Chapter 16
Beck
Something has shifted in the house.
Not the furniture. Not the layout. The air itself, maybe — the way it sits different in the kitchen when Gemma's on the other side of the wall, the way I pour two cups of coffee now without thinking, the way the morning feels less like a thing I need to get through and more like a thing I want to stay in for a while.
This is new. New and inconveniently hard to catalog.
I'm at the stove when the front door flies open hard enough to rattle the coat hooks, and six pounds of dinosaur backpack comes skidding across the entryway hardwood, followed immediately by Ivy.
"Daddy." She drops the backpack with the enthusiasm of someone who has just walked off a very long flight and points directly at me. "We need to talk."
I set down the spatula. "Good morning to you too."
"Gemma's here," she announces. Not a question.
"She's all yours!" Vanessa calls through the open door, already halfway down the porch steps and very pointedly not making eye contact with me. She gives a small wave that means you're on your own with this one and retreats toward her rental car. My ex-wife has excellent survival instincts.
"Gemma's car is right there," Ivy says, gesturing broadly toward the driveway. "Her Honda. With the crack in the bumper."
"Good morning," I say again.
Ivy drops into the nearest kitchen chair and stares at me with the focused gravity of a detective who has cracked the case and is now awaiting a confession. She's got Vanessa's eyes and my stubbornness, which is a combination that occasionally makes me question my life choices.
"I told you," she says.
"You told me what, exactly?"
"That she was nice." She pulls Dino — her latest stuffed addition, a brachiosaurus the size of a throw pillow — from the depths of her backpack and sets him on the table like she's establishing territory. "I told you she was very nice and you should be her friend. And now she lives here."
"She lives next door. In the in-law suite."
Ivy gives this distinction all the serious consideration it deserves, which is none. "She eats breakfast here, though."
"Sometimes."
"Is she going to eat breakfast here today?"
I turn back to the eggs. "Probably."
Ivy nods with the grim satisfaction of someone who has been proven correct and intends to collect on it for the foreseeable future. She arranges Dino carefully at the corner of the table, adjusting his angle twice, and then goes very still.
Clarence has materialized in the kitchen doorway.
He surveys the situation from the threshold with the expression of a creature who has seen a great many things in his life and is prepared to tolerate exactly none of them. His gaze moves from Ivy to Dino and back to Ivy. His tail swishes once.
"Clarence," Ivy says formally. "This is Dino." She rotates the brachiosaurus to face the cat. "You're in charge of him while I'm at school."
Clarence stares at Dino.
Dino stares back, wide-eyed and glassy, with the eternal optimism of a stuffed animal.
Clarence turns around and walks back out of the kitchen.
"He's processing it," Ivy tells me.
"Definitely," I agree.
Gemma appears nearly an hour later, hair still damp from the shower, wearing a flannel that has a small paint stain on the cuff from where she helped Ivy with a papier-maché volcano a few weeks back.
She stops in the kitchen doorway, clocks Ivy at the table, and her whole face goes bright in a way that does something unhelpful to my chest.
"You're back!" she says.
"I told him," Ivy says, pointing at me again.
"Told him what?"
"That you were nice."
Gemma slides a look in my direction. I take a very focused sip of coffee.
"That was very wise of you," Gemma says, dropping into the chair across from Ivy with the ease of someone who belongs there. Which she does. Which is the problem, or maybe not a problem at all, which is a whole different problem.
"Did you go on any good rides?" Gemma asks, and Ivy launches into a detailed account of every attraction at Disneyland, ranked in order from "the best one" to "the one that made Connor from school cry, but he's kind of a crier.
" The monologue runs long. Gemma listens to every word like it's the most interesting thing she's heard all week.
I refill both our cups without being asked and sit down across from them. This is my kitchen. My daughter. My catastrophically inconvenient feelings. All of it sitting together in a patch of morning light, and I don't know what to do with how right it looks.
"Daddy," Ivy says, without looking up from her eggs. "Gemma has to eat all her meals here now."
"That's not really—"
"All of them," Ivy repeats, and the tone indicates this is non-negotiable.
Gemma covers a smile with her coffee cup. I wrap both hands around my mug and tell myself this is fine.
The afternoon is the kind of slow Saturday that Copper Ridge does well — cool sunlight through the back windows, the mountains sitting blue and enormous on the horizon, Ivy asleep on the couch under the dinosaur blanket with Dino tucked under her arm and Clarence has inexplicably positioned himself a foot away from Dino with his back turned, standing guard or expressing contempt, impossible to say which.
Gemma's at the kitchen table with her laptop, one knee pulled up to her chest, a half-eaten apple on the table beside her that she's clearly forgotten about. I'm at the counter supposedly reviewing an equipment report, but the same paragraph has been sitting in front of me for a while now.
This is new too. Not the paperwork avoidance — that's well-established.
The part where I'm aware of every small sound she makes.
The soft exhale when she finds something interesting.
The way she tucks her hair behind her ear and then immediately loses it forward again.
The way she doesn't fill silence with noise, doesn't feel the need to perform at ease — just is.
After everything that happened between us, I expected it to feel complicated. And it does, some. But mostly it feels like the morning, like the coffee I pour without thinking — like a thing that's been quietly true for longer than I was willing to admit it.
She glances up, catches me not reading. Raises an eyebrow.
"Equipment report," I say.
"You've been on the same page for twenty minutes."
"It's a dense page."
The corner of her mouth lifts. She goes back to her screen, and something settles in my chest that I don't have good language for. I'm not a man who runs toward things he doesn't have language for. Usually I wait until I've identified exactly what a thing is before I let myself want it.
I should probably work on that.
It's quiet. Comfortable. The domestic ease of it snags at something behind my ribs, and I carry both mugs to the sink to rinse them so I have something to do with my hands.
That's when I see her screen.
Not trying to. Not reading over her shoulder. She tilts the laptop to rub at a cramp in her wrist, and the angle opens up just enough — apartment listings, grid view, thumbnail photos of bare rooms and wide windows. A city name at the top of the page.
Bozeman.
The cold comes fast, low in my stomach, the same cold that was there when Vanessa sat me down at the kitchen table in Seattle and said I don't think either of us is happy and I'd known she was right and somehow that had made it worse.
Gemma closes the laptop.
"Hey," she says, glancing up with a smile that doesn't quite reach.
"Apartment listings," I say.
A beat. "What?"
"I saw your screen," I say, keeping my voice low. Ivy's still on the couch.
The smile holds but something shifts behind it. "Oh, that." She waves a hand, easy and bright, the way she gets when she wants a conversation to bounce off her. "I was just browsing. Keeping an eye on the market. It's nothing."
"Bozeman."
"Beck—"
"You're looking at apartments in Bozeman," I say, and my voice comes out flat in the way it does when I'm trying to keep it level and failing, and I know it, and I can't stop it. "That's not nothing. That's not staying."
She closes the laptop the rest of the way and turns to face me. "It's just keeping options open," she says, like she's explaining something obvious to someone who is overreacting. "Everyone does that."
"I don't."
"That's because you bought a house."
"Gemma."
"I'm not—" She stops. Starts again, brighter, which is the tell. The brightness is always the tell. "It was just idle browsing. I wasn't seriously looking, I was just curious what the market looks like, it doesn't mean anything."
"Planning your exit," I say, and the words land harder than I mean them to, harder than I wanted them to, and I watch her face change.
"Excuse me?"
"That's what this is. You're already—"
"Don't." Her voice goes quiet and sharp at the same time. "Don't tell me what I'm doing."
"Then explain it to me."
"I already did." She's very still, the way she gets when she's not being bright anymore, when the shield is up and functional. "I said it was nothing. You decided it was an exit plan. That's you deciding I'm leaving, Beck, before I've given you any reason to think that."
"I saw the screen."
"You saw a browser tab." She stands, and the chair scrapes on the tile, and Ivy shifts on the couch without waking.
We both glance at her and then back at each other, and the argument goes quieter.
Harder for it. "You are doing the thing where you decide how the story ends before it gets there.
And then you're surprised when it ends that way. "
That lands. I feel it in my sternum.
"I'm not — " I stop. Start over. "After everything—" Another stop. The words won't line up. They're all too large and I'm standing in my own kitchen and I'm thirty-six years old and apparently I can't say a simple true thing without choking on it.
Gemma watches me. Waiting.
"You're right," I say finally.
She blinks.
"I saw the screen and I reacted. I didn't—" I press my fingers to my eyes and breathe out. "I wasn't trying to end the story. I was scared of what ending it was telling."
The room is quiet enough to hear the hum of the refrigerator, the faint mountain wind off the back of the house.
"What story?" she asks, and her voice has gone softer now, the edge gone out of it.
"That I made you want to go." The words come out rough. "Not that you'd leave. That I'd — that I'd do whatever I do, and you'd find yourself looking up apartments because staying stopped being worth it. Because that's—" I stop. Start again. "That's the version I know."
Gemma is quiet for a moment. A long one. Ivy breathes on the couch. Outside, a jay calls once, sharp and gone.
"Beck," she says.
"I know. It's not fair. I'm putting—"
"I was scared," she says. "That's why I looked."
I wait.
She pulls the laptop toward her without opening it.
Just rests her hand on the cover like she's choosing her words carefully.
"I woke up this week and things were good.
Really good. And I don't — I don't have a great track record with good.
Everywhere I've been, every time it started to feel like I was settling in, something shifted and I wasn't there anymore.
Denver. Before that." Her jaw tightens once.
"So I pulled up listings. Not because I wanted to go.
Because looking at exits makes me feel like I have some control over something I'm terrified of losing. "
Neither of us fills the silence.
"I'm not going anywhere," she says. "I wasn't planning to. I was just—"
"You were scared," I say.
She looks at the table. "Pretty much."
I look at her for a long moment. At the paint stain on her cuff. At the way she's sitting with her hand flat on the closed laptop and her chin up and her eyes steady on mine, waiting to see what I do with what she's just handed me.
"I have a whole drawer of cat supplies, Beck."
That is not the sentence I was expecting. "What?"
"In the suite." She tips her head toward the shared wall.
"A whole drawer. Treats, the good kind, not the ones Clarence pretends to hate but definitely doesn't. A backup brush.
Two different kinds of toys that he ignores equally.
The little crinkle ball he bats under the couch and then yells about.
" She holds my gaze. "I don't buy cat supplies for places I'm planning to leave. "
I don't have anything to say to that. There's nothing adequate. So I don't try.
I cross the kitchen and pull out the chair next to her and sit down. My shoulder presses against hers, and she doesn't move away. Neither do I.
We're not fixed. That's not what this is. I'm still carrying every way I know I can get it wrong, and she's still got one hand somewhere near an exit she didn't actually want to take.
But we're in the same room.
And from the couch, in a small sleepy voice without opening her eyes, Ivy says: "Clarence is guarding Dino now."
Gemma and I both look over. Clarence has, in fact, repositioned himself directly in front of the brachiosaurus. Back still turned. Expression deeply aggrieved. But there.
She tilts her head against my shoulder. Neither of us moves. Outside, the mountains do what they've always done — sit enormous and indifferent and permanent against a cold blue sky.
She said she's not going anywhere, and I believe her.
But there's a version of staying that's just not leaving yet, and a version that's choosing this on purpose — choosing me on purpose — and at some point I'm going to have to ask which one she means, and actually let her answer.
But she's here, her shoulder warm against mine, and Clarence is standing watch over a stuffed dinosaur like it's a legitimate assignment, and Ivy is breathing slow and even on the couch.
Right now, I'll take it.