5. Faye
five
Faye
Northbend Holdings — Corrigan parcel — expression of interest.
I read it twice, sitting down on the arm of a couch that isn't mine.
They want the sixty-one acres. All-cash.
Conditions waived. Fourteen days to close, and their number is high enough that my student loan — the one with the balance I've never said out loud, not to my mother, not to the two men I've dated seriously, not to anyone — disappears in one line and leaves change.
Nothing in it says what they'd do with the land. That's the tell. People who want land for a reason tell you the reason.
I have a spreadsheet for this. Three tabs — Debt, Timeline, Return — built in September on the ferry back from the funeral, every cell pointing at the same place.
Sell by the end of October. Back at my desk by the first of November for the Oak Bay campus job, the biggest thing my name has been attached to, which the firm is holding open with a thinning patience.
Everything since the phone call has run on that spreadsheet. It's how I got through emptying her apartment. You make a list and you work the list and you do not stop long enough to feel the shape of the hole.
I open a reply. I type I accept, subject to and stop, because there isn't a condition. It's cash, it's clean, it's fourteen days, and it's more money than my grandmother made in her life.
I sit with my thumb over send.
Here's the part I'd never say to Gideon Marsh.
I want it. Not the gate, not the flip — the number.
I want to open my banking app and see a balance that isn't a countdown.
I've carried that debt through two apartments, one relationship that ended partly over it, and every financial conversation I've had since I was twenty-four, and this erases it before lunch.
I don't send it. I don't delete it either. It sits in my drafts and it sits there all week, and every time I open my phone I know exactly where it is, the way you know where a bruise is.
I forward the email to Gideon, because he should hear it from me and he’ll know what to do.
He calls immediately.
"Northbend," he says. No hello.
"You know them?"
"Bought four hundred acres up past Ferry Creek two years ago. Put a gate on it." A pause I can hear the floor of. "They don't log. They don't build. They hold and they flip."
"They're offering me a number you can't match."
"I know."
"Gideon."
"I'm not going to match it." His voice doesn't change at all. "I've got six people on payroll and a mill that runs on a margin I could show you on a napkin. My number's my number. It was fair when I said it and it's fair now."
"So what do I do?"
"That's not my question to answer."
I press the heel of my hand against my eye. "That's a terrible thing to say to somebody."
"Would you rather I lied?"
"Yes. Briefly."
The sound he makes is almost a laugh. Then: "Come for supper. Rue's been drawing something for you all week and if she doesn't hand it over soon she's going to combust."
I shouldn’t go to dinner, but I do anyway.
The drawing is of a truck. It's a good truck. There's a small figure in the driver's seat with hair drawn in aggressive brown scribbles and a much larger figure in the passenger seat, and the caption says FAYE DRIVING BECAUSE DAD IS TIRED.
"That's you," Rue says, in case I'm slow.
"I gathered."
Supper is elk stew, the windows steamed over, Rue narrating a schoolyard dispute over a skipping rope while Gideon asks follow-up questions. I laugh so hard I have to put my spoon down to catch my breath.
And the entire time, under it, I am aware of him.
Of the size of him at that stove. Of his hand when he passes the bread.
Of the fact that twenty hours ago I had my back against his office door with his hand over my mouth, and that neither of us has said a single word about it since, and that both of us have been thinking about nothing else.
He hasn't touched me since I came in. Not once. Not the small of my back, not my shoulder. He's keeping it clean in front of his kid, and I understand exactly why, and it is doing something to me that no amount of touching could.
After dishes, Rue asks what we’ve all been thinking, or avoiding thinking about.
Chin on her folded arms, straight down the middle, no idea she's fired anything. "Are you staying or are you visiting?"
The kitchen is very quiet. The tap drips. Gideon has his back to us at the sink and his hands go still in the water, and he does not turn around, and he does not answer for me.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
Because the true answer is I don't know, and you cannot say that to a seven-year-old whose mother left gradually. You cannot hand that child a maybe. Her whole life is a case study in what maybes do.
"That's a really good question," I say.
Rue’s expression fades just a bit. "Okay," she says, and she takes her plate to the counter, and she goes upstairs without being asked.
I sit there with my hands flat on the table.
Gideon dries his hands. He comes and sits across from me and doesn't reach for me.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"Don't be. She asked a fair question."
"I couldn't answer it."
"No." He looks at me steadily. "That's ok too.”
"Gideon."
"If you want me to ask you to stay." He says it without heat. "I'm not going to."
"Why not?"
"Because you'd say yes." He turns his mug on the table.
"You'd say yes on a Tuesday in October with the leaves turning and my kid drawing pictures of you, and then it'd be February and the light's gone by four and you'd be looking out that window at sixty-one acres you could've been paid for, and I'd have to watch you regret it. "
"That's not fair."
"It's not," he says. "It's true, though."
"You don't get to decide what I'd regret."
"No." He puts the mug down. "But I get to decide I won't be the reason you didn't get to choose."
I drive home without a kiss goodbye.
The draft is still in my phone. I take it out and look at it in the dark with the engine ticking, and I am not going to lie about how close my thumb gets.
Because if I send it I get on a ferry with no debt, a great job, and a story about an October I'll tell at dinner parties for a decade. That's a real life. I built it alone and nobody handed me a brick of it.
And if I don't I'm choosing a man with a mill running on a small margin, in a valley where the light goes at four in February, and a child who has already been taught by an expert that adults leave slowly. There's no version where I get to test that carefully. You don't put a toe in that water.
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat.
Money is the smallest thing at risk here and I've been letting myself pretend it's the biggest one, because I can put money in a spreadsheet.
The bench is up there in the dark. Sixty-one acres, twelve of them good ground, a creek with frogs in it, and four lilacs in a line where a door used to be.
A woman drove eleven hours round trip every May for thirty-one years to stand in front of it, and never sold one acre, and left the whole thing to a granddaughter who couldn't find a weekend.