Epilogue - Gabby #2
So we did. We met at her store on a Monday when both our shops were closed.
She showed me her starter—which is older than I am, apparently, inherited from her grandmother—and I showed her the folding technique that makes croissants rise.
We didn’t talk about competition. We didn’t talk about the fact that she’s better at bread and I’m better at pastry.
We just worked in her kitchen, moving around each other, showing each other the specific grace of our separate expertise.
She made beautiful sourdough rye. I made beautiful Danish.
Neither of us has acknowledged that we were helping each other, because the pride is still there, underneath, and that’s fine.
Pride between bakers is just respect wearing a disguise.
It’s just two people saying: I see what you’re good at. Let me show you what I know.
Marnie stocks my croissants at the general store now, displayed on a cherry shelf Jace built her in trade. This is what we do in Ashwood Falls—we trade wood for space, space for food, food for labor.
And Jax. Jax Moretti, who runs the bar and plays hockey, who laughs louder than anyone in town. He’s a person who walks into a room and immediately makes it better, not through anything he’s done but just through his presence. Through his loudness, his jokes, his refusal to let silence exist.
He shows up at every community event with a drink in his hand and a joke on his lips and the specific energy of a man who’s performing happiness so convincingly that most people don’t notice he’s deflecting.
But Dotty notices. Dotty notices everything.
She told me last week that Jax goes quiet when a certain name comes up—someone from his past, someone connected to the fishing lodge on the other side of the peninsula.
She didn’t say who. She just raised her eyebrows in that Dotty way that suggests she knows something the universe hasn’t figured out yet, and said: “That one’s next. ”
I knew what she meant. “Next” for the next fairy tail, presumably. “Next” in the continuing saga of Ashwood Falls romance. Jax is too alive not to be looking for something. He’s looking in the direction of someone who isn’t looking back yet.
This morning—this specific Saturday in October, with the line out the door and the first real cold settling over the mountains and the leaves on the birch trees going gold in that particular way that only happens once a year—I’m standing behind the counter at Sugar he’s normally punctual about his apple delivery at ten-fifteen, but I guess even moose have days where they run behind.
I hand him an apple through the window. He takes it. We nod at each other like old colleagues. Which we are. Morris and I have an understanding now. We’ve negotiated a peace treaty written in fruit and patience.
He accepts the apple with the dignity of a king receiving tribute.
Outside, the mountains are wearing their first snow.
The sky is that specific October blue that looks like it was painted by someone who takes color personally.
The river is running cold and silver. Ashwood Falls is doing what it always does—existing, quietly, stubbornly, with the permanence that only places built by people who chose to stay can achieve.
I chose to stay.
Not because of the clause. Not because of the bakery. Not because a dead woman I never met left me a building and a legacy and the implicit instruction to figure out what matters.
I chose to stay because this is where the salmon arrives at dawn and the oven has a name and the moose is a neighbor and the man I love says everything in three words or fewer and means it more than anyone who’s ever given me a paragraph.
Sixty days. That was the deal.
I’m staying for all of the other days, too.
Catch up on the series.
No Axe to Grind
Pregnant in Plaid
Faking the Goal
Love at First Loaf