He’s quiet for two steps. “Yes.”
“I’m not… I wanted to say that I’m not…” I stop. Try again. “It mattered. That’s what I wanted to say. It mattered to me.”
As he walks beside me, I can feel him receiving this. The way Archer receives things, seriously, completely, without minimizing. “Good,” he says. One word. The Archer version of everything.
“Good.”
We walk the rest of the path in the silence that is our silence, full, not empty. The Archer-and-Lola silence that has been building since the river path on opening night and has reached a state of something I’d call peace if I was naming it.
The evening brings them all together.
This is the pattern now. This is what evenings areat the pack house. The fire and the configuration of five people who have found their places in the same space. Tristan at the stove or at the table, always with something warm to offer. Jack on the floor or ranging, always in motion. Archer at the worktable, present and physical and less armored every day. Ryan in the window chair.
And me on the couch.
I sit on the couch and I look at the room. The beauty of a Monday evening with nowhere to be and nothing to run from and four people in the room who I…
I hold it.
I hold the feeling and I don’t categorize it and I don’t manage it and I don’t check it against the exit routes because I don’t need the exit routes.
I’m not going anywhere.
Jack is telling a story. Archer is pretending not to listen. Tristan is in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed and his expression pleased. Ryan is in the window chair and he is looking at me with the expression that I can now read completely. Its not mysterious, not undecodable. Completely clear. Warm and steady, the look of a man who has been waiting for something and has watched it arrive.
I look back. Not with the eye contact of someone making a point. Just with everything. Whatever is on my face right now, which is the real thing, I give it to him without the armor. His expression does what it did on the river path. The thing underneath the patience, briefly visible.
“Hi Ryan,” I say, across the room.
“Hi Lola,” he replies.
Jack stops mid-sentence. “Are they—”
“Jack,” Archer warns.
“I’m just—”
“Jack,” Tristan says, from the doorway.
“I’m being quiet,” Jack responds. “This is me being quiet.”
Ryan looks at me with the warmth of someone who finds his pack entirely beautiful in all of its chaos, and I look at him with the warmth of someone who is learning the same familiarity, who is inside it now rather than at the edges of it.
I tuck my feet under me.
I pull the blanket across my lap.
The fire crackles.
Outside, Sweetwater Valley is winding down. The town that has been sayingand Lolafor a week. The town with a cobblestoned main street and a clock tower and a gas station run by a woman who doesn’t care who she offends.
The valley. The air that changed when I drove into it, the pressure that shifted, the thing I drove toward without knowing I was driving toward it.
The fortuneteller, fourteen years ago, told a little girl that she was going to spend a long time looking for the right place to land.
The fortuneteller was not wrong.
I landed here.
