Chapter Six
RAFE
THE MOUNTAIN WAS DOINGwhat it did before a clear day: going still and cold and precise, every edge of it sharp in the pale light before eight. I’d been up for an hour. Coffee was on. I’d found potatoes in the bottom of the cabinet and eggs that hadn’t been touched since yesterday’s omelette incident and I’d cooked both without thinking about it, which was not something I made a habit of—cooking for someone, standing in a kitchen that had always been mine alone and feeling the weight of another person still asleep in the back room.
I felt it, and I didn’t put it away.
The potatoes were done and resting in the pan when I heard her moving—the creak of the floorboard near the bed, the small sounds of someone coming awake in a space that wasn’t theirs yet. A pause. Then bare feet on the wood and London appeared in the kitchen doorway, hair down, the flannel hanging off one shoulder, the thrift store jeans she’d pulled on after her shower last night.
Her eyes went to the stove. Then to me.
“You cooked,” she said.
“Eggs and potatoes.”
“You cooked breakfast.” She came to the table and sat down and picked up the coffee I’d left there for her, both hands wrapped around it, and looked at the plate like it was evidence. “I want you to know I understand that this is a direct comment on yesterday’s omelette situation.”
“It’s not.”
“It absolutely is. You’ve staged an intervention using carbohydrates.” She picked up her fork with great dignity. “I respect the commitment.”
“I was hungry.”
“That’s what someone says when they’re also staging an intervention.” She took a bite of potatoes and her eyes went briefly closed. “Okay. These are genuinely good. Which somehow makes it worse.”
I sat across from her. “How does that make it worse?”
“Because now I can’t even be quietly defensive about the omelette. You’ve removed that option.” She pointed at me with the fork. “That was calculated.”
“Eat your eggs.”
She ate her eggs.
The morning light through the west window was the thin, early kind, running pale across the table, and London ate without saying anything for a few minutes, which I’d learned by now wasn’t absence. Just there. Just eating breakfast in a cabin in Idaho.
I’d been trying not to think about the fact that she was leaving tomorrow.
I wasn’t succeeding.
“Can I ask you something?” London said.
“Go ahead.”
She set her fork down and met my eyes, the way she did when she’d decided something. “Wharton. When I reapply—and I’m going to, I’ve decided that—it’s a two-year program. InPhiladelphia.” She held my gaze. “I want to know what you think that means.”
I looked at my coffee. Then at her.
“I think it means you’re going to Philadelphia,” I said. “And I think you’re going to be excellent at it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“London.” I set my mug down. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to tell me what you actually think. Not the version where you’re managing the situation.” Her eyes were steady and very green. “Yesterday on that road you said something stopped following the rules. I’m asking if that’s still true this morning, with twenty-four hours of daylight and a clear head.”
The morning was quiet around us—birds outside, the sound of the creek somewhere below the property, the small shift of the cabin settling in the cold.
“It’s still true,” I said.
