Page 4

I was forty feet away in the pines with frost in my beard, and I wanted to be the reason for that face so badly I could taste it in the back of my throat, like iron.

I have flowers drying in my workroom. I cut them in September because October always needs something beautiful on a sill.

I'll put them on hers.

3

Sloane

"Eli," Edna explains. "Grows every herb in this valley. Half the lodges between here and Jasper buy their teas off him."

"He has a key to my cabin."

"He has a key to all the cabins, sweetheart." She rings up my coffee and the loaf of bread I'm pretending I came in for. "Changes the washers. Clears the flues. Stocks the wood."

"He was inside while I was asleep. Twice."

Edna stops with her finger on the till.

"Did he touch you?" she asks.

"No."

"Did he take anything?"

"My wine," I say, and her mouth twitches.

"Well." She hands me my change with a shrug. "I can ask him for the key back."

I stand at her counter with a loaf of bread under my arm and my heart going, and I don't say yes. I don't say anything. Edna watches me not say it, and nods slowly, the way I nod when a patient finally tells me the real reason they came in.

"Five years," she says. "He's never once used one of those keys for anything but a washer." She picks up her crossword. "I'd think about why he's using it now."

When I get back to the cabin, there are flowers on the windowsill.

Inside. On the sill above the sink, where the afternoon light comes in. A bundle of dried October flowers, rust and gold and a deep burnt orange, tied with the same twine as the tea. I was gone an hour. The door was locked.

I stand at the sink looking at them for a long time, and the thing I feel isn't fear, or not only fear. It's the feeling of being known. Somebody watched me stand at that window on my first morning with my coffee going cold, staring out at his dying garden for longer than I've stared at anything beautiful in years, and he understood what he was seeing, and he brought me more of it.

I've spent fourteen years reading people who can't tell me what they need. Nobody has ever read me back.

At dusk I go looking for him.

I don't mean to. I tell myself I'm walking to clear my head, and then I'm on a path behind the cabin I've never taken, following a smell I've been catching on the wind for three days — turned earth and thyme and something green and bitter — and the trees open out and there's his garden. Long curved beds running down the hill in the blue light. A greenhouse at the top of it, glowing faintly. And beyond it, dug half into the slope, a low house with herbs hanging in the windows and a lamp lit inside.

He's in there. I can see him through the glass, a big dark shape moving between a stove and a table, and I stand at the edge of his garden in the cold the way he's stood at the edge of mine, and I watch him.

He's cooking. Stirring something, tasting it off a wooden spoon, adding a pinch of something from a jar. He moves slowly and precisely, as though everything in that kitchen might break. He's humming. I can't hear it, but I can see his chest move with it.

Then he stops.

He sets the spoon down, and turns, and looks out through his window straight at the place where I'm standing in the dark, as though he's known I was there the whole time.

I run all the way home. I don't stop until the Maple cabin door is shut behind me, and I lean on it, panting, laughing a little, wild, with my face burning and my whole body lit up.

That night I don't lock the door.

I leave it on the latch, and I lie down on my stomach at the very edge of the loft with the quilt around my shoulders and my chin on my folded arms, where I can see over the edge to the room below. The stove glows orange. The rest is dark. I wait.