Chapter 5
Chapter Five
By midafternoon, the air had turned silk-smooth, warm on Tessa's shoulders with just enough breeze coming off the water to lift the hair at her nape.
Brian had gone to the shop to help Hank and Colby with something mechanical she didn't pretend to understand.
He'd offered to drop her in town on his way, but she'd declined, wanting the walk.
Wanting to feel the path under her feet and the sun on her face and the simple pleasure of going somewhere without a destination in mind.
The trail from White Gull Lane wound through the pines, dappled light falling through the needles in bright coins.
She took her time, pausing to watch a squirrel scold her from a branch, to breathe in the scent of warm earth and resin.
When the path opened onto Main Street, Copper Moon spread before her like a postcard come to life.
The craft fair was in full swing: white tents lining the green in neat rows.
A guitarist tuned up under the gazebo, his fingers picking out fragments of melody that drifted on the breeze.
Children darted between booths with snow cones dripping from their hands, their laughter bright and uncomplicated.
The air was a braid of kettle corn, sunscreen, and the ever-present salt of the harbor.
Tessa wandered through the rows, letting herself be drawn from one display to the next.
Hand-thrown pottery in shades of blue and green.
Quilts with intricate stitching that must have taken months.
Jars of local honey with handwritten labels.
Everything here was made by someone's hands, crafted with care and intention.
It was so different from the sterile efficiency of the hospital, where everything was mass-produced and disposable.
She stopped at Harbor Bean, the coffee shop Brian had pointed out on their first trip into town, and ordered a cup of tea. The barista, a young woman with pink streaks in her hair and a nose ring, handed over the cup with a smile.
"First time at the fair?" she asked.
"That obvious?"
"You've got that look. Like you're actually seeing it instead of just passing through." The barista picked up a marker and drew something on the lid of Tessa's cup. When she handed it back, there was a small heart inked onto the cardboard. "Welcome to Copper Moon."
Tessa stared at the heart for a moment, her throat unexpectedly tight. It was such a small thing. Such a silly thing to get emotional about. But kindness had been in short supply in her life lately, and even the tiniest gesture felt like a gift.
"Thank you," she managed.
She carried her tea through the fair, sipping slowly, letting the warmth spread through her chest. At a jewelry booth near the end of a row, she stopped to examine a display of silver pendants. Each one held a tiny pressed flower or leaf, preserved in clear resin, frozen in time.
"Those are all local," the vendor said, a middle-aged woman with sun-weathered skin and kind eyes. "Wildflowers from the meadow behind my house. Ferns from the woods near the bay. Little pieces of Copper Moon you can carry with you."
Tessa picked up a pendant with a delicate fern frond pressed inside, its green preserved perfectly beneath the silver frame. Moments caught and saved for later. That was what she wanted. Little pieces of quiet she could hold onto when the noise came back.
"I'll take this one," she said.
She slipped the chain over her head and let the pendant settle at the hollow of her throat. The metal was cool against her skin, grounding.
As she turned away from the booth, movement caught at the edge of her vision. She glanced to her left, toward a rack of T-shirts two booths back.
A man stood there, studying the shirts with what appeared to be casual interest. Gray ball cap pulled low. Sunglasses despite the overcast sky. He wasn't looking at her. Not directly. But something about his posture made the hair on the back of her neck prickle.
She watched him for a moment, her pulse ticking up. He picked up a shirt, checked the size, and put it back. His head turned slightly, and for just a second, the dark lenses of his sunglasses seemed to skim past her face like the flare of a mirror catching light.
Then he moved on, drifting toward another booth, and the moment passed.
Tessa let out a breath. She was being paranoid.
A town full of people, a fair full of tourists, and she was reading threat into a stranger looking at T-shirts.
Seven years in trauma had rewired her brain to scan for danger, to read rooms for the one small thing that meant everything.
But out here, that instinct was a liability, not a skill.
She shook it off and headed toward the seawall.
The harbor stretched out before her, blue and glittering, boats bobbing gently at their moorings.
She found a spot along the stone wall and settled there, both hands wrapped around her cup of tea, watching the water.
A pair of teenagers practiced casting fishing lines without hooks, the loops of monofilament catching the light and falling again.
Gulls circled overhead, crying to each other in their harsh, lonely voices.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She pulled it out and looked at the screen. Unknown number. Chicago area code.
Her stomach clenched. She let it ring, watching the screen until the call went to voicemail. A moment later, it buzzed again. Same number.
She declined the call and slid the phone into her pocket, her heart beating harder than it should. It was probably nothing. A telemarketer. A wrong number. The hospital, maybe, though they had her email if they really needed to reach her.
But the old reflex was standing up inside her, the one that had kept her alert through countless night shifts, the one that whispered pay attention when something felt off.
She turned and scanned the crowd behind her. Families with strollers. Couples holding hands. A group of older women examining a display of hand-painted birdhouses. No gray ball cap. No sunglasses. Just a normal afternoon at a normal fair in a normal town.
She was imagining things.
"Thought I might find you down here."
She turned, her heart leaping into her throat, and found Brian standing a few feet away. He had a paper bag from Cooper's Hardware under one arm and an easy expression on his face that softened when he saw her.
The relief that washed through her was disproportionate to the moment. He was just a man she'd known for a few days. There was no reason his presence should make her feel safer.
But it did.
"I came for tea and a walk," she said, holding up her cup. "And because the air feels better down here."
"It does." He moved to stand beside her, looking out at the water. "Shop was slow this afternoon. Colby kicked me out, said I was hovering."
"Were you?"
"Probably." He glanced at her, and something in his expression shifted. "You okay? You look... tense."
She hesitated. The man at the T-shirt booth felt silly now, a product of her overactive imagination. But the phone calls still sat heavy in her pocket, unanswered and unexplained.
"I think someone was watching me," she said, the words coming out before she could second-guess them. "Up there, at the fair. Or I'm making things up. I honestly can't tell anymore."
Brian didn't dismiss it. Didn't tell her she was being paranoid. Instead, his posture shifted subtly, his gaze sweeping past her shoulder to scan the crowd the way a person scans traffic before crossing the street. Careful. Thorough. Not alarmed, but alert.
"Where?" he asked.
"By the T-shirt booth. Gray cap, sunglasses. He wasn't looking at me directly, but..." She shook her head. "I don't know. It felt wrong. And then I got two calls from an unknown Chicago number that I didn't answer."
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "You recognize the number?"
"No. Could be anything. Probably a telemarketer."
"Probably." But his eyes were still scanning, cataloguing faces in the crowd. "The guy at the booth. You see him now?"
She looked. A couple stood at the T-shirt rack now, laughing over something on one of the designs. No gray cap. No sunglasses. The man could be anywhere. Or nowhere. Just another face in a sea of summer tourists.
"I'm probably wrong," she said. "There are a lot of people here. I spent too many years reading rooms for threats. It's hard to turn off."
"Maybe." Brian's voice was even, but there was something underneath it. Something that said he was taking her seriously, even if he wasn't showing alarm. "Doesn't hurt to walk back together."
The relief she felt at that simple offer was almost embarrassing. "Okay."
They walked through the fair side by side, Brian's presence solid and warm beside her. She noticed the way he positioned himself between her and the crowd without making it obvious, the way his eyes kept moving even as he made easy conversation about the booths they passed.
At the bulletin board outside Ruth's bookstore, she paused. The turquoise flyer for the charity concert had been reprinted larger, taped over the smaller one she'd noticed before. Someone had written Bring a Blanket across the bottom in dark marker.
Come sit with us by the water.
She touched the corner of the paper with one finger, the same way she sometimes touched a patient's chart before entering a room. Grounding herself in the moment.
"Thinking about going?" Brian asked.
"I might." She let her hand drop. "If I'm still here."
"You'll be here. Three months, remember?"
She turned to face him, and the words came out before she could overthink them. "If I'm still here next weekend, would you go with me?"
The question surprised her as it left her mouth. She hadn't planned to ask. Hadn't even realized she wanted to until the words were already in the air between them.
But she didn't want to sit on the grass alone. And she didn't want to go with anyone else.
Brian's expression did that thing it sometimes did, the hard edges smoothing into something softer and more open. "Yeah," he said. "Bring a blanket."
She smiled, and for once, it stayed.
They walked back through the pines as the afternoon light turned golden, the shadows lengthening across the path. The sound of the fair faded behind them, replaced by birdsong and the rustle of wind through needles.
Brian asked her about the pendant, and she told him about the vendor, the wildflowers, and the idea of carrying little pieces of Copper Moon with her. He listened the way he always did, with his full attention, as if what she said mattered.
"My mom used to press flowers," he said. "When I was a kid. She had these big books full of them, all labeled with where she found them and when. I thought it was boring at the time. Now I wish I'd paid more attention."
"Does she still do it?"
"She passed away. Ten years ago." His voice was matter-of-fact, but she heard the weight beneath it. "Cancer. It was quick, at least. She didn't suffer long."
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. It was a long time ago." He stepped over a root that crossed the path and offered her his hand to help her do the same. His palm was warm and calloused, and he let go as soon as she was steady. "What about you? Parents still around?"
"My mom is. She lives in Ohio, where I grew up. We talk on the phone, but I haven't visited in..." She had to think about it, and the answer shamed her. "Two years. Maybe longer. There was always a reason not to go. A shift I couldn't miss. A surgery I couldn't hand off."
"And your dad?"
She touched the sleeve of her flannel, the one she still wore despite the warmth of the day.
"He died when I was twenty-two. Heart attack.
I was in my third year of med school. Sometimes I think that's why I pushed so hard to become a surgeon.
Like if I saved enough people, it would make up for not being able to save him. "
She hadn't meant to say that. Hadn't meant to open that particular door. But something about Brian made it easy to tell the truth, even the truths she usually kept locked away.
He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was gentle. "That's a heavy thing to carry."
"It is." She managed a small smile. "I'm working on putting it down."
"That's the hardest part. The putting down."
She looked at him, at the lines around his eyes and the set of his jaw, and knew he was speaking from experience. Whatever had driven him away from the ambulance, whatever weight he'd been carrying when he came to Copper Moon, he understood.
They reached the cottage as the sun was sinking toward the horizon, painting the water in shades of copper and gold. The color that gave this place its name. Tessa stood on the deck and watched the light change, the pendant warm at her throat, Brian a steady presence beside her.
"Thank you," she said. "For coming to find me. For walking me back."
"I was already in town," he said.
She decided not to call him on it. "Still. Thank you."
He nodded once, then headed inside to start dinner. She stayed on the deck a while longer, watching the copper fade to rose to purple, listening to the evening sounds rise around her.
She thought about the man at the fair. The phone calls she hadn't answered. The prickle at the back of her neck that might have been paranoia or might have been instinct.
She thought about Brian's hand in hers as she stepped over the root. The way he'd positioned himself between her and the crowd without being asked. The way he'd said yeah to the concert like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Three months in Copper Moon. Three months to heal, to rest, to figure out who she was without the hospital defining her.
She hadn't expected to find someone who made her feel safe in the process.
She hadn't expected to find someone at all.