Chapter 19
Gabby
Marco leaves on a Sunday, and by Monday morning I’ve already decided to sell.
Not because of him. He was never the problem. A reminder of something I thought was fixed. His car disappears down the road. No relief. No regret. Just flatness. Everything to do with a man who won’t come out of his workshop.
I told Marco the truth. Not the dramatic version, not the tearful confrontation that would make a good story at dinner parties. Just the truth, plain and undecorated, delivered while standing behind the bakery counter with flour on my hands and Jasper growling at his ankles.
“You don’t actually want me back,” I’d said. “You want the woman who didn’t know she deserved better. She doesn’t exist anymore. I baked her out of my system with salmon croissants and a possessed oven and a moose who eats my porch.”
He’d stared at me like I was speaking a different language.
Which, in a way, I was. Many weeks in Alaska had given me a vocabulary he couldn’t parse—one built on sourdough starters and generator pull cords and the specific silence of a man who said more in a single sentence than Marco ever said in an entire marriage.
“You’re staying,” Marco had said, not a question. “In Alaska. For a guy who builds furniture.”
“I’m staying for me,” I’d told him. “The furniture guy is a bonus.”
Except the bonus had stopped talking to me. The bonus was locked inside his workshop, sanding wood like the grain held answers, and every time I walked the four hundred yards between our cabins, the trail stretched longer every time.
Monday afternoon, I start packing.
Not much to pack, really. My entire previous life is in storage in Austin. Boxed up. Paying rent on memories I can’t throw away.
What I have here: Edna’s flannel collection, which I’ve adopted without permission.
My rolling pin. A few pairs of shoes that are wrong for every possible Alaskan activity.
The pastry tools I ordered online during week three, when I’d finally admitted to myself that I was going to try—really try—to make the bakery work.
Edna’s journal, which I’ve read cover to cover three times now, underlining passages in pencil like it’s a textbook for a life I’m studying.
I fold the flannels into the suitcase first. Then the journal. Then the pastry tools, wrapped in kitchen towels because I don’t have proper packing materials and because everything in this cabin is both temporary and irreplaceable.
The rolling pin goes in last. It always goes in last. It’s the first thing I unpack and the last thing I pack and the thing I’d grab if the cabin caught fire, same as always, same as before Alaska, same as before Jace—
Jasper appears from somewhere—the bedroom, maybe, or that spot under the kitchen table where he’s taken to sleeping when he stays with me—and walks directly to the open suitcase on the bed.
He sniffs the flannels. He sniffs the journal.
He turns around three times and sits down directly on top of my clothes.
“No,” I tell him.
He settles deeper. Puts his chin on his paws. Gives me the look—the one that says I’ve made a decision about this luggage and my decision is that it’s a bed now.
“Jasper. Move.”
He closes his eyes.
“That’s a suitcase, not a dog bed. Those are my clothes. I need those clothes. I am trying to leave and you are sitting on my entire wardrobe.”
One eye opens. Assesses me. Closes again.
I sit down on the edge of the bed next to him and put my hands in my lap and look at the half-packed suitcase with a seventy-pound Malamute in it, and I think about what an absurd thing it is to be defeated by a dog.
This is not how people leave places in the movies.
In the movies, there’s a montage—sad music, slow-motion packing, meaningful glances at photographs.
Nobody mentions the part where the dog claims your luggage and refuses to negotiate.
“You’re his dog,” I say quietly. “You should be with him. Not here, guarding my suitcase like it’s a bone.”
Jasper’s tail thumps. Once. Twice. Like he’s disagreeing but doesn’t want to argue about it.
The knock on the door comes at four-fifteen.
I know the time because I’ve been staring at the clock on the wall—the one Edna bought that has birds instead of numbers, so four-fifteen is technically “robin-fifteen”—trying to figure out when the property lawyer’s office opens in the morning so I can start the paperwork.
It’s Tessa.
She’s standing on the porch in a flannel and boots—everyone in this town wears flannel and boots; it’s like a uniform for people who’ve chosen to live in the middle of nowhere—and she’s holding a casserole dish and looking at me with an expression that’s not quite sympathy, not quite judgment, but something in between.
Something that says: I’ve been exactly where you are and I’m not here to tell you what to do.
“Birdie told Piper, who told Gage, who told me,” she says, which is the Ashwood Falls version of a news alert. “You’re selling.”
“Thinking about it.”
“Can I come in?”
I step aside. She sets the casserole on the kitchen counter—moose stew, from the smell of it, which is a sentence I never could have constructed six weeks ago—and looks around the cabin with the eyes of someone who understands exactly what this space means.
“I ran from Kyle all the way to Alaska,” Tessa says, not sitting down, not making herself comfortable, just standing in Edna’s kitchen like she’s delivering testimony.
“Packed my rental in the middle of the night. Drove for four days. Ended up in Ashwood Falls because I was looking for a tree. A specific tree. And for the first three months, I told myself I was just passing through.”
“Tessa—”
“Let me finish.” She leans against the counter.
“The best decision I ever made was the one that terrified me most. Not leaving Kyle—that was survival, that was instinct. The decision that terrified me was staying. Choosing a place that didn’t make sense on paper.
Choosing a person who scared me because he was kind and I didn’t trust kindness anymore.
” She pauses. “Gage didn’t make staying easy.
He made it worth it. There’s a difference. ”
My throat is doing the thing it does when someone says something true and my body recognizes it before my brain does—tightening, burning, threatening tears that I absolutely refuse to shed because I’ve cried enough this week for a lifetime.
“He won’t talk to me,” I say. “Jace. He just—shut down. I asked him to use words and he chose silence and the silence is—” I stop.
Breathe. “The silence is worse than anything Marco ever said, because at least with Marco I knew where I stood. With Jace, the silence could mean anything. It could mean ‘I love you and I’m scared’ or it could mean ‘you were convenient and now you’re not’ and I can’t tell the difference because he won’t tell me. ”
Tessa nods. “Gage threw a table once. When he was scared. Didn’t throw it at me—threw it at the wall. And I had to decide whether I was going to let his fear dictate my choices or whether I was going to stay and let him figure out how to be terrified and present at the same time.”
“What did you do?”
“Stayed. Told him the table was ugly anyway.” She smiles—small, quick, real. “He bought a nicer one. Jace built it.”
I laugh. It’s a short, wet, ridiculous sound, and Jasper lifts his head from the suitcase at the noise.
“I’m not telling you to stay,” Tessa says. “I’m telling you that the decision that looks like giving up and the decision that looks like staying can sometimes be the same decision wearing different clothes. And you have to figure out which one you’re actually making.”
She leaves the casserole. She squeezes my arm at the door. She doesn’t hug me, because Tessa is not a hugger—she’s a truth-teller, which is better.
Tuesday morning, six a.m. The porch.
There’s salmon on the steps.
Wrapped in wax paper, same as always. Same rock-steady, wordless delivery. No note, no explanation, no knock on the door. Just fish, appearing on my porch placed by Alaska itself.
Except it wasn’t placed by Alaska. It was placed by a man who woke up before dawn, caught a salmon, cleaned it, wrapped it, and walked four hundred yards through the trees to leave it on the porch of a woman he won’t speak to.
This is the eighteenth time. I know because I counted. I’ve been keeping track—not in the ledger, not anymore, but in my head. Eighteen salmon. Eighteen mornings where Jace Maddox said nothing with his mouth and everything with his hands.
I’m sitting on the porch steps holding the salmon when he appears at the edge of the clearing.
He’s not trying to sneak away this time—he’s standing there, at the trailhead, like he got halfway home and his feet wouldn’t finish the trip.
Jasper is beside him, tail low, eyes moving between us like he’s watching a tennis match he desperately wants someone to win.
He walks to the porch. Slowly. Like each step costs him something.
He stands in front of me, holding nothing, saying nothing. The early light catches his face and he looks exhausted. Exhausted the way you get from not sleeping, from fighting with your own silence, from lying awake in a workshop listening to the absence of someone who should be there.
“You brought me fish,” I say.
He nods.
“You’re not talking to me, but you brought me fish.”
Another nod.
“You cannot just bring fish to every emotional crisis,” I say, and my voice breaks on crisis, embarrassing and completely beyond my control.
He looks at me. His jaw works. Something moves behind his eyes—a fight, an internal negotiation between the silence and whatever’s underneath it. And then:
“It worked the first seventeen times.”