Chapter 7
KENDALL
Iwake up thinking about his laugh.
The sound is still in my head, short and startled.
His expression afterward is still behind my eyelids, as if I'd reached through a wall he didn't know had a window, as if I were a person he hadn't planned on.
I lie in bed with the warmth of that look still on my skin, and for a few breaths the world is just a dark room and the memory of a man who laughed because of me.
Then I remember what day it is.
Gary thinks I'm in Sitka at my mother's bedside.
He gave me a week. Tomorrow that week is over.
Tomorrow he'll expect a call, a flight number, a return date, and when none of those come, the careful window my mother bought me with her own money will slam shut.
Gary Simmons does not tolerate gaps in information, and a missing wife is the kind of gap he fills with every resource he has.
I run the numbers the way I've been running them since the first mile of highway: how long before he calls the hospital and discovers I'm not there, how long before he calls the police, how long before the police stop looking and Gary's people start. The search radius will expand past Sitka eventually, and someone might have spotted me somewhere I’m not supposed to be.
The bruise under my ribs throbs in time with my pulse. The pain has gotten worse, not better. Trying to earn my keep around this lodge instead of resting has aggravated it, a dull grinding that sharpens when I breathe too deep or twist at the waist.
I've been managing it how I manage everything Gary left on my body: quietly, carefully, with long sleeves and controlled movements, always hoping nobody looks close enough to ask.
I have two problems. The cover story expires tomorrow, and I'm falling for a man whose hands I can still feel in my hair.
I don't know which problem will kill me faster.
By breakfast, the guardedness is back. The old protocols click into place: watch the room, control the face, give nothing away that can be used.
Alex sees it. Of course Alex sees it. He reads me the way I read his boots, and the shift from yesterday's flirting to today's distance registers on his face as a tightening along his jaw.
"Something changed," he says. We're alone in the kitchen. Cameron took Dash to check the road, and the lodge is quiet enough that the fire settling in the next room is the only sound.
"Nothing changed."
He crosses the kitchen. Not asking. Moving.
He stops close enough that I have to look up, and his hand comes to my chin, fingers tilting my face the way he tilted it the night he kissed me.
The grip is firm. His eyes move across my face, reading me the way he reads weather, and whatever he finds there tightens the muscles along his jaw.
"Kendall." Low. Direct. A warning and a question at the same time.
My body is running its own program underneath the containment protocol. The one that registers his hand on my jaw and wants it in my hair. The one that remembers what he tastes like. The one I can't shut down by deciding to.
"I'm fine," I say. The lie is so practiced it comes out smooth, the same two words I've been offering since the first time a doctor asked about a bruise on my wrist and Gary was sitting in the waiting room with his patient, attentive smile.
He holds my chin for another beat. His thumb moves once across my jaw, slow and deliberate, and the gentleness of it from a hand that could snap a fence post is more devastating than the grip itself.
Then he lets go. Not gently. The way a man sets down something he wants to break open but has decided not to. He steps back, picks up his coffee, and drinks it watching me over the rim.
He doesn't say okay. He doesn't say anything. The silence says for now so loudly I can feel it on my skin.
I leave the kitchen before my body can betray anything else.
The bruise decides the issue by mid-morning.
I reach for a pot on the top shelf and the pain shears through my side. The breath that comes out of me is involuntary, a sharp hiss that I cut short too late. The pot stays on the shelf. My hand goes to my ribs and holds.
Cameron is at the table cleaning a carburetor. He looks up.
"That rib's been bothering you for days," he says, and the tone makes it clear he already knows the answer.
I open my mouth to deliver the script and Cameron cuts me off with a shake of his head.
"Amberly's at the clinic. She's good." He pulls his truck keys from his jacket and sets them on the table. "I can drive you, or you can take my rig. Four-wheel drive handles the snow fine and I can give you directions. But you should go."
The offer comes without interrogation or loaded concern, just keys on a table and a direct suggestion. Cameron Sawyer solves problems the way he fixes engines: identify the issue, provide the tool, move on.
"I'll take the ride," I say.
Amberly's clinic is a converted storefront at the end of the main road, a mile from the lodge. Cameron drops me at the door and says he'll be at the hardware store when I'm done.
The truck pulls away. I stand on the sidewalk and realize I haven't been to a doctor without rehearsing first since early in my marriage.
The clinic is small and clean and organized with the kind of efficiency that suggests a tight operation. A woman at the front desk with dark hair pulled into a loose knot and a pen tucked behind her ear looks up when I come in.
"Gayle Watkins," she says. "You must be the lodge guest. Amberly's ready for you in the back."
Amberly Sawyer is lighter than her brothers, fine-boned where they're broad, with steady hands and a directness in her gaze that reads as warmth until you realize it's precision.
"What brings you in?" she says.
"My ribs." The word comes out before I can wrap it in a better story. The pain is too present for performance.
"Shirt up," she says. "Let me take a look."
The words are clinical, unhurried. She's not asking permission because she already has it. I'm in her clinic. I came here. The transaction is clear.
I pull the flannel up.
The bruise is ugly. I know without looking. The original impact has spread into a mottled map of purple and green, yellow at the edges where the healing has started.
Amberly's face doesn't change when she sees it.
Her hands move to the area, her fingers cool and precise, pressing along the ribs with the competence of someone who has palpated a hundred injuries and knows what bone feels like under skin.
"Deep breath," she says.
I breathe. The pain is a white flash behind my eyes.
"No fracture," she says. "Badly bruised, possibly a hairline crack in the cartilage. You've been aggravating it."
She steps back. Her gaze moves from the bruise to my face, and something in her expression shifts into a register I recognize because I've spent years watching people decide whether to see what's in front of them.
Amberly sees it.
She doesn't demand details. She doesn't lean in with soft eyes and say 'you can tell me.'
She stands in her clean clinic with her steady hands and looks at the bruise, then at me.
The recognition that passes between us is older than language, one woman reading another's body and understanding exactly what left those marks.
"This isn't from hauling firewood," she says.
"No."
The word comes out before I can stop it. One syllable. The most honest sound I've made to a medical professional since the marriage started.
During the marriage, the doctors were different.
Gary's name was on the hospital wing. His donations funded the new imaging center.
The physicians who treated my "accidents" were polite and thorough and they wrote down whatever I told them because questioning the wife of their benefactor was a conversation nobody wanted to have.
One doctor, once, held my wrist a beat too long during an exam and asked 'if there's anything else you'd like to discuss.' I said no. Gary sent flowers to the hospital the next week. The doctor transferred to a different practice within the month.
Amberly doesn't work for Gary. Amberly doesn't work for anyone.
"I'm going to give you anti-inflammatories and a cold pack," she says.
"Ice it when you can. Avoid overhead reaching, which I suspect is advice you've given yourself already.
And I need you to keep breathing deep, even when it hurts.
Shallow breathing with rib injuries leads to pneumonia, and I don't want to see you back here for that.
" She reaches into a cabinet and pulls out a plastic device with a mouthpiece and a graduated chamber.
"Incentive spirometer. Breathe into it ten times an hour. It'll keep your lungs expanded."
She hands me the spirometer, the pills, and a chemical cold pack, her movements efficient and impersonal in a way that feels like respect.
When she finishes, she washes her hands at the sink and dries them on a towel. She turns to face me.
"My mother had bruises," she says. "On her arms. Her ribs. Places clothing covered. I was young. I remember how she moved in the mornings, careful, like the air might hurt her."
The sentence is quiet and factual. It settles into the clinic like a weight placed on a shelf, carefully, in a space that was built to hold it.
"You don't have to tell me anything," Amberly says.
"But if you need this clinic, for any reason, at any time, the door doesn't lock.
" She pauses. "My brothers are good men.
Alex especially. But I understand why that wouldn't be enough for you right now, and I'm not going to tell you your own timeline. "
I nod. My throat is too tight for words. The door doesn't lock, and nobody is going to tell me my own timeline. Two statements that undo more of my armor than every question Gary's doctors never asked.
Cameron is waiting at the hardware store. The ride back is quiet, the shared silence of two people who don't need to fill space with noise. He doesn't ask what Amberly said. He doesn't ask about the ribs. He drives.
The flirting starts again after dinner.