She turns to look at me. "Colm—"
"I'm not asking you to stay," I say. "I know what that is. You have a life, a job, a place. I'm not asking you to blow all of that up for a man you've known for three days and a week three years ago."
"Then what are you asking?"
"I'm asking whether this is real for you. What we started. Or whether you came back to hand me a daughter and leave again."
She holds her breath, thinking.
I know my words sting, but there’s no other way to say it. I’m falling hard and fast all over again, and I need to know if she’s going to stay this time. For real.
In the yard, Macie has placed the piece of rope next to a rock and is apparently judging their relative merits.
"I didn't plan for it to be real," Mila says. "I planned to find you and tell you and figure out co-parenting from opposite ends of the province." She looks at her hands. "And then I saw your face, I remembered why I left before morning. Because I knew if I stayed I'd want to keep you, and at twenty-two I wasn't brave enough for that."
"Are you brave enough now?"
She looks at me.
"I don't know," she says. "I know I want to be."
seven
Mila
Saturdaynight.Thefestival'sclosing ceremony.
The bonfire is built on the flat ground west of the competition area — a proper fire, eight feet high, the kind that throws heat and light in every direction and makes the tree line glow amber. The whole town comes. It's the part of the festival that's been running the longest, before the competition structure and the vendor row, back when it was just a logging community marking the end of summer.
I stand at the edge of the firelight with Macie on my hip.
She's tired and she's fighting it, the way she does — propped against my shoulder, heavy-lidded, watching the fire with a fixed focus that is partly wonder and partly the determination not to miss anything. I've wrapped her in the zip-up fleece from my bag and she has her thumb in her mouth, which she mostly doesn't do anymore, only when she's very tired or very overwhelmed.
Tomorrow I was going to drive back to Kelowna.
I don't know if that's still the plan.
He's been quiet today. Not cold — just inward, a man thinking through something complex. We met at the festival grounds in the morning and he ran the final competition heats and Macie and I watched and ate festival food and he came to find us at every break. But something in him has been waiting.
I check my phone. No texts.
"Log man," Macie says drowsily against my shoulder.
"He'll find us," I say, not knowing if I believe it.
The fire crackles and spits. Around us the town is gathered — old men in canvas chairs, families with children, young people on blankets. A woman near the edge of the crowd is selling hot cider from a thermos. The festival committee has set up a microphone for remarks nobody's listening to. The air smells like woodsmoke and late summer — the particular smell of August ending, something sweet and something leaving.
I hear him before I see him.
His footstep is specific — I've learned the sound of it over four days, the particular weight of him on grass, on gravel, on a wooden platform. He comes through the crowd from the direction of the main stage and he's carrying something.
A small carved wooden figure. An animal — I can't see it clearly in the firelight, but he turns it as he walks and the firelight catches it. A bear. Small enough to fit in a toddler's hand.
He stops in front of us. He looks at Macie first — takes in the tired weight of her, the thumb, the fleece.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
