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Tonight’s group is four retirees from Florida on a boys’ trip. They’ve never seen snow and behave like men who’ve been let out of school early.

We take them to the lake. Snow is beginning to pile up around the tree line and the shallow puddles along the shore are freezing over. I set them up for photos, delivering my well-worn tutorial on capturing the aurora and a science lesson. Solar wind, magnetic field lines, the green of oxygen at altitude—the only part of my old life and all those years of study I still get to use.

Ellery shares stories, things she’s learned about Alaska, tales from the gold rush era, and bird facts she’s gleaned from a beat-up guide to Alaskan birds she must’ve found at the bookstore. One story she calls her own mythology: how she likes to believe the lights are the universe’s screensaver kicking in when the world’s been idle too long. They eat it up, and I tell myself I listen, rapt, only to make sure she’s not giving them false information.

“You’re making things up,” I say, as we pack up the van.

“I’m enriching the experience.”

“You told them the sky was a screensaver.”

“You gave them a lecture about ionization. One of them fell asleep standing up.”

“That’s just Harold. Harold falls asleep standing up. He told me so himself.”

She laughs, head tipped back to the lights, snow catching in her hair, dusting her rosy cheeks. The air between us wavers, and I lose about thirty seconds.

“You’re staring.”

“I’m checking you haven’t frozen to death. You dress like you’re on a stroll through Central Park in the fall.”

“I dress cute. I don’t think the man who owns nine identical flannels can throw shade.”

“They’re not identical.”

“Nick. They are literally the same. I’ve cataloged them. I have a chart.”

“You don’t have a chart.”

“I have an extensive chart.” She knocks her shoulder into my arm, light, careless. The contact arrives somewhere that hasn’t been visited in a long time.

I don’t move. Not moving takes everything I’ve got.

She grabs the puffer jacket hanging over her seat in the van, and zips it up. An extra layer to go over that stupid green coat she insists on wearing. She knows I got it for her, that I put it there for her. We’ve got an unspoken agreement to never discuss it.

I don’t look too closely at how these moments add up.

On the drive back, after we’ve dropped off the retirees, Ellery brings up the holidays.

“I don’t think I’ll go home for Thanksgiving, maybe not Christmas either. Ashford holiday events are on the scale of the Met Gala, and I’m not in the mood for it.”

She says it to the windshield. I keep my eyes on the road and wait because she’s not finished.

“It’d be nice to stay for the summer. Maybe I could find some seasonal work in the spring?” She’s turning her ring around on her finger. “See a different side to Ravenslight Creek, get a new perspective…” She pauses, wrangling her thoughts. “Maybe there’s something here for me.”

The very idea of it comes up so abruptly, I’m spinning. Her, here, through the spring, the summer, windows down and the sun still up at midnight, her complaining about the mosquitoes. Together, doing this thing we do. I want it so badly I’m doing fifteen over before I notice.

I ease off.

Because it doesn’t stop at summer. It’s her flying home for Christmas alone. Her best friend’s wedding, alone. Every funeral, every ordinary trip out of this valley for the rest of her life, and me standing there watching her go.

Part of her would be staying because of me, because of these moments we spend together. I could deny it but I’d be kidding myself. She came here to work out what she wants without someone telling her, and if I say one word about wanting her to stay, that’s what I become. Another voice in the room. I know exactly how heavy that gets because I’ve been carrying Sebastian’s decision for four years.

Mom married a man who couldn’t leave and built her life around staying here. She’d say it was worth it, and she’d mean it. She also hasn’t been farther than Fairbanks since I was born, and there’s a photograph in her kitchen of a nineteen-year-old girl standing outside a culinary school in Seattle that she never went back to.

I can’t watch Ellery make her life small when she deserves so much more.

So I end it.