Ella skipped school on Monday and spent the day in her room. Tali started to drive her to school after that, but the drives were agonizing. Every attempt Tali made at conversation was met with one-word answers and barely concealed contempt. Apparently, the child wasn’t one to let go of a grudge easily because even though Tali had rescinded the decision to try to take her away to LA, the fact that she’d even considered it and that Hudson had to intervene on her behalf meant Tali was basically human scum now.

It hurt.

Not so much that Ella hated her, exactly, because she honestly barely knew the kid. It was more about Matty and how he’d feel about everything if he could see them. She wondered if he’d regret his decision to name her guardian at all, or feel as disgusted as Ella and Hudson did that she’d even considered taking his daughter away from her entire support system.

The thought of letting him down was painful, and she was determined to make things right with Ella now that the decision to stay was made. She had to figure out a way to get through to her, to make her presence here not just a thing she was doing out of a sense of obligation, but because she could... make the kid’s life better, somehow. Otherwise, what was the point?

She was just at a loss as to how to accomplish it when Ella seemed resolved to turn her nose up at any olive branches Tali offered. The chill between them was as bad as the one in the Arctic air around them, and Tali felt utterly clueless as to how to go about melting it.

It sucked.

A week passed, and Tali managed to get a job at a local diner/tavern called the Foxhole, which was run by an overly friendly woman named Mabel. Tali couldn’t be more grateful for the work. Being in Matt’s house surrounded by pictures of his smiling face, his arm around an equally smiley daughter, was torture, especially when she hadn’t seen Ella smile once since she’d arrived.

Obviously, she couldn’t blame the kid. Tali had never even stepped foot in the home while Matt was still alive, but she still felt his absence with a mighty ache.

She couldn’t imagine how awful it must be for Ella, who’d lived here with him every day of her life, who’d undoubtedly watched him make his specialty banana-berry pancakes over the stove, who’d probably endured his ridiculous comments as he put on painfully bad reality TV and then mocked it relentlessly. Their yard had a basketball hoop and a goal post. She wondered how often they played. There was a stack of board games taller than she was in the living room, and she knew how disgustingly competitive her brother could be. She wondered if he’d ever let Ella win, or if he was as cutthroat with her as he was with everyone else.

She wouldn’t be getting answers to any of those questions.

Not from Ella.

Every day when she got home from school, the kid went straight up to her room and slammed the door. Several nights, she’d gone over to the Callaways for dinner and gotten dropped back at Matt’s after nine.

Apparently Tali had met Mrs. Callaway at the wake, but she couldn’t call the woman’s face to mind. She’d now had several phone conversations with her though, when she called to ask if it was okay for Ella to stay for dinner. Tali had to struggle not to laugh bitterly at that.

What if she said it wasn’t? Ella would only hate her more than she already did. The sullen looks and monosyllabic answers were bad enough. She wanted to avoid outright fighting, if she could. The memory of their first night together still made her feel sick to her stomach.

Truth be told, she was glad to let her go. At least if she was going over there for dinner, she was eating.

Tali had cooked something every night, but Ella had refused to eat with her. She’d taken to leaving trays of food outside her room. Sometimes they were taken, sometimes they weren’t. It made her lie awake at night, wondering what Matt would think of her letting his kid starve herself.

But what was she supposed to do? Bust in on her and force food down her throat?

She’d never felt more isolated or more alone.

And so Mabel and her gracious job offer was turning out to be a true blessing.

Tali was quite certain she would lose her goddamn mind if she had to sit in Matt’s place all day waiting to hear whether or not Ella was coming home right away or not, then making a dinner to place outside a locked bedroom. She already spent several hours a day wondering what the point of staying was, why she hadn’t just taken Hudson up on his offer to take Ella off her hands, or contacted these Callaways about it.

Working at the Foxhole was keeping her tethered to the real world, even if Newcomb, Alaska was as far from the real world as it could possibly get.

She was too ashamed of how badly she was botching things with Ella to confide in Mabel about it, but otherwise, she was a wonderful person to talk to and helped distract her from her own dark thoughts, her regrets about how little time she’d made for Matty and how thoroughly she was failing at looking out for the light of his life.

Mabel was in her fifties, and the harsh climate had weathered her kind face some, but she was lively and warm and full of sass. She crackled with youthful energy and she made Tali laugh, which is not something she’d thought herself capable of doing so soon after losing Matty. But hearing Mabel rant about the customers, her husband, and her grown children and a million little things had been making Tali smile enough that doing so no longer felt like a strain.

They worked well together, from the first day and every day since. Tali arrived at the Foxhole every morning after dropping Ella off at school to find Mabel already zooming around the place in her floral apron, bantering with the regulars.

There were five or six bushy-bearded men who were guaranteed to be there for breakfast every morning, and Tali was still in the process of figuring out who they all were. It was kind of hard to pick out facial features within all the grizzled beardiness.

But Mabel knew them well, and listening in to their conversations gave Tali plenty of insight into the bizarre world that was now her home.

One of her favorite things to do back in LA was to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and she did plenty of that here. The topics could not possibly be more different than those that went on in LA.

It was different, but Tali had traveled quite a bit after finishing culinary school, working her way through jobs across Europe. She liked different, and she didn’t want to give in to misery while she was stuck here. So every day she put in a little more effort.

She pushed herself to talk to the customers, ask them about their lives, about their families and their jobs, about the wildlife and the wilderness around them. It was definitely a change from LA where no one looked up from their phones long enough to notice anything around them, where if you smiled at a stranger they’d think you were an escaped mental patient and speed-walk away from you.

And they were all so curious about her too. It was sometimes a struggle to cut off conversations so she could get her work done, as they grilled her about all the details of life in LA. Most of them had never been south of Anchorage, so it was an effort to field all their questions. She’d been forced to repeat her Josh Groban story at least six times.

She was getting to cook some, too, for people that actually wanted to eat it. Ella never said a word about her cooking, but the other residents of Newcomb were generous with their compliments, and it made her feel good.

Mabel had let her start doing all those pastries she didn’t have the time for. Baked goods had never been Tali’s specialty and she’d mostly been doing entrees and dinner fare for the past few years, but apparently those skills she’d picked up in culinary school were good enough for the people of Newcomb.

Mabel could not stop singing her praises and pushing her goods on the customers, who seemed to love them too. It was nice, getting that direct contact with people who’d tried her food. In LA most of the face-time she got from customers was with those who wanted to complain about something. Anything pleasant she heard about her own cooking was usually through an online review posted by a faceless stranger. Sometimes it came from a frazzled assistant to some movie star who’d internet-stalked her and called her up to ask if she’d consider being the private chef for their terrifying boss, or even from the owner of a competing restaurant who wanted to steal her away from Caroline.

It was a rather nice change to have average people paying her genuine compliments.

All in all, things were going well.

That is until her least-favorite person in Newcomb, and perhaps the world, decided to drop in.