In that version I don't come back to Silver Ridge.
I sit down on the installation platform and let that land.
It's not the garden keeping me here — or not only the garden. It's that I've been in Silver Ridge for six weeks and somewhere in that time this place stopped being a project. The lodge room that feels like mine. The woman at the bakery who knows my order. The workshop with its task lights and stone dust and Flint's hands.
His hands.
I've designed memorial gardens for fourteen years and I've never had trouble walking away from one when the work required it. That's the skill — you design the space to hold what needs holding, and then you leave it to do that, and you go build the next one.
I cannot figure out how to apply that logic to this.
I call Priya. I tell her I need three more days to think. She doesn't ask why.
I find Flint at the workshop at noon. He's at the Jamie stone and he finishes the cut before he acknowledges me, which is one of the things about him I've stopped finding annoying and started finding steadying — he finishes things. He sets the chisel down.
"There's a problem at my firm," I say. "I might need to go back to Vancouver."
He looks at me. Just looks. Waiting.
"I could hand the Silver Ridge execution to a junior designer. The design is done. She'd oversee installation." I put my sketchbook on the worktable because I need something to do with my hands. "I haven't decided. I wanted you to know I haven't decided."
He's very still. Not his working stillness — something different. Something with more held in it.
"I didn't know you were planning to leave," he says.
Not an accusation. But it lands like one.
"I'm telling you now," I say.
"I know."
He picks up the chisel. Sets it down.
"What do you want?" I ask him.
He looks at me for a long moment. "That's not the same as what I'll say."
The most honest thing anyone has said to me in years. Also completely useless.
I drive back to the Silver Lodge. I lie on the bed and look at the ceiling.
He wants me to stay. He won't say it because he thinks it's my decision to make. He's right that it's my decision. He's wrong that saying it would make it for me.
I pick up my phone. I call Priya. I tell her I'm staying.
six
Flint
Reidisnormallylatefor work. Today, he finds me at six in the morning working by headlamp.
He doesn't say anything at first — just sets his thermos down and pours two cups and puts one on the bench near me and goes to the far wall and looks at the Jamie stone, which is nearly done now. I've been at it since four. The lettering is cut. The surface texture is finished. The only thing left is the edge work on the base, which I can have done by noon.
"What happened?" he says.
I tell him. Not all of it — Reid doesn't need all of it. But enough: that Ivy might leave, that her partner took a project and walked, that she told me and I didn't say what I should have said.
He's quiet for a while. "What did you say?"
