Ten months later and I still wake up before her.
Old habit. New reason. The old reason was that I didn't sleep much and the quiet before sunrise was the only hour of the day my brain wasn't running a loop. The new reason is that I like to watch her do the slow stretch she does about ten minutes after I get out of bed, back arched, arm thrown over the pillow where I was, hand reaching for me before her eyes are even open.
She finds the cold side of the sheet and her mouth turns down in her sleep.
Every morning.
It kills me every morning.
I put the coffee on.
The cabin has changed in ten months. Not much. Enough. There's a second leather chair in the office now because she works from mine and I built myself a new one on a Saturday last August. The wall above the couch has three of Darius Kane's smaller canvases on it, a gift when we went to his opening at IronVine. Her grandmother's cast iron lives on my stove full time. My stove is now our stove. I stopped tracking the pronouns three months in.
The big change is outside.
The second cabin.
It's not done. Still needs the interior trim and the wiring finished on the upper floor. I've been building it with Callum Ridge on weekends since May, his crew doing the heavy lifts, me doing the finish work because I wanted my hands on the thing she was going to work in.
Simone's office cabin. Fifteen minutes walk from the main house down a cleared path through the pines. Soundproofed for her Zoom calls. A wood stove. A desk she picked out from a guy in Nelson who does reclaimed barn wood. Windows that face east so she can watch the morning come in over the ridge while she writes.
It will be finished by her birthday.
Which is in two weeks.
I'm nervous about it in a way I haven't been nervous about anything in a long time.
I pour two cups. Take mine to the porch.
The morning is cold in the way autumn mornings are in the Kootenays, sharp and clean, and I stand with my hands around the mug and I look at the trees and I think about how a year ago I was a man who had forgotten what the point of a morning was.
Now the point of the morning is the woman who's about to come downstairs in my shirt and complain that I let her sleep too long.
"You let me sleep too long."
I don't turn around. The porch boards creaked under her bare feet so I heard her coming.
"It's seven."
"That's too long."
"It's Saturday."
"I have a deadline."
"You have a deadline Tuesday."
She leans into my back. Arms around my waist. Chin on my shoulder. The gold disc at her throat clicks softly against my collarbone through the shirt.
"Saturday breakfast."
"I know."
"Sage is going to make the thing with the plantains."
"I know that too."
"You love the thing with the plantains."
