Page 86 of The Lonely Road

This year, I found my way back to it with Mason Brooks, and the pleasure of it is massive, as big as the skies that are now darkening.

I look at him, and I think: I love you.

Fully.

Completely.

“Let’s have dessert.” I take his hand. “Auntie Carol made wojapi, and if you don’t eat it while it’s warm, she’ll know, and she won’t forgive you.”

He glances at our hands, then back at me. “Can’t have that.”

And we walk back toward the tables.

Wíitsin’s house wraps around me like warmth and home around us when we return.

I make tea. I move through her kitchen the way I’ve moved through it my whole life—this cabinet, that hook, the kettle that takes exactly as long as it’s always taken—and Mason sits at the table and doesn’t try to fill the quiet, which is one of the things I love about him, that he can be in a room without needing to make noise in it.

I set tea in front of him.

I sit down across from him.

I focus on him—not as a lawyer, but with the other lens, the one that has no professional category—and I say it.

“I love you.”

He stills and fixes his attention on me.

It’s not a controlled quietness—I know that one. This is another kind.

He’s not cold.

He’s not indifferent.

He’s looking at me like a man who’s found something he didn’t expect—and now doesn’t know what to do with it.

I wait.

I know how to wait.

Outside, faint through the walls of this house that has held sixty years of her patience and her certainty and her love, the drums are still going.

The bear’s heartbeat.

Steady as it ever was.

CHAPTER 21

mason

Ilove you.

She said the words I’ve been dreading to hear. The words I’ve been desperate to hear. She said it the way she does everything—directly, without performance, the fact set down between us like something she’d finished deciding and had no interest in revisiting.

I love you.

Three words in her voice in her grandmother’s kitchen, the tea between us, the May evening going dark outside the window, the drums keeping time in the distance.

I am in love with her.