Finnegan
Six Months Later…
It’s been half a year. I know the exact number of days, but I don't count them the way I used to count things—forward into void, marking time against nothing. Now they stack up behind me like work well done. A record of something worth keeping.
It's a spring morning and I'm running my second trap line when I hear her voice on the radio back at the cabin, Tom's check-in, her end of the frequency. The words are muffled by distance but the sound reaches me through the trees and I find myself moving a little faster on the way back.
That's new. Wanting to get home.
I have three rabbits and a fox by the time I reach the door.
Kate's sitting at her radio equipment in the corner that used to be empty shelving, her hair still loose from sleep, pen moving across a notebook.
She holds up one finger without looking at me mouthing one moment, and I go to the kitchen and start breakfast and count the steps automatically.
Twelve. Same as always. Same cabin. Just not the same.
Her books are on my shelves. Her handwriting is on the whiteboard I built her. There's a second mug on the hook by the window, and every morning for six months I've taken it down without thinking about it.
She finishes her transmission, sets down the handset, turns around and smiles at me. That particular smile that’s easy, morning-soft, entirely for me.
"Tom says Clearwater held again last night," she says. "Third week running."
"Expected outcome given the barrier placement."
"Don't ruin my joy with competence." But she's still smiling. She crosses to where I'm cracking eggs and tucks herself under my arm like she belongs there, which she does, and watches me work. "Good line this morning?"
"Three rabbits. Fox."
"Finn." She tilts her head up. "The fox." The same fox that’s been after our chickens. A happy coincidence, in my book. But she has a soft spot for the devious critters. Something I’ve yet to understand why.
"It was already caught. I didn't go looking for it."
She makes a sound that means she doesn't entirely believe me. She's right not to. I may have adjusted that particular trap placement three weeks ago knowing the territorial range. I don't mention this.
We eat at the table with our notebooks open between us the way we always do now. Her columns and my columns side by side, patterns emerging from combined data the way they don't from either alone. It should feel intrusive. It feels like the most natural thing I have ever done.
"I want to ask you something," Kate says.
I set down my fork. Conversations that start this way are never about data.
She's watching me with that careful look that means she's trying to read my face and also trying to make sure I can read hers. "Are you happy?"
The question moves through me slowly, finding all the places it needs to check.
Three years, four months, twelve days of counting myself down to nothing. Routines as a substitute for living. The cabin as a perimeter against loss. And then her, half-frozen and furious and carrying six months of dead men's work in her pack, crashing into my system and somehow improving it.
"Yes," I say.
She exhales. Like she wasn't sure.
"Kate." I reach across the table, turn her hand palm-up, press mine against it. "You disrupted every system I had. I rebuilt them around you. That's not something I do accidentally."
"No," she agrees. "It really isn't."
"I don't know how to do this perfectly. I'm going to miss social cues. I'm going to need quiet when you want noise and I'm going to organize your research equipment in ways that make sense to me but not to you and I'm going to—"
"Finn."
"—count things. Constantly. Everything. It doesn't stop."
"Finn." She squeezes my hand to stop me from rambling. "I know all of that." A pause. "I stayed anyway. I'm staying anyway. That's not an accident either."
I look at our joined hands. Hers rougher than they were when we met—field work does that. Mine exactly the same. Two systems that figured out how to run in parallel.
"There's a storm coming," I say. "Two days, maybe three. The barometric pressure has been dropping since yesterday."
She looks out the window at the clear sky and grins. "Looks fine to me."
"It won't be."
"Are you telling me we're going to be snowed in for three days?" She gives me a suggestive look that I almost miss.
"Approximately."
She stands up and comes around the table and settles herself in my lap like she's done a hundred times now, easy and unselfconscious, her arms around my neck. I put my hands on her waist and hold her there and feel the specific quality of rightness that I have not found a better word for yet.
"I can think of worse things," she says against my mouth. She kisses me slow and warm, morning-soft, no urgency. Just her and me and the storm coming and three days ahead of us with nowhere to be and nothing to do except this. "I love you," she says.
"I love you too." It comes easier every time. Still precise. Still true the way facts are true, not the sentimental approximation that word usually carries, but easier. She taught me that saying it out loud is just the data becoming shared.
I pick her up and she laughs again and wraps her legs around me, and I carry her away from the cooling eggs and the open notebooks and the radio that won't matter for three days.
The storm comes exactly when I calculated.
We don't mind at all.