Chapter 7
Jenna
I wake up alone in a bed that smells like him.
The other side is cool. He’s been gone a while. I can hear the axe through the window. Steady, rhythmic, the sound of a man who processes everything through his hands. He’s splitting wood at five in the morning because that’s what Jasper does when he doesn’t want to think.
I lie there looking at the cabin ceiling. The hand-planed beams, the tight joints. His mug is gone from the shelf, which means he made his own coffee this morning. He didn’t wait for mine.
My phone is on the floor, screen down, where I put it last night.
I pick it up. The editor’s email is still there.
Re: Montana Backcountry files. Deadline in two weeks.
And underneath it, a second email I didn’t see last night: the Iceland brief.
A glacier she wants me to reshoot from the north face.
Different light, different season. The flight is in three weeks.
I stare at the screen. The screen stares back.
The assignment is done. I have over four hundred frames.
More than enough for the magazine. My editor wants the files edited and delivered.
My career is out there, not in a one-room cabin on forty acres.
I’m a freelance photographer. I live on planes and in rental cars and in landscapes that belong to nobody.
I shoot, I file, I move. That’s the system. The system works.
This assignment isn’t just another job. It’s proof that the life I built still works. I chase the light. I get the shot. I file the images and board the next plane.
That’s who I am.
At least, it’s who I’ve always been.
My mother had a system too. Hers was staying.
She stayed in a town she’d outgrown for a man she loved and a life that slowly got smaller.
She’d been a painter. Oils, big canvases, the kind of work that takes up space.
By the time I was ten, the canvases were in the attic and the brushes were in a coffee can in the garage and she cooked dinner every night at six and smiled like she’d chosen it.
Maybe she had. Maybe choosing it was the thing that made it hurt.
I decided at fourteen that I would never stop moving. Movement is freedom. Staying is shrinking. You can love someone and still disappear inside their life, and I watched it happen and I swore I wouldn’t.
I get up. I use the bathroom and brush my teeth. I make his bed the way I made it every morning, neat, precise, a cabin that looks like no one slept in it. Like I was never here. I start packing. Camera gear first. The R5 in its padded case. Lenses in foam. Battery packs. Tripod.
I step onto the porch.
He’s at the woodpile. Shirtless, despite the morning cool. The axe comes down and the wood splits and he stacks the halves and sets another round. He doesn’t look at me. He knows I’m there. He always knows where I am on this property. He’s been tracking me like weather since the day I arrived.
I go outside to the tent. The morning air is cool and the meadow is gold and I don’t look at any of it.
I break camp the way I always break camp: sleeping bag rolled, camp stove packed, bear canister stowed.
I pull the stakes he reinforced and collapse the poles and roll the tent into its compression sack.
Four minutes. The same four minutes it took to set up.
When I come back around the cabin with my full pack, he’s at the woodpile.
He sees the pack. I watch him see it. His eyes go to the camera bag, the tent, the sleeping bag strapped to the outside. The axe stops mid-swing. He lowers it. Sets it against the chopping block. Stands there.
I wait.
I give him a window. Not a big one, because I’m not a woman who begs, but a window.
A pause where I’m standing on his porch with my pack and my camera and everything I own on this mountain, and he could say one word.
One syllable. The man who built a vocabulary around single words.
“No” in a bar. “Rules” on this porch. He is a man of one-word sentences and this is the one that matters.
He doesn’t say it.
His jaw works. Once. His hands open and close at his sides. But his mouth stays shut and his feet stay planted and the word doesn’t come.
I wait three more seconds. I count them. Three seconds is not a long time unless you’re standing there with a pack on your back giving a silent man a chance to change your life. Then three seconds is an eternity.
I read his silence the only way I know how: as an answer.
“The assignment’s done,” I say. My voice is level. Professional. The voice I use on the phone with editors, in airports, in the back of taxis leaving places I loved and left. “I have everything I need. The magazine is going to be thrilled.”
He nods. A small movement. Like even the nod costs him something.
“Thank you. For the cabin. The radio. The access to your property. The photos are going to be incredible.” I’m rambling.
The fact that my throat is tightening around every word is irrelevant.
The fact that the man standing ten feet away held my face in his hands last night and kissed me like I was the first thing he ever wanted is irrelevant. I am closing a transaction.
“Be safe on the switchbacks,” he says. Quiet. Practical. The words of a man who has nothing left except the practical and is holding onto it the way he holds the axe. With both hands. Because letting go isn’t something he knows how to do.
“I will.”
I go inside and radio Marissa. My voice is steady. “Can Levi come get me? I’m at Jasper’s. I need a ride to the trailhead to get my car.”
Marissa is quiet for two seconds. Two seconds is an eternity for Marissa. “He’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“Thank you.”
“Jenna.”
“I’m fine.”
The radio clicks off. She didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either.
I sit on the porch to wait. The same porch where he left biscuits at 7:58. The same railing where the coffee appeared every morning. The same rocker he slept in the night he gave me his bed and lied about sleeping on the porch half the time.
The axe starts again. Inside the tree line, out of sight.
He’s splitting wood so he doesn’t have to stand here and watch me leave.
I understand that. I’m sitting on his porch so I don’t have to stand in his clearing and watch him not ask me to stay.
We’re both very good at finding tasks to hide behind.
I have a camera. He has an axe. Same armor, different tools.
A Steller’s jay lands on the porch railing three feet from me. Blue and black, fearless, loud. It screams at me twice and flies off. Even the birds on this property have opinions about my decisions.
Levi’s truck comes up the access road twenty-eight minutes later. He gets out. Looks at me. Looks at the cabin. Doesn’t ask.
“Trailhead?” he says.
“Trailhead.”
He loads my pack into the truck bed. I climb in. As we pull away, I don’t look back at the cabin. Looking back would break something I need to keep intact for the next forty minutes.
Levi drives. He doesn’t talk. He’s the kind of man who understands that silence can be a kindness, which makes sense because he loves a woman who fills every silence and he’s learned when not to.
At the trailhead, my rental is where I left it, dusty and sun-faded and exactly the same as it was a week ago.
“Marissa’s expecting you,” he says. Not a question.
“I know.”
He unloads my pack. Puts it by the car. Stands there for a second like he wants to say something. Then he just nods and gets back in the truck and drives away.
I drive to town. The road unspools. The mountain gets smaller in the mirror.
Marissa opens the door before I knock. Tank top, shorts, hair up. Her face has the expression I know better than any expression in the world: I love you and you’re being an idiot and I’m going to let you figure out which part first.
She doesn’t ask what happened. She hands me a mug of coffee and sits next to me at the kitchen table and waits.
I try the deflection. “The assignment is done. I got incredible shots. The ridge in the afternoon light alone is worth the whole trip. The art director is going to lose her mind.”
Marissa drinks her coffee.
“Iceland is next month. The north face of Vatnaj?kull. Different angle from what I shot two years ago. The brief looks interesting.”
Marissa drinks her coffee.
“I’m thinking I might pitch a follow-up series to *Montana Backcountry*. The canyon in the fall would be completely different. The colors, the light. I could come back in October.”
“Jenna.”
“What?”
“You packed your bags and you left.”
I look at her. She looks at me. The coffee is warm in my hands and the kitchen is quiet and Marissa sits there patiently.
“That’s what I always do,” I say.
“I know.”
“It’s how I operate. Constantly in motion.”
“I know that too.” She sets her mug down. “But this time there’s a person that you’re leaving. Not just a place.”
I don’t have a response. I open my mouth to deflect and there’s nothing there. The joke machine is empty. The woman who has talked her way out of every vulnerable moment since college is sitting at her best friend’s kitchen table with a mug of coffee and absolutely nothing to say.
My phone buzzes. The group chat.
Jules: I’m cashing in my screenshot. Three days ago: “It’s not a love story. It’s a magazine assignment.” How’s that holding up?
Claire: Are you okay? Not “fine.” Actually okay.
Paige: Sometimes leaving is brave and sometimes leaving is the thing you do because staying is scarier.
Tori: Jenna. You described a man’s light before you described his face. You are not over this.
Jules: The man cleaned your BOOTS. He pointed them the right direction. Do you understand what that means? That’s not a man who wants you to leave. That’s a man who pays attention to which way you point your shoes.
Claire: What do you actually want? Not what makes sense. What do you want?
I put the phone face-down on the table. Marissa doesn’t ask what they said. She already knows.
Claire’s question is the one that sticks. *What do you actually want? Not what makes sense. What do you want?*
I want to want Iceland. I want to want the glacier and the flight and the next assignment and the rhythm of the life I’ve built. I want to want movement the way I’ve always wanted movement, like oxygen, like the next breath.
I want to want all of that more than I want a cabin on forty acres and a man who fills my water bottle without being asked.
“I need to edit the files,” I say. “Can I use your table?”
“You can use whatever you need.”
I open my laptop. I start editing. Culling frames.
Adjusting exposure. The mechanical work of photography, the part that lives in my hands, not my head.
The south trail. The meadow. The canyon wall in morning light.
The ridge at sunset, copper and rose. The ridge at dawn, pale gold.
The wildflowers. The creek crossing where the refracted light made patterns on the rocks.
Frame after frame of the most beautiful land I’ve ever shot. Every single one of them is his.
There’s a frame I didn’t remember taking.
The porch railing with two mugs on it. His and mine.
The morning light catching the steam. I must have shot it on instinct, the way I shoot everything, without thinking, and looking at it now I can see what my subconscious was doing.
It was documenting something it didn’t want to lose.
I get to the portrait.
His face in the warm light. His hands on the cherry wood. Sawdust on his forearms. Rainfall visible in the window that I can almost hear through the screen.
The expression underneath the scowl.
I know what I captured. I knew it when I took it. A man who is tired of hiding and didn’t know he was tired until someone aimed a camera at him. A man who is looking at the woman behind the lens like she is the only thing he has ever wanted to let in.
He looked at me like that. He looked at me like that and then he set my camera on the workbench and kissed me and held my face in both hands and I could feel his heartbeat.
He looked at me like that. Then he filled my water bottle.
Cleaned my boots. Moved my camera gear before a storm.
Slept on the outside of the bed so his body was between me and whatever might come through the door.
He looked at me like that and I walked out this morning. He didn’t say “stay.” I didn’t say “I want to.” We are two people who are very good at silence and very bad at the one conversation that matters.
I stare at the portrait. The portrait stares back. His eyes, even on a screen, even in a photograph, even from a cabin miles away, are looking at me like I’m the answer to something he stopped asking.
Marissa is at the counter. She can see my face. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
I close the laptop. I put my hands flat on the table. I breathe.
The meadow will still be there tomorrow. The ridge. The canyon. The light that made my hands shake. The cabin he built with his own hands. The porch where the coffee appeared every morning. The bed that smells like woodsmoke and pine and a man who said “it’s about to get better” and then delivered.
I don’t know how to stay. I’ve never known how to stay. I’m the woman who leaves. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure of.
But I’ve never left anything that felt like this.