I Am Ready Now

Kath returned to the lookout alone.

She had not been there since the night before the escape. For weeks, the ridge had existed inside her as a place sealed by silence: shale, dry grass, the empty space where Alex’s reply had not come. Now autumn had changed it without permission. The grasses were pale. The air had cooled. The lake below held the sky with less glare.

She carried no violin.

Only the book.

Evangeline had suffered from weather, smoke, pockets, and heartbreak. Its cover curled. Pages had loosened. Margins held a record no public meeting could correct: Alex’s early pencil, Kath’s answering lines, crossed-out anger, the page that once said Bear with me a little longer.

Kath sat on the stone where the first note had waited.

Under the shale, someone had left a new envelope.

Her name was written on it.

Kath O’Kane.

Not Kate. Not Kathleen. Not a useful abbreviation.

She opened it.

Inside was one page in Alex’s handwriting.

I will be at the lower track until sunset. If you do not come down, I will go. If you come down and ask me to leave, I will go. If you want to speak here instead, leave the page under the stone and I will come when invited.

No apology. No argument. No poem dressed as pressure.

Kath looked toward the lower track.

Alex stood near the cottonwoods, far enough away to be a choice. She wore a dark coat and boots dusty from the climb. Her hands were in her pockets.

Kath waited to see what her body did.

It did not shrink.

It did not run.

It hurt, yes. Want had memory in it. So did disappointment. But beneath both was a steadier thing, a self that did not need to be purchased back with anyone else’s regret.

Kath folded the page and put it in the book.

Then she walked down.

Alex saw her coming and did not move to meet her halfway. By the time Kath reached the track, the sun had lowered behind the ridge and the lake had turned pewter.

“Hello,” Alex said.

“Hello.”

They stood with six feet between them and a season’s worth of unsaid things.

Alex’s eyes moved over Kath’s face, not checking for injury now but reading whether she was welcome to keep looking.

“I can leave first if that is easier,” Alex said.

“No.”

“All right.”

The restraint no longer felt pristine.

That helped.

Before, Alex’s restraint had seemed almost beautiful, a polished discipline Kath could admire and resent. Now Kath could see the work marks on it: places where Alex had chosen badly, chosen again, learned to stop before touching the nearest noble explanation. The woman in front of her was not safer because she had never failed. She was safer because she had stopped asking failure to look like virtue.

Kath still did not know whether that was enough.

She only knew she had come down the hill.

Kath crossed her arms. “Tell me what changed.”

Alex nodded as if she had expected the question and not presumed the answer.

“The independent trust is registered. Grace is chair for one year. Rowan is on the youth advisory group and has already made three adults regret learning the word representation. Mrs. Gallant is no longer on any committee related to the program. I resigned from the arts board, but the teaching work continues under the trust. I sent a public correction about the benefit and named my failure plainly. I apologized to Rowan with their parents present and then again privately when they requested it. I have not contacted you because Grace said she would personally staple my better intentions to a fence post if I confused repair with access.”

Kath laughed despite herself.

“That sounds like Grace.”

“She was more vivid.”

“I believe it.”

Alex looked down at her hands. “I am seeing a counsellor in Kelowna. For the institution problem. For the family problem underneath the institution problem. For the part of me that thinks being careful is the same as being good.”

Kath had not expected that. “Good.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want praise for it?”

“No.”

“Good.”

This time Alex almost smiled.

Kath looked toward the ridge. “I hated you for a while.”

Alex’s face tightened, but she kept still. “I know.”

“No, you don’t. Let me say it.”

“All right.”

“I hated that you made me want safety and then treated safety like a reputational calculation. I hated that you were almost brave. I hated that part of me still looked for you at the edge of every room.”

Alex’s eyes shone.

“I hated that too,” Kath said, softer.

“I am sorry.”

“I know.”

“I missed you,” Alex said.

Kath closed her eyes briefly.

There it was. Plain want. No policy wrapper. No procedural shield.

“I know,” Kath said again, but this time the words broke differently.

“I missed the notes before I let them become evidence of my own goodness. I missed hearing you tune before you played. I missed being corrected. I missed the person I was when I was brave enough to answer you without asking a board whether longing was allowed.”

“Careful,” Kath said.

Alex nodded. “Yes. But not hidden.”

That distinction entered Kath slowly.

Careful, not hidden.

She could live near that, perhaps. Test its walls. Open a window.

Wind moved through the cottonwoods, dry leaves rattling like paper.

Kath opened Evangeline to the first exchange. Some people are too fond of being paid in loyalty. That is a line worth keeping.

“I kept the line,” Kath said.

Alex looked at the page. “So did I.”

“I am not moving fast because you did public penance.”

“I know.”

“I am not a reward for correct politics.”

“No.”

“I am not ready to be looked at by the whole valley as Alex Simpson’s redemption arc.”

Alex flinched at that, rightly. “Never.”

“Say more than never.”

Alex took a breath. “If we become anything visible, it cannot be proof that I am forgiven. It cannot be used by the trust, the board, Grace, anyone, as evidence that the harm is repaired. I will not put you in a newsletter. I will not let people call us healing. I will correct them if they try.”

“People like a tidy ending.”

“People can read worse books.”

Kath looked at her, startled into laughter.

Alex’s face softened. “I want to be seen with you because I love the idea of ordinary visibility. Groceries. Concerts. You telling me my tempo is wrong in public. But I do not want the valley to make a symbol out of what I should have protected as a person.”

Love had not been said. Not exactly. The sentence had come close enough to warm the air around it.

Kath let it pass without catching it.

Not yet.

“But I am tired of letting Colin decide what wanting costs.”

Alex looked at her then, hope carefully leashed.

Kath stepped closer. One step. Then another. The distance between them became ordinary. Breath, warmth, the faint scent of tea and cedar on Alex’s coat.

“Ask me,” Kath said.

Alex understood. Her voice went low.

“May I kiss you?”

Kath closed her eyes.

The first yes rose too fast, all hunger and old loneliness. It came from the girl in the attic room, from the woman on the ridge waiting for an answer, from every night her body had wanted before her life was safe enough to admit it. She let that yes pass because it was real but not sufficient. She waited for the quieter one, the one that belonged to the self she had built in the aftermath.

“Yes.”

Alex touched her as if touch were a language she had been trusted to relearn. One hand at Kath’s jaw, warm from her coat pocket, thumb still at first and then not still when Kath leaned into it. The other hovered until Kath took it and placed it at her waist.

The contact went through both of them. Kath felt Alex’s breath catch before their mouths met, felt the tremor in her fingers, the careful pressure of a hand trying not to claim what it had been invited to hold. That care should have cooled the moment. It did not. It made the wanting sharper because it left Kath room to move inside it.

The kiss was not a cure.

It was better than that.

It was present: Alex’s mouth careful, then less careful when Kath answered; Kath’s hands in Alex’s coat; the rasp of wool under her knuckles; the cold air entering wherever their bodies did not meet. Kath had forgotten, or had chosen not to remember, how much of a kiss happened outside the mouth. The angle of a shoulder. The small sound Alex made when Kath pulled her closer. The way Kath’s own body leaned before pride could instruct it not to. Cottonwoods rattled above them. The lake below held the last light. No audience. No rescue. No debt.

Kath broke the kiss first because she needed to know she could.

Alex let her.

That, more than the kiss itself, nearly undid her. The space returned at once, cold against Kath’s lips, but it was not punishment. It was simply there, available. Kath breathed into it and found she could still feel Alex’s hand at her waist, waiting for instruction without going slack with fear.

“Again,” Kath said, surprising herself.

Alex’s eyes darkened. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

The second kiss had less ceremony. Kath stepped into it, not taken in, not gathered, but arriving. Alex’s hand tightened only after Kath’s did. Their mouths found a rhythm and lost it and found a better one. For a few seconds the whole valley narrowed to breath, wool, cedar, cold leaves, and the sudden impossible fact of wanting without owing.

When they parted, Alex rested her forehead near Kath’s, not quite touching until Kath leaned in.

“I am ready now,” Kath said.

Alex went still.

Kath opened her eyes. “Not for everything. Not for promises neither of us can keep. But for this. For seeing what we become when neither of us is hiding behind stone.”

Alex’s breath shook. “I am ready to earn slowly.”

“Good answer.”

“Grace has been coaching me.”

“I assumed.”

They laughed, and the laugh warmed the space between them.

Kath took Alex’s hand.

The first handhold after forgiveness-not-yet was awkward.

Their fingers found each other, then overcorrected. Alex’s hand was colder than Kath expected. Kath’s thumb brushed the inside of Alex’s wrist and felt her pulse jump. Want moved between them, immediate and old, but now it had to pass through everything they had learned: ask, wait, answer, mean it.

Kath did not let go.

“I am afraid,” Alex said.

“Of me?”

“Of hurting you again.”

“You might.”

Alex’s face tightened.

“I might hurt you too,” Kath said. “That is the unpleasant thing about not being a symbol. People are involved.”

“That sounds like something Grace would embroider on a pillow to make guests uncomfortable.”

“I would buy it.”

Alex laughed, and the pulse under Kath’s thumb steadied.

“We go slowly,” Kath said.

“Yes.”

“Not secretly.”

“No.”

“Privately when we choose private. Publicly when we choose public. Not because fear picked for us.”

Alex turned her hand, palm to palm. “Yes.”

That yes did not fix the past. It did lay one board across the gap.

They walked back up to the lookout together. At the stone, Kath placed the old copy of Evangeline beneath the shale, not as a message but as a marker.

Before she set it down, she opened to the loose page near the back.

There, among smoke stains and softened creases, was the question she had written weeks earlier:

Do you ever write something and wish it had not introduced you to yourself?

Under it, in Alex’s newer hand, added sometime after the archive, after the meeting, after the silence had been forced to account for itself:

Yes. Then I try to deserve the introduction.

Kath touched the words.

“When did you write this?”

“The day after the community hall. I did not know if you would ever want the book back. But I wanted the answer to exist somewhere other than my head.”

“That is dangerously close to a poem.”

“I accept the charge.”

Kath left the page open when she placed the book under the shale.

“Leaving it?” Alex asked.

“Retiring it.”

“With honours?”

“With weather.”

Alex smiled.

Kath looked over the valley. Jackson Orchard was only a darker patch among darkening rows. Broadacres lay beyond, lights coming on in windows that had begun to feel less like refuge and more like chosen return.

Alex stood beside her, not behind, not ahead.

Kath reached for her hand again.

This time, there was no hidden note needed to explain the touch.

They did not go back to Broadacres together immediately.

That would have made the scene too simple, and both of them had developed a reasonable suspicion of simplicity. Instead they sat on the ridge until the cold came up through the stone and ordinary discomfort began to do what drama could not: make them practical.

“Food,” Kath said at last.

“I have a granola bar.”

“Of course you do.”

Alex took one from her coat pocket and broke it in half. It had gone slightly stale.

“Romantic,” Kath said.

“I can improve.”

“Slowly.”

They ate in silence, shoulder to shoulder but not leaning. Below, the valley lights came on. Jackson Orchard was dark except for the farm shop and the kitchen. Broadacres glowed wider and warmer, but Kath made herself look at both.

“I may still be angry tomorrow,” she said.

“I expect so.”

“You may still be ashamed.”

“I expect so.”

“We are not going to make every feeling into a referendum.”

Alex considered that. “Can we make some into agenda items?”

Kath laughed with her mouth full of granola, which ruined the severity of the moment and improved it beyond measure.

“Some,” she said. “With strict time limits.”

Alex folded the empty wrapper into a square and put it back in her pocket.

“I should tell you something unromantic,” she said.

“Your strongest category.”

“Grace asked whether I wanted to come to dinner tonight if you did.”

Kath turned. “Grace arranged this?”

“Grace creates conditions and then acts offended when people call it arranging.”

“True.”

“I said I would not come unless you asked me directly.”

Kath watched the dark valley. It would have been easy to be annoyed. Easier still to be touched and call that annoyance. Grace had made a room possible, Alex had refused to step into it without permission, and Kath stood between those facts with cold fingers and a mouth that still remembered being kissed.

“Do you want to come to dinner?” she asked.

Alex’s answer did not rush. “Yes.”

“Do you want to come because you want to see me, or because Grace will interrogate you less efficiently if food is present?”

“Both, but mostly you.”

“Acceptable.”

Alex smiled. “Do you want me to sit beside you?”

Kath thought of white tents, public hands, rooms where adjacency had been used to imply ownership or scandal depending on who needed which story. She thought of Rowan watching adults with flinching hope. She thought of Jean learning not to smooth, Lizbeth learning not to perform certainty, Grace learning that keeping was not the same as repair.

“Across from me,” Kath said. “Tonight. I want to look up and decide when to look.”

Alex nodded. “Across.”

“And if Grace smirks?”

“Grace will smirk.”

“Then we ignore her.”

“Bold strategy.”

Kath squeezed her hand once. “I am practicing.”

They made it halfway down before Alex stopped.

“What?” Kath asked.

Alex looked embarrassed, which was becoming one of Kath’s favourite expressions because it had no polish in it. “I am about to ask a practical question.”

“I have been warned about your kind.”

“Do you want me to tell Grace we kissed?”

Kath stared, then laughed so hard she had to put one hand on a fence post.

Alex waited with admirable dignity.

“You think Grace does not know?” Kath asked.

“Grace knowing and me announcing are different categories.”

“Are they?”

“Yes. One is surveillance. The other is consent with witnesses and stew.”

Kath wiped her eyes. “That may be the least romantic sentence anyone has ever said to me.”

“Top five, surely.”

They walked a few more steps. The question stayed with them, no longer funny. At the lower bend, Broadacres came into view through the trees: kitchen lit, smoke lifting from the chimney, Orville barking once at something unworthy. A place that had offered shelter and would, if allowed, become another set of expectations. People who loved could still lean too hard. Houses could become stories. Stories could become rooms with locks.

“No announcement,” Kath said.

Alex nodded.

“No hiding either.”

“All right.”

“If Grace asks, I will answer.”

“What if she asks me?”

“Then you may suffer.”

Alex accepted this solemnly. “Deserved.”

At the kitchen door, Kath paused with her hand on the latch.

Inside, voices moved: Jean saying something about potatoes, Lizbeth laughing and then complaining that laughing made the baby press on her bladder, Grace telling someone that bodily complaints did not improve with commentary and then immediately commenting on the stew. The ordinary noise of Broadacres pressed against the door.

Kath had spent so long wanting a room that did not demand performance. Now she had to learn how to enter one without performing recovery.

“I might leave early,” she said.

“I can drive you.”

Kath looked at her.

Alex corrected herself. “I can offer to drive you. You can also walk, ask Grace, steal Orville, or sit in the pantry until everyone becomes less visible.”

“Better.”

“I am improving under duress.”

“Under supervision.”

“That too.”

Kath opened the door.

Grace looked up from the stove immediately, took in their joined hands, and did not smirk.

That was worse.

Jean saw next and smiled into the potatoes as if happiness were a private seasoning. Lizbeth looked between them, lifted one brow, and said, “Finally,” with the exhausted authority of a pregnant woman who had been waiting for adults to become efficient.

Alex released Kath’s hand at once.

Kath caught it again.

Not for the room. Not to prove anything. Because Alex had let go too quickly and Kath wanted to decide whether that was necessary.

Grace stirred the stew. “Dinner in ten.”

“Across,” Kath said quietly to Alex.

Alex remembered. She took the chair across the table, not beside.

The distance was visible and chosen. Kath liked it. She liked Alex across from her, nervous and trying not to watch too much. She liked looking up when she wanted and looking down when she did not. She liked Jean passing bread without comment, Lizbeth stealing the heel of the loaf, Grace refusing to mention anything important until everyone had eaten because Grace, for all her theatrical cruelty, understood timing better than most priests.

Halfway through dinner, Orville put his head in Kath’s lap. Kath fed him a piece of potato. Grace saw and said, “Treachery.”

“He asked directly,” Kath said.

Alex laughed first.

Kath looked up.

Across the table, Alex’s face was open in the lamplight. Not safe because nothing could go wrong. Safe because if something went wrong, Kath could name it before it became a law of the room.

After dinner, Grace did ask.

She found Kath at the sink, where Kath had gone with plates despite being told twice not to be useful.

“So,” Grace said.

“No.”

“I had not yet formed a question.”

“You were assembling one.”

“Efficiently.”

Kath handed her a wet plate. “Yes. We kissed. No, it does not solve anything. No, you may not become unbearable about it.”

Grace took the plate. “I am always unbearable. The subject matter merely changes.”

“Grace.”

The older woman sobered. “Does it feel like yours?”

Kath looked toward the table. Alex was listening to Lizbeth explain why every baby-name suggestion Bobbi had made sounded like either a minor hockey coach or a goat. Jean was laughing with one hand over her mouth, then lowering it as if practicing being seen.

Kath turned back to the sink.

“Yes,” she said. “Tonight it does.”

Grace nodded. “Then tonight is enough.”

In the other room, Alex laughed at something Lizbeth said.

Kath rinsed the plate and stayed.