Page 10 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

I pull the quilt up over her shoulder. She's already half under.

Outside, the wind moves through the maples and drops another few thousand leaves on the drive, and neither of us says a single thing, and it's the fullest quiet this house has had in three years.

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."