"I came here to use you," she said. "I had a lawyer, a timeline, a plan for every contingency. I was going to take what I needed and leave." She looked down at the paper. "Somewhere around the second week I stopped being able to picture leaving. I kept trying to see myself in my apartment in San Francisco. All Icould see was this kitchen, this porch, you up before dawn because you can't sleep past five."
She folded the paper carefully along the crease. Put it in her pocket.
"I don't want the plan." Her chin came up. "I want the real thing. Even though it's messy and unscheduled and you ruined me with salmon on the first night —"
"It was just butter and lemon."
"It was not just butter and lemon." Her eyes went soft. "I want to stay. Not because of a baby. Because I'm in love with you and the manual was forty-seven pages of avoiding that."
The wind moved through the clearing. A bird called from somewhere in the cedars. The valley was laid out below us, the river catching afternoon light. I stood there with her words in my chest, my hands unsteady, no plan for what came next.
I reached for her hand. She gave it.
We stood on that ridge for a long time, not talking, her fingers laced through mine, the wildflowers growing without a system in the thin soil around us. The peaks turned gold in the late light. The river ran below, the same as it always ran, steady and unhurried and not going anywhere.
I didn't have forty-seven pages. I had her hand in mine, a folded piece of paper in her pocket, and the clearing where I'd decided to stay alive. She was here. I was keeping her.
Epilogue
Nell
THE WILDFLOWERS HADcome back.
I noticed them through the kitchen window — lupine and yellow blooms I still couldn’t name after a full year of living among them — growing in the same spot along the river bank where I’d picked the first bunch. The mason jar on the dining table held a fresh cutting. I’d stopped arranging them. They went in however they landed, and somehow that looked better than anything I could have planned.
The cabin was quiet in the good way. My laptop sat open beside it, a consulting contract I’d been editing between feedings still on the screen. Cliff’s hiking boots by the door. My trail shoes beside them, broken in now, the tread worn from a year of paths I’d learned without a map. The bookshelves carried his paperbacks and my business texts, spines cracked on both sides. His mother’s quilt was folded over the back of the couch, blues and greens faded another shade from the sunlight that came through the front windows every morning.
Through the bedroom doorway I could hear Cliff talking.
“— and then you’ll need to understand the secondary market implications of a diversified asset portfolio.” His voice was lowand serious. “I’m kidding. I don’t know what any of that means. Your mother does. I’m going to teach you to fish.”
I leaned against the doorframe. He was standing by the window with Nina on his shoulder, one hand spanning the entire width of her small back, swaying in the unconscious rhythm he’d developed within the first week and hadn’t stopped since. He was shirtless. He ran warm, always had. Nina’s fist was curled around his collarbone, holding on with the determined grip of someone who had opinions about everything and the vocabulary for none of it.
Nina Catherine Masterson. She had his dark hair and my sharp chin and a disposition that suggested she’d inherited both our stubbornness, which the world probably didn’t need but was getting anyway. She’d already survived one FaceTime call with my mother during which my mother cried, my father asked about property taxes, and my sister said “I can’t believe you live on a mountain” in a tone I was still classifying.
I watched Cliff sway. He pressed his mouth to the top of Nina’s head and closed his eyes. The expression on his face was one I’d first seen the morning after we slept together, open and unhidden, the version of him he used to cover with movement and chores before I could catch it. He didn’t cover it anymore. He stayed in it, holding our daughter the way the feeling was holding him, and my chest ached in the good way. The kind that didn’t need a spreadsheet or a contingency plan.
“She’s watching us,” Cliff said to Nina, eyes still closed. “She’s doing the thing where she stands in the doorway and collects data.”
“I don’t collect data.”
“You have a data face. You’ve got it on right now.”
“I have a data face?”
“You have several. I married the one that does math when it thinks I’m not looking.”
He opened one eye. “Drew texted. He’s landing at ten.”
“I know. I saw.”
“Champagne again, probably.”
“Bottle five.”
“We’re never drinking those.”
“Tell him that.”
