8. Kevin
— ? —
Kevin
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Stephanie is in your arms. DON’T FUCKING PANIC.
I was panicking.
I’d dreamed about this for years. Seeing her again.
Holding her. Just saying hi, just asking how she’d been, casual, easy, two grown people who’d survived a war.
I’d walked through it in therapy a hundred times, blocked it out beat by beat.
What I’d say. How I’d hold my shoulders.
The calm, adult conversation we’d have about closure and moving on.
None of those rehearsals had featured a grass fire, or her sitting in the dirt with her feet blistering and her dress smudged with soot, laughing at me with tears in her eyes because the whole thing was too absurd to do anything else with.
I’d built the version of tonight where I was composed.
The universe had handed me the version where I ran across a lawn beating out flames with my own jacket, and then picked up the woman who divorced me and hadn’t stopped to ask if that was allowed.
She was lighter than I remembered. Or maybe I was stronger. Three years of trying to sweat the guilt out of my body in a gym at four in the morning had put muscle on me that our marriage never had.
She was stiff against me too. Holding herself in tight and careful, keeping as little of her body in contact with mine as physics would allow.
Fair. That was fair. I’d earned every inch of that distance and then some.
I got the cabin door open with my shoulder and carried her inside.
The place smelled of cedar and clean linen.
The bathroom off the bedroom was small but spotless, and I lowered her onto the closed lid of the toilet as gently as I knew how, which, given what my hands do for a living, is fairly gently.
“Thanks,” she said, staring at the towel rack instead of at me.
“Let me see the burns.”
I knelt on the cold tile and took her foot into my hands. The skin was red and furious, blistering in the spots where the melted rubber had welded itself to her. Not as bad as I’d feared out on the lawn. Bad enough.
I flipped open the medical kit and started laying out supplies on a hand towel. Antiseptic and gauze, burn cream and tape. My hands knew the choreography even while the rest of me had short-circuited. Muscle memory has saved me in worse rooms than this.
There it was, the whole sick joke of my life folded into one bathroom.
I could stabilize a stranger bleeding out on an operating table at three in the morning and stay calm enough to crack a joke with the nurses.
I’d built a whole career on being the man who showed up when a body was failing.
And the one night the only body that mattered had failed, I’d been fifteen minutes away at a dinner with the ringer on my phone flicked to silent, telling myself the call could wait, telling myself she could wait, because she always had.
I got to kneel here now and fix her feet.
That was the size of what I was allowed to fix.
Stephanie hissed when the antiseptic touched raw skin.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
Then nothing. Heavy, freighted silence, the kind that holds three years of everything neither person is willing to be the first to say.
I kept my eyes on her feet and worked. Cleaned the burns, smoothed on the cream, wound the gauze in careful overlapping passes.
She had the same feet she’d always had. Narrow, high in the arch.
There was a pale scar on her left ankle from a bike she’d wrecked at twelve, back before I ever knew her, and I’d kissed that scar a thousand times in a bed on the other side of this island.
My thumb wanted to find it now. I didn’t let it.
Except my thumb did find it. I felt the ridge of old scar tissue under the pad of it before I’d decided anything, a slow deliberate pass along her ankle bone that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the three years I’d spent not touching her.
I shouldn’t have done it. I knew it the second it happened. I did it anyway.
She went still.
The stillness of a whole body stopping its breath to feel one small point of contact, nothing to do with pain.
Her toes, which had been curling against the sting of the antiseptic, went slack.
Her breath, which I could hear over the dripping tap, snagged once, high in her chest, and didn’t come back out for a long second.
I looked up before I could stop myself.
She was already looking at me. And for one suspended beat neither of us pretended it was about her feet.
Her lips had parted. The pulse in her throat had picked up, quick and visible, and her eyes had gone dark and enormous in the low bathroom light, and every clinical thing I’d been hiding behind since I picked her up off that lawn burned clean off me at once.
My hand was still curved around her heel.
Two inches would have put it on her calf.
I could have watched what her face did if I set my mouth to the arch of her foot the way I used to.
The wanting came up so hard and so fast it whited out the room.
I put her foot down.
Gently, on the towel, as if it could break, and I sat back on my heels and dragged in a breath that shook on the way down. My hands weren’t steady. I laced them together to make them stop and hoped to God she hadn’t seen.
“Sorry,” I said, rough. “Tape pulled. Did that hurt?”
“No,” she said. Barely a word at all. Then, steadier, reaching for the same lie I was reaching for: “No. It’s fine.”
We both knew it hadn’t pulled. We both let it stand, because the alternative was naming the thing sitting in the room with us, and neither of us was drunk enough or brave enough to do that yet.
Being this close to her was its own kind of surgery, and I was the patient.
Every detail I’d trained myself to stop reaching for was suddenly right in front of me.
The freckle below her knee. The way she curled her toes against pain instead of pulling away, too proud to flinch twice for the same man.
Her breathing, quick and shallow and working hard to seem even.
I’d spent three years learning to live in a body that missed her constantly and had gotten decent at ignoring the ache.
Ten minutes on this tile floor had undone all of it.
“So,” she said at last. “Are you staying the weekend?”
“That was the plan, yes.” I anchored another layer of gauze. “But if you want me to leave, I can find somewhere else. A hotel on the other side of the island.”
“Oh, if it’s for me, don’t worry.” Her voice had gone deliberately light, and I knew that exact register, the one she used when she was working hard to sound like she didn’t care. “We’re adults. We can behave around each other, can’t we?”
I looked up at her. She’d fixed her gaze on the wall, jaw locked tight enough to ache.
“Yes,” I got out. “Of course. I’ll do whatever works best for you. I don’t want to make this uncomfortable.”
“Of course.” She nodded fast, too fast. “I’m ok with this. It’s your mom’s birthday. You should be here with her. I’m happy you came.”
The words went into me clean, right between the ribs.
You should be here. With her.
Be here with her the way you never were with me. Her face gave nothing away, but the subtext screamed it. Present, for once, instead of sending your pregnant wife to voicemail while she bled alone on a staircase and said your name into a machine.
I swallowed it down and bent back to her feet. My hands still hadn’t steadied.
“I’m sorry,” I started. “I know that doesn’t mean anything. But I’m-”
The cabin door banged open against the wall.
“Is he fucking in here?”
Hugo. Furious, the word ripping out of him. And right behind it, Harry’s flat, exhausted drawl.
“Oh my god, calm DOWN.”
Stephanie’s eyes went wide. “Shit.”
She tried to stand. Pain crossed her face and her ankle folded, and she pitched sideways. I came up off my knees and caught her by the waist on pure reflex, steadying her before she could go down onto the tile.
That’s how Hugo and Harry found us.
Me half-risen, hands at her waist. Stephanie caught against my chest. Our faces a hand’s width apart.
Hugo looked like he wanted to put me through the wall, which was fair. The last time the two of us had stood in a room together, he’d broken my nose and cursed me out in five different languages while his father dragged him off me.
I’d deserved all five languages. Hugo had been my best friend since we were eighteen, the reason I’d met Steph at all, the guy who’d stood up at my wedding and toasted me as the brother he got to choose. I’d cost myself that too. You don’t get to keep the brother when you break the sister.
“Get your hands off my little SISTER,” Hugo growled.
Stephanie stepped toward him and winced hard the second her weight hit the burns.
“I burned my feet, dumbass. Because SOMEONE ditched me with a freaking tiki torch to go PEE.” She crossed the tiny bathroom and slapped him flat across the chest. “Kevin just bandaged my feet and helped with the fire. Don’t be dramatic. ”
Harry shoved past her brother into the cabin.
“Oh my god, Steph, are you alright?” She dropped into a crouch and turned Stephanie’s bandaged feet toward the light.
Then she stopped, staring at the ruined sandals beside them.
“Wow, I didn’t know you still had these shoes.
You were supposed to get rid of these last year! ”
I went very still.
Last year. Harry had seen those shoes last year.
I looked between the two of them. My sister and my ex-wife, crouched together on a bathroom floor with the loose, unthinking ease of people who did this all the time. A whole shared history I’d never known existed.
“You kept in touch?” My voice came out hollowed and thin.
Harry looked up at me. Guilt moved across her face and settled. “Hello, brother.”
“Harriet.”