Chapter Ten #3
The clinic shrank in the rearview. Gray brick, white trim, the Hades Abyss MC patch visible in the front window if you knew where to look -- small, discreet, placed where the morning sun wouldn’t fade it.
I’d put it there three years ago, after Fox asked if I wanted one for the clinic, and I’d said yes without hesitation because some affiliations were worth advertising and others were worth keeping close, and the club fell into both categories depending on who was looking.
Someone was looking now. The blocked calls said so. The truck said so. The empty parking space across from my clinic said so with the particular eloquence of absences that had been carefully arranged.
I turned onto the county road that led home.
The maples were thick on either side, their leaves catching the late light, and the compound gate came into view half a mile ahead -- chain link, razor wire, the particular silhouette of a place that had been built to keep things out rather than let them in.
My phone stayed silent in the cupholder.
No new texts. No calls. Just the engine’s rumble and the sound of gravel under tires as the county road gave way to the compound’s private lane, and the list in my head kept running, item by item, because that’s what lists were for -- containing things so the rest of you could function.
The gate was open. Cotton stood beside it, one shoulder against the post, his arms crossed over his cut.
He didn’t wave. Didn’t nod. Just watched me approach with those green eyes that missed nothing, and when I passed through, he reached for the chain without looking at me and pulled the gate closed behind my truck with a sound that traveled through the frame and into the bones of the house waiting fifty yards ahead.
* * *
The house smelled like garlic and tomatoes when I came through the back door. Katy had something simmering on the stove, and Ellie was at the kitchen table with her workbook open in front of her, talking while she worked.
Apparently, subtraction had survived dinner preparations.
I set my clinic bag on the bench by the back door and unzipped it.
The aluminum case sat inside -- the combat medic kit, restocked two days ago, gauze and butterfly closures and antiseptic wipes arranged in the order that twenty years had baked into muscle memory.
I’d added extra gauze. More tape. The kind of inventory adjustment that happened below thought, like a pilot checking fuel without being asked.
The front door was twenty feet away through the living room. I crossed to it and tested the deadbolt. Locked, exactly as I expected. That didn’t mean I was done checking. I moved to the windows.
When I turned, Katy was watching me from the stove.
Wooden spoon in one hand, the other braced against the counter’s edge, and her eyes had that particular focus they got when she was reading something in a room that wasn’t written down.
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.
The fact that I’d walked directly to the deadbolt before saying hello was its own kind of communication, and she received it same as she received most things from me -- with quiet attention, without flinching.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
Ellie looked up from the kitchen table. Her homework was spread across the oak in the disorder she favored -- worksheets overlapping, a pencil case spilling colored pencils across the geometric pattern placemat I’d bought three weeks ago and had never seen her use for its intended purpose.
“Doc! My poster got a smiley face. Ms. Keller said the Popsicle comment was funny but not educational, which I think means she liked it but couldn’t admit it because she’s the teacher. ”
“Teachers have rules,” I said.
“I know. It’s a whole system.” She went back to her workbook, brow furrowed as she worked through the next problem.
I got a glass of water and stayed in the kitchen while Katy finished dinner. Ellie alternated between subtraction and commentary, apparently incapable of doing one without the other.
We ate pasta at the table. Ellie told us about her poster, then about a boy who’d informed her that her rocks didn’t qualify as a collection because she didn’t have a display case.
“He’s wrong,” I said.
Ellie pointed her fork at me. “That’s what I said.”
“What makes something a collection?” Katy asked.
“Having more than one of it.”
“Reasonable definition.”
“And knowing their names,” Ellie added. “Which I do.”
From there, the conversation somehow moved to whether dogs understood clocks, whether cats cared what time it was, and finally whether squirrels had calendars. Ellie decided they probably measured the year by acorn season.
I had no evidence to dispute her.
By then, her plate was empty.
“Okay,” Katy said. “Time to get ready for bed.”
Ellie’s face fell. “Already?”
“Bath, teeth, pajamas, then bed.”
“Five more minutes?”
“Three.”
“Four?”
Katy considered her. “Three and a half. Final offer.”
Ellie nodded as if serious negotiations had concluded and carried her plate to the sink. She’d been here long enough to know where everything went, long enough that she no longer asked before opening a cabinet or getting herself a drink.
I watched her disappear down the hall after Katy.
Three weeks ago, Ellie had been a kid I’d found stranded beside a highway with her mother.
Now there was a cup with her name on it in my cabinet.
I dealt with the dishes while Katy supervised bath time. The sound of running water echoed down the hall, followed by Ellie protesting that shampooing her hair twice in one week was excessive. Katy disagreed. Ellie appealed the ruling. Katy remained unmoved.
Eventually, Ellie reappeared in dinosaur pajamas long enough to tell me good night.
“Night, Doc.”
“Brush your teeth.”
“Mom already made me.”
“Then I have no further instructions.”
She grinned and headed back down the hall.
Katy returned a while later and poured coffee for both of us. She handed me a mug and tipped her head toward the back porch. We took our coffee outside and sat on the steps. Katy settled beside me, close enough that her shoulder rested against mine.
I’d been waiting until Ellie was in bed to tell her.
“I got another blocked call today.”
Katy turned toward me. “Same as before?”
“Same. Nobody spoke.”
I told her the rest. The blue Silverado across from the clinic. The engine running. Fox’s text. Hornet and Cotton watching the gate. The truck had last been spotted near the county line heading east, away from the compound.
“So he’s leaving?” she asked.
“We don’t know that.”
Her fingers tightened around her mug. “But he’s not here.”
“Not right now.”
I could have told her that was good news. Could have made the truck heading east mean more than it did. I wouldn’t.
“We’ll keep watching,” I said. “If anything changes, you’ll know when I do.”
Katy studied me for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”
I reached over and took her free hand. This time, she held on.
“Do you think he knows we’re here? Not the compound. Here, specifically?” Her fingers tightened around mine.
I considered what I actually knew before answering. “He knows where the clinic is. We don’t have anything that says he knows where I live.”
“But he could.”
“He could.”
She looked toward the yard.
I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles. “I’m not going to tell you he can’t find us, Katy. I am telling you he won’t get near this house without someone seeing him.”
She was quiet for a moment. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Is it working?”
“A little.”
“I’ll take a little.”
She nodded. Once. Tight. The kind of nod that wasn’t agreement so much as acknowledgment -- receiving a difficult truth without flinching, same as she received most things from me, and the courage of that nod traveled through me in a current so clean it bypassed thought entirely and went straight to whatever part of me had been holding its breath since the phone rang sometime after three-twenty.
My hand found hers on the step between us. Covered it. Her fingers were cold and I didn’t try to warm them. Just held. My thumb found the ridge of her knuckles and stayed there, not moving, present in a way that asked nothing and offered everything at once.
Beyond the porch, the compound had settled down for the night. The clubhouse sat dark in the distance, and the maples shifted along the edge of the yard. Nothing drew my attention. For tonight, that was good enough.
Katy’s head tipped against my shoulder. The heaviness of it was slight -- she was not a large woman, and the density of her had less to do with mass than with presence -- but I felt it settle against me just as I’d felt Ellie settle against my chest on the gravel drive weeks ago, complete and trusting and entirely without reservation.
We sat there. The coffee went cold in our mugs.
The yellow light from the back door didn’t reach any farther than it had when we sat down, and the dark beyond it held whatever it held -- threat, or absence of threat, or the limbo that existed between those states -- and neither of us reached for our phones to check the time or the weather or the news from a world that had very little to do with the step we were sitting on.
Katy rested against me, her hand tucked into mine. Somewhere beyond the yard, Cotton had the gate. I trusted him to do his job.
Katy shifted closer, and I put my arm around her.
Tomorrow might give us a reason to worry. Tonight hadn’t.
So we stayed on the porch until our coffee went cold, and neither of us talked about leaving. We didn’t go inside for a long time. The night was patient. So were we.