see it working perfectly behind the counter, steam rising from the group head like it’s personally offended by the accusation.
But Dotty’s made a decision and when Dotty makes a decision, the laws of physics rearrange to accommodate her.
Marco looks confused, which is the correct response to being ejected from a café by a woman who could probably broker peace in the Middle East if she applied the same energy.
“But I’m drinking coffee,” he says.
“That’s the last of it,” Dotty says. “I’m closing.”
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Dotty doesn’t close until seven. But she’s moving around the café like she’s orchestrated something and she’s sure about it. She’s turning off the espresso machine. She’s cleaning the counter. She’s treating Marco like he’s a problem that requires containment.
Morris is in the parking lot when I come back out.
Morris, the moose, is standing directly behind Marco’s rental car, blocking it completely.
Not hitting it. Not destroying it. Just standing there with the specific stubbornness of a moose who’s decided that this vehicle is not leaving.
I’ve seen Morris eat a porch railing, charge a delivery van, and sleep through a thunderstorm without flinching, but I’ve never seen him take a political position.
Apparently Marco has inspired civic engagement in the local wildlife.
I walk past him without stopping.
The workshop is where Gabby finds me at three-thirty. She’s walked over from the vendor meeting. Her hair is down. She’s wearing the dress from the competition—the blue one that makes everything about her sharper. She looks like someone who’s been steeling herself for a difficult conversation.
“We need to talk about Marco,” she says immediately.
“I know,” I say.
“He called me. He said he came to Alaska to convince me to come back to Austin. He said he made a mistake and he wants to try again. He said that what we had was good and that I should give us another chance.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing yet,” she says. “I wanted to talk to you first because—” She stops. She’s looking at me like she’s trying to see if I’m still here or if I’ve already left. “—because I wanted to know what you think.”
“I think you know what you want,” I say, and I’m being careful with my voice because if I let it crack, everything cracks.
“That’s not an answer,” she says.
“What do you want me to say?” The words come out sharper than I intended. “Do you want me to tell you to stay? Do you want me to convince you? Do you want me to act like your ex-husband flying to Alaska to win you back is not a major situation?”
“I want you to tell me what you’re feeling,” she says.
And that’s the thing about Gabby. She wants honesty. She wants realness. She doesn’t want me to sit in my silence and let her guess what I’m thinking. She wants me to break the silence and let her in.
But the silence is where I live. It’s where I’ve lived since the day my parents got in a bush plane and didn’t come back. It’s where I’ve lived since I learned that people leave, that closeness is temporary, that letting someone matter is the same as giving them power to destroy you.
So I don’t say anything.
Her face changes as she realizes that the man she loves—the man who said he loves her—is choosing to retreat instead of engage. She tries to fill the silence with words, because that’s what she does when she’s scared.
“Jace?” she says quietly. “Talk to me.”
I turn away. I pick up a piece of wood that I’ve been working on—a frame for something, I don’t remember what anymore—and I start sanding it. The motion is familiar. It’s what I do instead of feeling things.
“I’m asking you to talk to me,” she says again. “I’m asking you to use words instead of shutting down.”
“I’m not shutting down,” I say. But I am. I can feel it happening. The walls are going up. The careful distance is asserting itself. The safety net of silence is tightening around me like it’s a living thing.
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m standing here watching you try to decide between the man you married and planned to be with for the rest of your life and the man you settled for because you were scared and you ended up in Alaska and I was convenient.”
It’s not true. I don’t actually believe it. But fear is a thing that says untrue things through your mouth and makes them sound real.
She flinches like I’ve hit her.
“That’s not fair,” she says.
“None of this is fair,” I say. “You had a 60-day clause that was always about testing the town. You had a 60-day window where you get to live here and see if you can make it work with the quiet furniture maker while the city life is still waiting in Portland. And now your ex shows up and he’s reminding you that that life is real and available and doesn’t require you to change everything about your expectations. ”
“I’m not going back to Marco,” she says.
“You might,” I say. “And if you do, I need you to know that it’s okay.”
It’s a lie. It’s the opposite of okay. It would break me in ways that I’ve spent years since my parents died protecting myself against. But I’m saying it like it’s true because I’m trying to be the good guy here, the one who lets her go, the one who doesn’t burden her with his own fear.
“It’s not okay,” she says. She’s crying now.
Actually crying. “It’s not okay because I love you and I don’t want to go back to Austin and I don’t want to lose you, and what you’re doing right now—this silence, this withdrawal—is making it impossible for me to know whether you’re here or whether you’re already gone. ”
I don’t answer. I sand the wood. The motion is rhythmic. It’s something my hands know how to do without my brain involved. It’s safe.
“Jace,” she says. “Please.”
But I don’t have anything left to say. The fear is too big. The silence is too comfortable. The walls are too high.
She leaves quietly.
She waits for about thirty seconds to see if I’m going to stop her, to see if I’m going to turn around and say something that would change this moment.
I don’t. I listen to her footsteps retreating.
I listen to the workshop door closing. I listen to the sound of her absence replacing the sound of her presence.
Then I keep sanding.
Friday morning comes and Morris is still blocking Marco’s rental car.
I don’t actually know how he’s managed this.
I don’t know if he’s slept. I don’t know if he needs to eat or if he’s made a decision about this vehicle and he’s committed to it.
The point is that the car is not going anywhere and Marco cannot leave without dealing with Morris, which is funny because Marco is the kind of man who has no experience with moose.
Ryder is in the parking lot at seven-thirty AM, ostensibly to check on the situation but actually to make sure Morris is okay, which means the whole town is coordinated on the Morris situation. This is what small towns do. They rally around the right side and they do it without saying it out loud.
I hear about this because Piper texts me.
Piper is my information broker and I’m realizing now that she’s been trying to help me the entire time.
She’s telling me where Gabby is. She’s telling me what Marco’s doing.
She’s trying to give me the information I need to fix this, except I don’t know how to fix it because the fix requires me to use my voice and I’ve let the silence win.