Page 12 of Kept By the Devoted Mountain Man
This is grief. I know what grief looks like in this kid. I've been watching it for two years — the questions, the drawings, thebedtime resistance, the days when she laughs so hard it tips over into something else and she doesn't know why. This is that. A five-year-old who has already lost the most permanent person in her world and has learned, against all natural law, that people leave.
"She has to go home," I say into her hair. "That's where her job is. Where her family is."
She cries harder for a moment, then slows. I feel her breathing even out by degrees.
"Will she come back?" she asks.
"I don't know."
The honest answer. The only one I can give her and mean.
She pulls back to look at my face. Her eyes are red and her braids are loose, one half-undone, and she looks so much like Jace in this moment that it hits me squarely in my grumpy old heart.
"Are you sad?" she asks.
"Yeah," I say. "I'm sad too."
Then she leans back in and I hold her until she's ready to be done, and when she's done she says she's hungry and I go back and finish dinner and we eat together in the last of the evening light and she talks about something that happens at the book sale, something about a girl with a dog, and I listen and it's ordinary and enormous at the same time.
After she's down I stand on the porch in the dark.
My phone is in my pocket. Tessa's number is in my phone.
I take it out. I look at the screen. I want to call her so badly I can feel it like a physical thing, a pull in the centre of my chest. I put it back.
The wanting and the hollow together, and Nora'sokaysaid in that practiced voice, and the deal I make the day Jace dies:Nora first. Always Nora first.
seven
Tessa
Mybagisonthe bed and it's half packed and I've been looking at it for forty minutes.
This is not a hard task. I pack it to come here. I know how my things fit. The yellow shirt goes first, then the jeans, then the books I buy at the sale on Main Street — three of them, which I don't need and buy anyway because the woman running the table has a warm smile and it is a beautiful afternoon and I am not thinking about leaving. I should be thinking about leaving. I'm thinking about Beckett Hale on a porch in the dark sayinggood that you came herein a voice like he means it past the surface of it. I'm thinking about his hands on my face. I'm thinking aboutstay.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The room is the same room it was when I arrived — the quilt, the wildflowers Maple replaces every two days, the mountain slice between the two spruce trees in the window. I've been here six days. Six days is not long enough to feel like a place is yours.
Except that I walk into Juniper's and Darlene has my tea ready before I sit down. Except that Kaylee texts me this morning just to say the kids are asking about the fox. Except that I know where the good rock is by the river and which trail behind the hotel turns golden at six in the evening, and Maple and I have four conversations about nothing in particular that feel like the beginning of a friendship.
I've been avoiding the real thought all morning. Here it is:I don't want to leave. Not because of an afternoon in a shed or a kiss on a porch. Because of who I am here. Because I walk into a library because of a sign and I sit on a floor because a little girl has an upside-down book and I spend a week being entirely, recognisably myself — the version of me who doesn't redirect or shrink or adjust herself into someone quieter.
I think about who I was before I left Vancouver. The careful, contained version who adjusts and redirects and tells herself wanting things is the same as being needy. I think about Daniel's face and the three years that lead to it. I think about the particular way I stop taking up space.
Then I think about Nora Hale, who is about to start kindergarten in eight weeks and who deserves someone in that classroom who already knows she's committed to the bit.
Someone like me.
My hands are steady on the wheel and the evening is gold and long, the sky still pale above the tree line at eight o'clock. His truck is in the drive. The porch light is on.
He's sitting in the cedar chair, coffee mug in hand, and he sees me pull up and his eyes go with with surprise.
I get out of the car.
"Nora asleep?" I say.
"An hour ago."
