"I told him," Ivy says, pointing at me again.
"Told him what?"
"That you were nice."
Gemma slides a look in my direction. I take a very focused sip of coffee.
"That was very wise of you," Gemma says, dropping into the chair across from Ivy with the ease of someone who belongs there. Which she does. Which is the problem, or maybe not a problem at all, which is a whole different problem.
"Did you go on any good rides?" Gemma asks, and Ivy launches into a detailed account of every attraction at Disneyland, ranked in order from "the best one" to "the one that made Connor from school cry, but he's kind of a crier." The monologue runs long. Gemma listens to every word like it's the most interesting thing she's heard all week.
I refill both our cups without being asked and sit down across from them. This is my kitchen. My daughter. My catastrophically inconvenient feelings. All of it sitting together in a patch of morning light, and I don't know what to do with how right it looks.
"Daddy," Ivy says, without looking up from her eggs. "Gemma has to eat all her meals here now."
"That's not really?—"
"All of them," Ivy repeats, and the tone indicates this is non-negotiable.
Gemma covers a smile with her coffee cup. I wrap both hands around my mug and tell myself this is fine.
The afternoon is the kind of slow Saturday that Copper Ridge does well — cool sunlight through the back windows, the mountains sitting blue and enormous on the horizon, Ivy asleep on the couch under the dinosaur blanket with Dino tucked under her arm and Clarence has inexplicably positioned himself a foot away from Dino with his back turned, standing guard or expressing contempt, impossible to say which.
Gemma's at the kitchen table with her laptop, one knee pulled up to her chest, a half-eaten apple on the table beside her that she's clearly forgotten about. I'm at the counter supposedly reviewing an equipment report, but the same paragraph has been sitting in front of me for a while now.
This is new too. Not the paperwork avoidance — that's well-established. The part where I'm aware of every small sound she makes. The soft exhale when she finds something interesting. The way she tucks her hair behind her ear and then immediately loses it forward again. The way she doesn't fill silence with noise, doesn't feel the need to perform at ease — just is.
After everything that happened between us, I expected it to feel complicated. And it does, some. But mostly it feels like the morning, like the coffee I pour without thinking — like a thing that's been quietly true for longer than I was willing to admit it.
She glances up, catches me not reading. Raises an eyebrow.
"Equipment report," I say.
"You've been on the same page for twenty minutes."
"It's a dense page."
The corner of her mouth lifts. She goes back to her screen, and something settles in my chest that I don't have good language for. I'm not a man who runs toward things he doesn't have language for. Usually I wait until I've identified exactly what a thing is before I let myself want it.
I should probably work on that.
It's quiet. Comfortable. The domestic ease of it snags at something behind my ribs, and I carry both mugs to the sink to rinse them so I have something to do with my hands.
That's when I see her screen.
Not trying to. Not reading over her shoulder. She tilts the laptop to rub at a cramp in her wrist, and the angle opens up just enough — apartment listings, grid view, thumbnail photos of bare rooms and wide windows. A city name at the top of the page.
Bozeman.
The cold comes fast, low in my stomach, the same cold that was there when Vanessa sat me down at the kitchen table in Seattle and saidI don't think either of us is happyand I'd known she was right and somehow that had made it worse.
Gemma closes the laptop.
"Hey," she says, glancing up with a smile that doesn't quite reach.
"Apartment listings," I say.
A beat. "What?"
