"It was ten sentences," I say.
"He is a very private man," Eliza says again, and Aris laughs—the first real, whole laugh of the night, and it does something to the room.
May sets down two mugs of coffee and the emergency slice of apple pie between us with two forks. She doesn't ask. She knows.
"Real food," Aris sighs, closing her eyes over the coffee. "God. I tried to eat a Cobb salad this afternoon and I almost cried."
"Cobb salad is a lie," Eliza says. "It's a plate of foods that don't like each other."
The baby stirs. Eliza shifts him on her shoulder without looking, the movement of a woman who has done this exact thing a thousand times. Matt puts a hand on her back, small and steady.
I watch Aris watching them. Something in her face softens by degrees.
We stay too long. May won't take my money. Eliza kisses my cheek at the door and squeezes Aris's hand and doesn't say anything at all, which for Eliza is the loudest possible thing.
We walk back down the boardwalk slower than we walked up it. Aris keeps stopping to look at things—the painted name on a hull, a clothesline of dried halibut, a hand-lettered sign on the church board that says SOUP SUPPER FRIDAY. ALL WELCOME, EVEN YOU, NASH.
We stop in front of it for a while.
"That's for you," she says.
"That has been on that board since 2019."
"I love this town."
"You haven't been here long enough to love it."
"Sure I have." She turns toward me. "It took twenty minutes."
We ride the snowmobile home to Misty Meadows in the dark. Aris presses against my back. Her arms are inside my coat, warm against my ribs, and she doesn't say a word for the whole ride, and neither do I.
The lights are on when we pull up to the house. I left them on when I rode out. I wanted the yard to look like someone lived there.
Aris climbs off the machine and stands in the snow, looking at it. My house. Two stories of cedar and stone with the porch light throwing a long yellow rectangle across the yard.
"Nash," she says.
"Yeah?"
"I meant it," she says quietly. "About not fitting there. I felt hollow. Until the plane landed."
"I know the feeling. The shed felt pretty hollow today too."
She looks up at me, her eyes fixed on mine. "So. Are we doing this? The long-distance thing? The Seattle-Fairbanks-Port-Promise triangle?"
"We're doing it," I say. "Whatever it takes. Boats, planes, sleds. We make it work."
"Good," she says. "Because I really don't want to have to find another guide."
"You couldn't afford another guide," I tease. "I'm the best."
"You're the most expensive, that's for sure," she counters, rising on her tiptoes.
I kiss her then, slow and deep, right there in the yard while the porch light throws our shadows long across the snow. Nobody watches. Nobody needs to.
We walk up the steps together. I unlock the door and push it open, and the heat comes out to meet us—woodsmoke, cedar, the coffee I forgot to turn off. Aris walks in ahead of me and stops in the middle of the room.
She looks at it all again—the woodstove, the hooked rug my grandmother made. One night under this roof before the field swallowed us, and she still goes straight to what's different: the bookshelf, where I've been moving things to make room. She looks at that for a long time.
