Page 8 of True North Mountain Man

He doesn't say anything.

"That's the part I'm ashamed of. Not the lying. The relief." My hands are shaking, so I put them flat on the table. "For five years you were the thing I couldn't have. A conversation I couldn't get back and couldn't stop thinking about, which is a genuinely pathetic way to spend your twenties, and I knew that, and it didn't help. And then there you were, and you had no idea, and it meant that whatever happened next was going to be new. Not a rerun. Not me trying to get a thing back. You'd be choosing me on the evidence in front of you and not on anything I'd been carrying." My voice goes somewhere I don't authorize. "And every day it got harder to give that up. That's why I didn't say it. It wasn't fear, at the end. It was greed."

"And Saturday night?"

"Saturday night you told me it doesn't happen to you that fast, and I had to look away, because you meant five days and I meant five years" I make myself look at him.

"Why didn't you say it Sunday, then?"

"Because Sunday was better than Saturday." My voice cracks straight down the middle of it. "That's the answer. Every day it got worse to say and better to have. Monday you kissed me at the truck before I'd got my gloves off and I thought, he's doing that because of this week, not because of a room in Vancouver. I wanted that more than I wanted to be a good person about it. Tuesday you told me I wasn't wearing the armour up here. Do you know what it's like to hear that from someone who doesn't know he's already the reason?"

He doesn't answer.

"I've been an honest person my whole career. I've walked away from two contracts over data I wouldn't sign. And I sat at that table for nine days holding the one thing you'd have wanted to know, and I told myself it was kindness." I press my palms flat. "I didn't want it to be about the thing I couldn't have five years ago," I say. "I wanted it to be about now."

Creed puts his elbows on the table. Looks at the wrecked aerial photo still weighted under the rock, the one with the crease across the north end from the middle of my back.

"It can be both," he says. "You have to let it be both."

"That's not how—"

"It is exactly how. It's the only thing I know how to do." He taps the map twice, the way he does. "You've got a benchmark from 'seventy-eight and a bank that's moved. You don't throw out the pin because the ground changed and you don't pretend the ground didn't change to protect the pin. You hold both readings and you resolve them, and what you get is more true than either one on its own."

I have to press the heels of my hands against my eyes and let out a laugh. "You're comparing me to a benchmark." That is so him.

"I'm comparing us to a survey." He reaches across and takes my wrist, the same one, thumb over the faded mark the chain left. "Nadia. Five years ago I met someone at the worst point of my life and I lost her in the fog with everything else in that year, and I'm not angry about eleven days. I'm angry about five years, and there's nobody in this room to be angry at for those."

"You're allowed to need some time."

"I've had five years of time," he says. "I've had nothing but."

six

Creed

There's a version of me that would've let it stay tidy.

Accept the apology, keep the eight hours a day of field work, sign the certification on the twenty-sixth and drive down the mountain with a good memory and a bad ache and call it even. I've done that. Not with a woman, but I've done that with a job, a town, a friendship — taken the tidy version because it's cheaper and told myself I was being reasonable.

But, I go get the box out from under the bunk instead.

"What's that?"

I set it on the table and take the lid off. Field books, spine-labelled by year, and a green folder with a society crest on it that I haven't opened since the day it was handed to me. "I keep everything. Come here."

She comes around the table. Stands at my shoulder while I go through the programme — the awards list, the floor plan of the reception rooms, the poster abstracts stapled at the back — and I find her name in eight-point type and put my finger under it.

"Osei, N. Modelling functional connectivity in the absence of continuous cover." I read it twice. "You told me the title was terrible."

Her hand comes down on the back of the chair.

"The title was terrible," she insists.

"You said everybody maps presence because presence photographs well. Absence doesn't photograph. That's why nobody funds it." I explain. "You had a glass of white wine you weren't drinking. There was a man with a very loud tie who kept trying to get my attention over your shoulder and you clocked him and turned so I couldn't see him. You did that on purpose."

"You looked cornered."

"I was cornered. I'd been cornered for two hours." I turn around in the chair to look up at her. "And you laughed at something I said about the Fraser delta, and I thought about that laugh for about six months afterward, and I never told anyone that, including myself. That's what I've got. That's all of it, and it took me three days to get it back, and I want you to know it was in there. It didn't survive that year in good shape, but it was in there."