“You planned this,” I say. My voice is hoarse. “The firewood. The dinner. You planned all of it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She sniffs. “I simply noticed that the clinic needed firewood and that a lovely young woman was eating alone on Saturdays and that—”
“Nora.”
She gives up the pretense. Her face crumbles, and she steps forward and wraps her arms around me and holds on, and I let her. I put my arms around this woman who has been showing up at my door since I was sixteen with food and patience and the unshakable belief that I was worth showing up for, and I hold her back.
“Thank you,” I say. Into her hair. Against the smell of cinnamon and pine.
She squeezes tighter. “You bring that girl to dinner on Sunday, or I’ll come up there and get you both.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She lets go. Wipes her eyes. Smooths her cardigan and straightens her shoulders, and becomes Nora Bell again, cheerful and composed, and not at all the woman who was just crying on Main Street.
“Well,” she says. “I have things to do.” She walks past me, pats my arm, and disappears around the corner.
Dr. Theo is standing in the clinic doorway. I didn’t see him come out. He’s leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and his reading glasses on top of his head.
“Took you long enough,” he says.
He goes back inside and shuts the door.
I shake my head and sigh. It did. It’s time I do something else. Something that took me long enough. I drive over to the furniture store. It’s about time I got another chair.
* * *
The cabin is warm when we get back that night. I built the fire before I went to pick her up, stacked it properly, the way I should have been stacking it for years instead of letting it burn out before dawn. I cared tonight. I cared because she was coming back.
Bianca is on the porch with Chief, happily sitting in the extra rocking chair I got for her too, watching the valley turn purple below the ridge. She’s in my flannel again. She might never give it back. I’m not going to ask.
I stand in the doorway. She’s got her hands on the railing, and Chief is lying across her feet, and the mountains are behind her, and the light is doing something to her hair that I couldn’t paint if I had a hundred years. Six weeks ago, I would have turned away from this. Shut the door. Gone back to the dark cabin and the cold stove and called it enough.
I walk out onto the porch. Chief looks up when I come out, and his tail thumps once against the boards.
I sit beside her. Our shoulders touch. The mountains are going dark and the first stars are showing above the tree line and the air smells like pine and wood-smoke and the clean, particular scent of autumn in a place that feels, for the first time, like it belongs to more than just me.
“Bianca.”
She turns to look at me. Green eyes are steady. Open.
“I love you.”
It comes out quiet and simple. I thought it would feel like pulling a tooth, something that needed force and bracing. But it’s just the truth, said the only way I know how. No decoration.
Her eyes fill. Her mouth trembles. And then she smiles, the same full, unguarded smile from this morning, except brighter, and aimed at me with a certainty I spent four years convincing myself I didn’t deserve.
“I love you,” she says.
Not quietly. Not measured or careful. She says it with her whole heart. Clear and certain and full.
I pull her against my side. She tucks her head under my chin. The mountains are black against the sky, and the stars arecoming in, one by one, and the porch is cold, but neither of us moves to go inside.
Chief stretches at her feet and settles with a low, contented sound. His head rests on his paws, and his eyes close.
I press my mouth to her hair.
The quiet is enough.
