Chapter 20
Jace
She bakes through the night.
I know this because the light in Sugar & Flour’s kitchen doesn’t go off.
I’m sitting on my porch—our porch, mine and Jasper’s, the one that faces the trail—and through the trees, if I look at exactly the right angle, I can see the glow of the bakery’s kitchen window.
A warm yellow square in the darkness, steady as a heartbeat.
She’s not stress-baking. I can tell the difference now. Stress-baking has a rhythm to it—frantic, uneven, an energy that produces quantity over quality. This is different. This is purposeful. This is a woman who’s made a decision and is translating it into flour and butter and heat.
Jasper is lying across my feet, which he’s been doing since he came back from Gabby’s yesterday.
He’d spent three days with Gabby after I shut down—three days of choosing the woman over me, which I deserved, which I understood, which still felt like a specific kind of punishment that only a dog who loves you can deliver.
He came back with his tail low and a look that said: I’m here because she told me you needed me, not because I’ve forgiven you.
I’ve been judged by a dog. Not for the first time, but this feels more official. Like he’s filed paperwork.
Fair.
The night is cool. Late summer in Alaska, so the sky never fully darkens—it just thins, goes pale at the edges, turns the mountains into charcoal outlines against a sky that can’t commit to being night.
The kind of almost-dark where you can read a book outside at midnight if you need to.
Where colors don’t disappear, they just shift into something other.
Silver. Indigo. The blue that exists between night and day.
I’ve always loved this light. The in-between.
The almost-dark that still holds enough color to see by.
It’s the light Hank used to work in during summer, leaving the workshop door open so the dusk poured in across the bench, saying “good wood shows itself in half-light.” He’d stand there with a piece of cherry or maple in his hands and turn it slowly, letting the changing light show him the grain from different angles.
“The light changes, the wood changes,” he’d say.
“You have to know how to see it in every version of itself.”
I’m learning that’s true about people too.
I think about Hank. About the promise I made. About how promises are just words until someone needs you to keep them.
He’d been in the chair—his chair, the one by the window in the workshop, the one I built for him when his back started going.
The wood is walnut. The joints are hidden.
It’s a chair built to last. He looked smaller by the end.
Like he was disappearing gradually. He said: "Edna’s place. Take care of it."
Not a question. Hank never asked questions he already knew the answer to. He knew me like wood knows the grain. He knew what I would do before I did.
“Yes,” I’d said.
“And if someone comes for it,” he’d said, and his voice was thinner than paper, barely there, a candle going out in a room with no wind. “If someone from her family comes. You’ll take care of them too.”
“Yes.”
He’d closed his eyes. Opened them one more time. “She was the best person I ever knew,” he’d said. “And I never told her.”
That was the last thing he said to me. Not goodbye. Not I love you. A regret. Forty years of love and he never said it.
I almost did the same thing.
I almost became Hank’s biggest mistake.
The light in the bakery kitchen stays on all night.
It burns until the sky starts brightening again—three-thirty, maybe four, the sun coming back like it never really left.
Jasper shifts on my feet, unsettled. The birds start.
The river, which never stops, carries its constant sound through the trees.
At five a.m., I get up. Jasper lifts his head and watches me.
“Stay,” I tell him.
He puts his head back down. Stays. For once in his life, he listens the first time.
The walk to Sugar & Flour takes twelve minutes from my cabin if I go the long way, through the main road instead of the trail.
I go the long way because the trail feels too intimate for what I’m about to do, and also because Ryder is sitting on his front porch at five AM—why is Ryder sitting on his front porch at five AM?
—and he raises his coffee mug at me as I pass and says, “About damn time,” which means the entire town has been waiting for me to stop being an idiot. Good to know there’s a consensus.
The pastry is there.
It’s sitting on a white plate in the center of the window display—the display that’s been empty since the grand opening cleanup, waiting for something worthy.
It’s golden, latticed, beautiful. It’s something I haven’t seen before.
Not a croissant, not a scone, not any of the standard items she’s been perfecting for weeks.
It’s new. Something she must’ve created last night in the purposeful light of her kitchen.
There’s a note next to it. Handwritten on a scrap of wax paper—the same wax paper I use to wrap her salmon.
For the man who left salmon on my porch until I stopped being too stubborn to eat it.
I read it three times.
I stand outside the bakery window at five-fifteen in the morning and read those words until they stop being words and start being something else—an answer, an invitation, a mirror of every wordless morning I left fish on her porch and walked away before she could ask me why.
The front door is unlocked. It’s always unlocked. This is Alaska.
She’s in the kitchen. She doesn’t hear me come in—or she does hear me and she’s letting me choose to approach on my own terms, which is something she’s learned to do, which is something I don’t deserve but am grateful for.
There’s flour on the counter, on the floor, on her hands.
The old oven—Carl, she calls it Carl now, like it’s a colleague she’s resigned herself to working with—is ticking as it cools.
Every surface is covered with the evidence of a night spent baking: bowls, sheet pans, whisks, towels, ingredients in various states of use.
It looks like a beautiful disaster. It looks like her.
She’s standing at the counter with her back to me, writing something in Edna’s journal.
Her hair is up in the pile that means she’s been working hard—the one that starts as a bun and devolves into a suggestion.
She’s wearing the flannel. The wool socks.
She’s everything she was that first morning and nothing she was, because the woman who stood on this porch in borrowed clothes and stared at a dead fish like it was a threat has become the woman who bakes through the night and leaves love notes in wax paper.
“Gabby.”
She turns. Her eyes are red from not sleeping.
There’s flour on her cheek—the right one, same spot as the photograph of Edna by the bookshelf.
She looks at me and her face does the thing—the calculation, the assessment, the running-numbers expression that means she’s trying to figure out if I’m here to stay or here to say goodbye.
I cross the kitchen. It takes four steps.
Four steps across flour-dusted tile, past the counter where eighteen salmon became a love story, past the oven that tried to kill her and failed, past every moment of the last few weeks that has led to this specific point in space where I am standing in front of her and she is looking up at me and the silence is not a wall. It is a room. And I’m inviting her in.
“The pastry in the window,” I say.
“It’s yours,” she says. “I made it with your salmon and my sourdough and the rosemary from Edna’s garden.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever baked. It has no right to be that good.
Nothing made at three a.m. by a woman who’s been crying should taste like that, but it does, and I put it in the window because I wanted you to find it before anyone else did. ”
Her voice is doing the thing—the escalation, the rambling, the way she fills silence with words because silence has always meant danger to her. But she’s watching me while she talks, watching my face, looking for something.
“Gabby,” I say again.
She stops.
“I’m not good at words.”
Her eyes are filling.
“I shut down because I was afraid.” The sentence feels like pulling a splinter from under my skin—necessary, painful, relieving. “Everyone I’ve loved has left. When I saw Marco, I thought you would too. It was easier to be silent.”
A tear tracks down her cheek, cutting a line through the flour.
“Hank’s biggest regret was the thing he never said. He loved Edna for forty years and never told her. Lived four hundred yards away. Left her salmon. Fixed her roof. Never once said the words.” I pause. “When he was dying, he said she was the best person he ever knew. And he never told her.”
She makes a sound—small, broken, a sound with no words in it.
“I’m not doing that.”
I take her hands. They’re flour-covered and warm and shaking slightly, and I hold them the way I hold wood when I’m about to make the cut that determines everything—steady, certain, committed.
“I love you.”
Three words. The most important sentence I’ve ever said. Not accidentally profound, not a one-liner that lands harder than I intended. Deliberate. Chosen. The opposite of silence.
She doesn’t deflect. She doesn’t joke. She doesn’t ramble or calculate or run the numbers on what this means for the ledger.
She says one word.
“Stay.”
And I know she doesn’t mean stay on this side of the counter, or stay in the kitchen, or stay for breakfast. She means stay the way I’ve been staying for weeks—present, constant, showing up at dawn with whatever I have to offer.
She means stay the way Hank never quite managed.
She means: choose this. Choose me. Choose the mess and the moose and the oven and the four-hundred-yard trail that is exactly the right distance between your life and mine.
I pull her into me. She comes like she’s been waiting—not patiently, not Gabby, never patiently—but with the specific intensity of a woman who decided what she wanted and then stood still long enough for it to arrive.
She’s small against me. Her head fits under my chin.
Her hands grip the back of my shirt and the flour transfers to the flannel, white handprints on dark plaid, evidence of the thing that’s happening.
“You have flour on my shirt,” I say into her hair.
“You have fish smell on your hands.”
“Fair.”
She laughs against my chest. The sound vibrates through both of us and it is, without question, the best thing I have ever felt.
Not the carpentry. Not the river at dawn.
Not the silence of a workshop where everything makes sense.
This. Her laughter against my ribs. The weight of her choosing to stay.
Jasper appears in the kitchen doorway. He looks at us—tangled together, flour-covered, his person and my person finally in the same place at the same time—and he walks over and puts his head in both our laps at once. One ear on Gabby’s thigh, one ear on mine. His tail sweeps the floor.
“Even the dog,” Gabby says, her voice muffled against my chest. “Even the dog knew before we did.”
“He always knows.”
Morris appears through the bakery window.
He’s standing on the porch—of course he’s standing on the porch, because Morris treats every porch in Ashwood Falls like his personal real estate—and he’s chewing on the railing with the slow, methodical confidence of a moose who has seen everything and is untroubled by any of it.
“Morris is eating your porch again,” I say.
“Let him.” Gabby pulls back just enough to look up at me. Her eyes are wet and bright and fierce and so full of something I can see its shape even if I can’t name it. “He lives here too.”
Outside, the sun is fully up. The morning light fills the bakery in gold and dust and the smell of whatever she baked last night—rosemary and butter and salmon and sourdough, a thing that shouldn’t exist but does, a thing that only works because she’s the one who made it.
I kiss her forehead. She tilts up and I kiss her mouth instead. It’s brief and certain and tastes like flour and salt and the kind of morning you only get once.
“I should tell you something,” I say.
“What?”
“The whole town already knows.”
“Already knows what?”
“That you baked all night. Dotty saw your kitchen light at midnight and called Piper. Piper called Ryder. Ryder texted Jax. Jax texted Trace, who told Patrice, who told Birdie, who posted something on the town’s Facebook group at two a.m. that I’m told includes the phrase ‘the mute and the motormouth are finally getting their act together.’”
Gabby stares at me. “How do you know this?”
“Piper texted me.”
“Piper texted you? You don’t even respond to texts.”
“I responded to this one.”
“What did you say?”
I look at her. Let the silence hold for one beat—not a wall, just a pause, the kind that means the next words matter.
“I said yes.”
She blinks. “Yes to what?”
“She asked if I was going to fix it. I said yes.”
Gabby’s face goes through approximately seven expressions in three seconds—surprise, disbelief, tenderness, annoyance, amusement, something that might be outrage, and then a kind of radiant, helpless joy that makes her look exactly like the photograph of Edna on the wall.
Not the features. The expression. The way of standing in a kitchen like it’s the center of the world because, for her, it is.
“One word,” she says. “You communicated the most important decision of our relationship in one word, via text, to Piper Lockwood.”
“It was efficient.”
She laughs. It’s the real laugh, the full one, the one that makes her whole face change and makes me aware of my hands and my heart and the fact that I would catch salmon every morning for the rest of my life if it meant hearing that sound.
I pull her back. She comes. Jasper’s tail thumps. Morris chews the railing. Somewhere, Dotty’s making coffee and announcing it to the whole town.
Three of them.
They were the right ones.