Page 11 of Lost With My Enemy

"That tree shouldn't be growing there," I say.

"No."

"It has no business surviving in solid rock."

"And yet." He pulls the camera back, looks at the screen himself. "Sometimes things grow where they're not supposed to."

My chest tightens. The gas station coffee defense is starting to feel thin.

Back in the truck, the silence changes texture. Not uncomfortable, but aware. I'm conscious of the space between my knee and the gearshift, the angle of his forearm on the armrest, the way the dream catcher turns slowly in the breeze from the open window.

"Tell me about the dream catcher," I say, because it's been three days and I've been wanting to ask since the parking lot.

His thumb taps the steering wheel once. "My mom made it."

"You said that. The first day."

"Yeah." A pause, longer than any silence he's offered so far. Jaxon fills spaces. He fills silences, fills pauses, fills the cab with humming and commentary about the landscape. This quiet is different. "She died two years ago. Pancreatic cancer. Fast, once they found it. Four months from diagnosis."

My hand moves to the gearshift console without permission from my brain. Not touching him. Just closer.

"Four months is cruel."

"It is." His jaw works for a second. "She was Cree. My dad's white. Grew up outside Cochrane. She made dream catchers, beadwork, moccasins. Taught classes at the community centre on weekends. Spent her whole life making sure Kenzie and I understood both sides of where we came from."

"Kenzie?"

"My sister. She's twenty-seven. Lives in Edmonton. Works in Indigenous education policy. She's the one who actually does useful things with her life." A small smile, complicated. "Mom would've loved that."

The highway unfolds through granite and pine. A lake appears on the left, glass-still.

"My parents divorced when I was twelve," I say, and the words come out before I've decided to offer them. "My dad moved to Vancouver. My mom stayed in Toronto. They fought over everything. The house, the cars, the furniture. They fought over a salad bowl."

"A salad bowl?"

"Ceramic. Hand-painted. They bought it on their honeymoon in Portugal. My mom said it was hers because she packed it. My dad said it was his because he'd picked it out. They spent eleven thousand dollars in legal fees arguing over a forty-dollar salad bowl."

Jaxon's eyebrows lift.

"Eleven thousand dollars."

"The salad bowl became the thing they were actually fighting about, which wasn't the salad bowl at all, obviously. But nobody could say what it was really about, so they just kept fighting about the bowl."

"Who got it?"

"Neither. It broke during the move. My mom dropped it carrying boxes out of the house. It shattered on the front steps. She stood there looking at the pieces for about ten minutes. Then she swept them up, put them in the recycling, and drove to her new apartment." My throat tightens, unexpected and unwelcome. "She never mentioned it again."

The cab is quiet. Not Jaxon's usual comfortable quiet, and not my controlled quiet either. A raw quiet, stripped of pretence.

"That's why you plan everything," he says. Not a question.

"If I control the details, nothing breaks."

"Things still break, Elise."

"Fewer things."

He nods slowly, eyes on the road. "Fair."