I stopped at the bottom of the porch step and looked at him.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
He thumped his tail once. I hadn’t earned his full forgiveness yet, but it would come.
I knocked. Two times, soft, the way Mama Mae knocked when she didn't want to wake up everyone all at once.
Soleil opened the door. She was already dressed in a pair of jeans and the sweater she'd had on the night she arrived. A black tie held her hair away from her eyes. Her face was the closed-sketchbook face from last night. She’d been crying at some point and had decided to stop. She was holding a coffee in both hands.
“I made you something,” I said.
She looked at the canvas under my arm, then back at my face. She didn't move.
“Can I come in?”
She stepped back from the door.
Boxes stacked by the table and her open suitcase spread across the bed. The scent of coffee lingered in the air.
I unwrapped the boards on the kitchen table and laid them side by side.
She set her coffee down, crossed the small kitchen, and stood at the table looking down at the carving.
I watched her face.
My plan hadn’t included what I would do if she just looked at it and didn’t react. It had included her crying. It had included her being angry. It had included her telling me to take it and leave and even included what I should do if she told me to fuck the hell off. But my plan hadn’t included what her face actually did. It settled, the same settling I'd seen at the bench at the lookout, at the underside of the kitchen drawer in this cabin, at the workshop the day she undid the buttons on my shirt. Like she was confirming something she already knew.
“You knew,” I said.
She nodded.
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“Every one?”
“Every one I could find.”
She didn't say seven. She didn't list them. She just stood at the table with her hand hovering above the meadow, and her thumb did the small slow trace it always did, and after a long beat she lowered her hand to the wood and set it flat and closed her eyes. Her fingers traced the petals without pressing, the way someone might touch something they’re afraid might disappear.
“Soleil.”
She opened her eyes but didn't look at me. Her attention stayed on the carving.
“I was going to ask you,” she said. “Last week. After my meeting with Evelyn. I was going to ask you if I could stay.”
“I know.”
“How did you —”
“I knew it in the same way you knew about the carvings.”
She turned to look at me. The closed-sketchbook face was gone. What replaced it was something I hadn’t earned and was being given anyway, the way she gave most things — without making me beg.
I’d been practicing the sentence since one in the morning, broken into three pieces because that was the only way my mouth could form it.
“You belong here,” I said.
