“I didn't —”
“You didn't what?” She wasn't using the voice anymore. She was using a different voice that was worse. It was the voice she used when she was telling herself something she was going to have to live with, and I knew that voice because I had been using a version of it on myself for nine years.
“I didn't want to do that to you,” I said. “Not the — not last night. The other thing.”
“The leaving-soon thing.”
I nodded.
“You didn't do it to me. I came up the mountain. I knew I was going home. I didn't forget any of that.” She finally looked at me. Her face was clear, but her eyes were guarded. “I'm not asking you for anything. So we don't have to do this part.”
I had never wanted to argue with someone less in my life, and I had never wanted to argue with someone more, and they were the same person, and she was sitting two feet from me wrapped in a blanket I had brought to a cabin she didn't know existed, and she was telling me I didn't have to do this part. So I kept my mouth shut and I let her have the version of the morning she had decided to take.
We got dressed in the kind of silence that took effort to maintain.
She put her braid back together with her hands while I rolled up the tarp. I folded the blanket. Put the coffee can and the matches back where they'd been on the hearth. Stacked the firewood and added a few of the splits I’d broken down during the night. We left the cabin the way we’d found it. That was the rule.
Biscuit walked between us the whole way down. I thought he would default to her the way he had defaulted to her every other time, but he didn't. He walked between us like a scruffy chaperone who didn’t want there to be any more trouble.
She didn't talk to me on the way down, but she wasn’t silent. Every once in a while, she’d bend down to talk to a flower or ask a plant how it was doing today. But her voice sounded different, less bright with more gravity. I was the one who’d done that to her. It was my fault.
I got us back to the ridge by noon. She thanked me for the hike but didn’t look at me when she did. Then she walked across the clearing, entered her cabin, and shut the door behind her. I stood next to my truck with Biscuit at my side, but the door didn't open again.
The porch step on Cabin Three had been loose for weeks. I'd seen it on Tuesday, and I'd been planning to fix it on Monday, because small repairs got done on Mondays and that was the rhythm I had with the cabins.
But my routine had been rocked. Last night had thrown me, and I felt like I’d lost my way. After she came out of the cabin and drove away, I got the toolbox out of my truck and fixed the damn porch step.
I planed the step level, replaced the bracket, sank two new screws into the joist, and was off the porch and gone by twentyafter two. I didn’t leave a note or let myself wonder whether she would notice or what she would think about it when she did.
Soleil might overlook things like that, but I couldn’t.
The faucet in her kitchen had been leaking since the day she moved in. I’d been planning on fixing it, but she’d shown up early and I hadn’t had the chance. On Friday morning, she left for a meeting at the bookstore. I drove up at ten with the toolbox, pulled the faucet handle, replaced the cartridge, tested the seal, and was gone by ten-forty. I didn’t leave a note this time either.
On Saturday morning, I built her a shelf. Eighteen inches by six, one shelf on two iron brackets, mounted on the wall by her kitchen table at the height where she could reach it from her chair. I'd noticed the table was too crowded for her sketchbooks the second time I'd been inside the cabin. I cut it from a piece of black walnut left over from the Aspen table. I sanded it, oiled it, and resisted the urge to carve anything into the underside.
I drove up to her cabin at eleven on Saturday. Her SUV was gone. The cabin door was unlocked because nobody in Hollow Peak locked anything. I let myself in, hung the shelf in fifteen minutes, and left.
I refused to look around the cabin while I was inside. That was a rule I’d created before I went in, and I held to it. When I was done, I headed back to my place and stood at my kitchen window for the better part of an hour, thinking about nothing in particular except the way she’d looked at me before I’d ruined everything.
By Sunday morning I’d been pretending not to look for Soleil for four days, even though I’d been looking for her constantly. Finally, when I couldn’t stand my own company any longer, I drove down to the Switchback for coffee and a cinnamon roll. She was supposed to be giving a talk at the lodge.
I saw her as soon as I walked in, sitting at the two-top by the window. Her sketchbook sat open in front of her next to a half-eaten cinnamon roll. She had a Magic Latte in one hand and was wearing the same Boulder Marathon t-shirt she’d had on the day she found the goat.
My heart pounded because I hadn’t seen her in days. And also because she wasn’t by herself.
A man sat across from her. Probably somewhere in his thirties. Even from across the room, I picked up on his attitude. He was leaning forward across the table with his forearms on the surface in a way that suggested he had been there a while and was planning to be there longer. Soleil tilted her head and offered him a polite smile. He sat there like an asshole who was way too sure of himself and hadn’t noticed that she’d been staring at the door for the last sixty seconds.
When she looked up and saw me, the polite smile faded. I walked across the café and sat down on the chair next to her without asking. Mae was already on her way to the table with another mug.
“What can I get you, Berg?” she asked, like she’d been waiting for me to arrive.
“Coffee. And another roll. Bring the bill.”
Mae arched a brow. “For both of them?”
“For both of us.”
The man in the fleece looked at me. He hadn’t caught up to the situation yet. His mouth opened like he thought he was still taking part in a conversation.
