The drive back was quiet for about ninety seconds.
“Does the entire town think we’re sleeping together?” she asked.
“It’s a small town. People see a stranger’s car on my road. They talk.”
“And what are they saying?”
“Lyle’s been married thirty years. He looked at us and didn’t bother asking twice.”
She turned toward the window. I could see her profile, the tilt of her nose, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “Atlas.”
“I’m right here.”
A breath. Her mouth opened. Her expression shifted, heavy and real, the same weight I’d been watching her carry since the day she tripped into my yard.
She shook her head. “Never mind. Tell me about that particular variety you ordered. Why the drainage area?”
I told her. She listened. And the thing she’d almost said filled the cab, taking up more space than either of us.
DAYS FOLDED INTO EACHother. The rhythm settled: mornings on the property, her with her drawings and plant maps and that running narration to the seedlings, me with the colonies and the extraction schedule and her voice always somewhere on the air. I could find her without looking. Her laugh, the rustle of paper, the scrape of her boot on gravel. She’d woven herself into the daily shape of my life and I hadn’t noticed until she was part of the pattern.
She cooked with me most nights. Not a formal arrangement. It wasn't discussed. The work day ended and the kitchen was there and she was there and food needed making. Elk stew one evening, thick with parsnips and shallots from my root cellar. A roasted chicken the next night with rosemary and a glaze she’d mixed from three of my wildflower jars while arguing that the buckwheat was superior. “Your taste buds are broken,” I told her. She laughed and flicked glaze at my shirt. I caught her wrist without thinking, her pulse hammering against my thumb, and we stood there until the oven timer broke it.
After dinner that night we sat on the porch. She was telling me about her sister Dahlia, a nurse in Seattle, and her family’s Sunday dinners over video call — her mother holding the phone at an angle that captured the ceiling, her father shouting from the kitchen that nobody appreciated his enchiladas. She was laughing while she told it, leaning back on her hands, and Iwatched her and thought about Sunday evenings on this porch alone. The quiet after the bees settled. The second chair I’d built because a porch should have two, even if only one got used.
“My parents call on Sundays too,” I said. I was looking at the meadow. “My mom asks if I’m eating enough. My brother sends pictures of his kids in Missoula.” I stopped. The next part cost me. “It’s a good life. I built exactly what I set out to build. But there’s a second chair on this porch and nobody’s sat in it until you.”
She didn’t say anything. She just shifted closer until her shoulder pressed against mine, solid and warm, and she stayed there.
She showed up the next day in a white sundress with small blue flowers. And work boots. The combination should have looked absurd, lace hem, steel toes, and instead it looked like everything I’d wanted standing at the foot of my stairs looking embarrassed.
“Not a word,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You’re smirking.”
“I don’t smirk.”
“Your face is doing something that in any court of law would be classified as a smirk. I packed for a long weekend. This was the only clean thing left and the alternative was a bath towel, and I seriously considered it.”
I looked at her. The dress was thin. Morning light came through it and the outline of her body hit me all at once, hips and waist and the whole warm shape of her, and my brain went offline. She was standing in my meadow in a sundress and boots with her curls loose and the light turning her skin warm gold. And then I could see her in this same meadow months from now, the dress pulled taut across a rounded belly, her hand resting where the fabric stretched. The image arrived fully formed,so vivid and so welcome that I forgot to breathe. She said something about the drainage stakes and I answered her. I have no idea what I said. It might have been English. She gave me a strange look and went back to her question, and I was standing in the spring sun having a vision of a future I hadn’t earned yet and somehow forming words about irrigation.
“There’s a washing machine in the utility closet,” I said. “You can throw your things in while you work.”
“That feels more domestic than either of us is ready to admit.”
“You’re wearing a dress to dig in dirt.”
She gathered the skirt in both fists and marched past me toward the garden beds. The dress swished against her thighs. The boots left prints in the soft earth. I watched her go and couldn’t remember the last time I’d smiled without deciding to.
She’d started leaving things at my cabin: a pencil case on the kitchen shelf, a half-finished trace on the table, a water bottle by the railing. Small trespasses. I didn’t move any of them.
But the questions hadn’t stopped.
She’d gotten better at folding them in, casual, tucked between observations about bloom timing or colony behavior, but the pattern held if you paid attention. She knew things she shouldn’t. My degree, my family, my brother’s name. She asked about Montana State and nodded before I’d finished answering. She mentioned Missoula once and caught herself so fast the correction sounded rehearsed.
And the other things.
