"First thing Monday."
"Anthony."
"First thing," he repeats, and looks at me. “You deserve this and I don’t want you to talk yourself out of it.”
The look. The register. The specific warm weight of it. The‘you’ll be over my knee if you disobey me on this’ look.
I decide every morning for the rest of my life is going to involve someone telling me to do things I was going to do anyway with that exact expression.
"First thing Monday," I say. "Yes."
"Good girl."
There it is. My favorite two words from my favorite voice. I wonder if it'll always land like this or if I'll get used to it.
I hope I never get used to it.
He sets down the bourbon and reaches for me, and I go and he tucks me in against his side with his arm around me and we sit in the firelight and I think about Sunday.
"I'm coming back in January," I say.
"I know."
"To see the elk migration."
"I know."
"And I'm going to need to look at the cabin."
His arm tightens. "I know."
"You know a lot of things."
"I pay attention," he says.
That's it. That's all of it in two words. He pays attention. Not to the things it's easy to notice like the view, the obvious, the surface. He pays attention to the things underneath.
To me. He pays attention to me, specifically and completely, and I am going to spend a very long time learning what it feels like to be known like that.
I cannot wait.
"I need to call my landlord on Monday," I say.
"Before or after the editor?"
"After the editor. You said first thing."
He laughs."After the editor," he confirms.
Sunday morning comes cold and clear.
The girls have breakfast with me in the main lodge, all five of them, loud and loving and full of opinions about the trip back and January and the cabin and whether I'm going to redecorate it, which becomes a twenty-minute conversation that I mostly listen to while eating the best eggs I've had in recent memory.
Anthony comes in at nine.
He gets a coffee and sits down with us and immediately Madison starts asking him questions about the ranch with the specific focused energy of someone who has been waiting for access and is going to use it. He answers all of her millions of questions. He answers Emily's questions about the bear cub's diet with the same patience. He lets Lily ask about the reindeer's names and explains the thing about earning them and she looks at me with an expression that says: I understand everything now.
He stays for an hour.
