The Distance I Chose

I woke before the bakery did, with the map still open on the table downstairs.

The red tower was only a pencil mark. I could cover it with my thumb. That didn’t make it smaller in my head.

Clara was already up when I came down. She had a kettle on and a tray of rolls cooling by the window. She asked if I wanted tea. I said yes, then watched her set the cup beside me without reaching across the map.

“I keep thinking I should know,” I said.

“Know what?”

“If I want Miller to go closer.” I rubbed the edge of the paper with my thumbnail. “I want to know who’s there. I don’t want him near them.”

Clara poured the tea. “Those can both be true.”

I watched the steam curl against the pale window. Outside, rain tapped the glass, light and steady. “If I say no, then we don’t find out.”

“If you say yes, you can still say how far.”

That sounded simple when she said it. It wasn’t simple when I tried to imagine the road running down from the rise, the fence getting bigger, the tower no longer hidden by trees.

Miller came in after the first customer had left. He shook rain from his coat in the entry and hung it up instead of bringing it to the table. The mill driver was outside, waiting with the map board.

“Have you decided?” Miller asked.

I looked at his hands. He kept them at his sides.

“I think so,” I said. “I want you to take the old road closer. Just far enough to see the tower from the road. Don’t go up to the fence. Don’t call out or knock. If you see anyone, come back.”

Miller nodded, slow and serious. “We can do that.”

“And if the road doesn’t feel safe, you turn around. You don’t have to finish because I asked.”

“I know.”

He didn’t say it like a promise made to calm me down. He said it as if the instruction belonged to him now, too.

I looked at the map again. “You’ll come back and tell me before you decide anything else?”

“Yes.”

The mill driver came in to look at the route. He was a broad-shouldered otter with a patched green coat, and he set the board down gently, careful not to knock the tea. “We’ll stay on the road,” he said. “No wandering through the brush.”

“I’d like that.”

Miller glanced at the little mark on the rise. “We’ll take the same route as before. The creek crossing held when we tested it. If the water’s up, we don’t cross.”