Chapter Four #2
His eyes found mine across the space and held for a beat—not relief, just registering it, the way a person looks when something they were quietly worried about has resolved itself.
No questions about whether I’d slept or how my ribs felt or if I was planning to run.
Just the simple acknowledgment that I was here, still here, and apparently settling in.
I looked away first.
* * * *
The afternoon hit me the way the aftermath always does—the adrenaline fully gone, nothing left underneath it but the full inventory of what’s missing. I’d spent the morning in a kind of suspended animation, moving through conversations and coffee and introductions without fully inhabiting my body.
Now it all caught up at once—my apartment, my job, six months of my grandfather’s kitchen and his voice, the comfort of being useful to someone who needed me. The version of my life that had existed before it was taken from me.
I didn’t cry. Crying was for people who still had the luxury of breaking down—people with somewhere safe to fall apart, someone waiting to catch them. I’d left that option behind in Nebraska, along with everything else.
Instead, I took my second cup of coffee out to the east-facing porch steps and sat down, the wooden planks cold through the seat of my jeans. The mountain—Black Butte—cut the horizon to the west, enormous and indifferent, its slopes still carrying patches of snow that caught the afternoon light.
Now, sitting on the steps with cold coffee between my hands, I did the thing I’d learned in the NICU when a shift went bad: I inventoried what was still functional.
I am alive.
My ribs hurt, but nothing is broken that won’t heal.
I have a place to sleep tonight.
My nursing license is still valid.
My hands still work.
My grandfather is safe.
I am not in Nebraska.
The coffee in my cup has gone cold.
The mountain is still there.
I went through it methodically, the way I would go through a patient chart—each line item a data point, none of them more important than the others. By the end of it, I was still sitting on the steps and the mountain was still there and the coffee had gone cold in my hands.
The front door opened behind me. I didn’t turn—my body recognizing the timing of the footsteps before my brain had processed who they belonged to.
Decker came down the porch steps and sat near me—not close enough to crowd, not far enough to signal indifference. Two steps away, close enough that conversation wouldn’t require raised voices, far enough that our shoulders wouldn’t touch if we both leaned the same way.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask how I was doing or if I needed anything or what I was thinking about. Just sat with his forearms resting on his knees, watching the same piece of horizon I’d been staring at.
We stayed like that without talking, long enough that the silence stopped feeling like something that needed to be filled.
In the NICU, I’d learned that the most useful thing you could sometimes offer was just presence—the simple acknowledgment that someone wasn’t alone with whatever was happening.
Decker seemed to understand that without being told.
Eventually, he said, “You don’t have to have a plan yet.”
Just that. Nothing attached to it—no elaboration, no “what are you thinking” or “have you considered” or “you know what you should do.” Just the plain fact of it, delivered the way someone might note that the sky was blue or the coffee was cold.
My first instinct was to argue. Having a plan was the mechanism I used to keep fear at a manageable distance—the careful construction of next steps, contingencies, exit strategies. Without one, I was just a body moving through space, subject to whatever forces happened to be acting on it.
But the plainness of Decker’s statement stopped me before the words could form.
He wasn’t offering reassurance or performing concern.
He was just reporting a fact—that whatever plan I might eventually need didn’t have to exist yet, that this moment could be what it was without being required to lead somewhere specific.
I nodded instead.
We sat a while longer. The mountain didn’t move. The air got colder as the afternoon light began to fade, the shadows stretching longer across the yard. Somewhere behind the house, a horse whinnied—a high, questioning sound that hung in the air for a moment before fading.
Decker’s presence beside me was neither demanding nor pretend. He wasn’t sitting with me out of obligation or the kind of pity that treats people as projects rather than humans. He was just there, the way the mountain was there or the cold air was there—a fact rather than a gesture.
When he finally stood up, brushing his palms against his jeans, the movement was so casual I almost missed it.
“Dinner’s in twenty,” he said, his voice carrying the same quiet certainty it had in the truck.
“Nothing fancy. You’re welcome to join us or I can bring a plate to your room if you’d rather. ”
The offer was so matter-of-fact—so free of the weight of charity—that it took me a moment to process it as kindness rather than obligation.
“I’ll come,” I said, surprised by how easily the words came out.
He nodded once, then turned and went back inside, leaving the door ajar behind him.
I sat for another minute, watching the light change on the mountain’s face.
The cold had worked its way through my jacket and into my bones, but I wasn’t quite ready to go in—to trade the clarity of sitting alone with my thoughts for the more complicated reality of being a person among other people.
So I stayed where I was, hands wrapped around the cold mug, eyes on the horizon, and gave myself permission to exist exactly as I was—not a problem to be solved or a situation to be managed, but just a person sitting on porch steps, watching a mountain as the day turned toward evening.
* * * *
After dinner, I asked to borrow Decker’s laptop to send my grandfather a message.
The meal had been simple—spaghetti with sauce from a jar, garlic bread, a salad Rawley had thrown together while the pasta cooked—but it had felt strangely normal, sitting at the table with these people I barely knew, eating food I hadn’t cooked.
We’d talked about the baby with the feeding issue, about the ranch’s upcoming projects, about nothing that required me to explain myself or justify my presence.
Now, with dishes stacked in the sink and everyone dispersed to different corners of the house, I needed to let my grandfather know we’d arrived.
“Sure,” Decker said, retrieving the laptop from a desk in the corner of the living room.
“Password’s 8557.” He handed it over without further comment—no questions about who I was contacting or why, no warnings about appropriate use or time limits.
Just the simple acknowledgment that I’d asked for something and he was providing it.
I sat at the kitchen table with the laptop open, the blue light from the screen washing my face in the darkening room.
The password field accepted the numbers on the first try, and the desktop appeared—a plain blue background with a single folder labeled “Ranch” and nothing else.
No personal photos, no documents with revealing names, just the clean functionality of a tool rather than an extension of its owner.
I opened the browser and navigated to my email. The login field waited, cursor blinking in its empty space. I typed my username, then my password, then hit enter before I could reconsider.
My inbox loaded—forty-three new messages, most of them hospital newsletters and nursing association updates I’d been too distracted to unsubscribe from. Nothing from my grandfather. Nothing from anyone who mattered.
I created a new message, addressed it to the account I’d set up for him last year after he’d finally conceded that checking email was easier than driving to the library, and started typing.
Grandpa—
I stopped, deleted, started again.
Made it to Montana. People seem decent. I’m okay. Nothing’s broken that won’t heal. Will call Sunday like we said. Love, Jasper.
Short. Direct. Nothing that could be used against either of us if someone else read it.
I hit send before I could second-guess the wording or add the dozen other things I wanted to say—that I missed him already, that I was scared of being a problem someone else had to solve was settling into my chest like a physical thing.
The message disappeared into the ether, the screen confirming its delivery with a bland “Message Sent.” I stared at it for a moment, the blue light making the bruise on my cheek look darker, more defined.
Then, with the browser still open and the cursor sitting in the search bar, I did the thing I had been actively not doing for weeks.
I typed my own name.
The results loaded in the time it took to draw a breath—page after page of links, most of them to my professional profiles, my nursing license, the hospital staff directory where my name and credentials still appeared despite my absence. Nothing new there. Nothing concerning.
It was the “People Also Search For” section that caught my eye—the algorithm’s best guess at what someone looking for me might actually want. And there, three items down, was a link to a forum thread I’d never seen before: “Looking for Jasper Arnold, neonatal nurse, formerly of Omaha General.”
My stomach dropped. I clicked the link.
The page loaded—a nursing forum I’d joined years ago, but rarely visited, its interface unchanged since the last time I’d logged in. The thread was recent—posted three days ago, with no replies. The username was a random string of letters and numbers.
The message itself was brief: Trying to locate Jasper Arnold, neonatal nurse who worked at Omaha General until six months ago. Last known location Nebraska. Any information appreciated. Please message directly rather than replying here.
No name attached. No explanation of why they were looking. Just the bare fact of the search, hanging in digital space where anyone could see it.
I closed the tab and opened a new one, then searched my name plus “Omaha” and “nurse.” The results loaded—the same professional links, the same staff directory, but with a new entry: a Facebook group for Nebraska healthcare workers, where someone had posted the same request three days earlier.
Again, no name. No explanation. Just the pattern of someone moving through the internet the way a person moves through a building, checking rooms, opening doors, getting closer.
I tried again with different search terms—my name plus my hometown, my name plus my nursing school, my name plus phrases I’d used in professional contexts.
Each search returned the same pattern—recent activity across multiple platforms, all within the last week, all asking the same question in different words.
Someone was looking for me. Not just wondering where I’d gone or if I was okay, but actively searching, methodically working their way through every digital space where I might have left a trace.
I sat with the screen for a moment, my jaw set, my thumb pressed against the edge of the laptop casing. The bruise on my cheek throbbed in time with my pulse.
Across the room, Decker was in the armchair by the window with a paperback open, not looking up.
His posture was relaxed—one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, shoulders loose, attention fully on the page in front of him.
He hadn’t asked what I was doing or how long I’d need the laptop or whether I wanted privacy.
He’d just handed it over and gone back to his book, creating a space where my business could remain my own.
I closed the laptop, the screen going dark with a soft click.
I told myself it could be nothing—old activity, automated crawlers, any number of explanations that didn’t require the conclusion my gut was already drawing.
The hospital checking references. A former colleague looking to reconnect.
A patient’s family with follow-up questions.
All of them more likely than the alternative—that someone from Nebraska had decided I was worth tracking down, that the hatred that had driven me from my job and then from my hometown had followed me here.
I did not entirely believe that.
I set the laptop on the table and did not say anything. If Decker had questions about what I’d found or why I’d gone suddenly still, he kept them to himself. He just turned another page in his book, the soft rustle of paper the only sound in the quiet room.
Outside, the mountain was a darker shape against the night sky, its presence neither reassuring nor threatening—just there, enormous and indifferent, the same way it had been for thousands of years before I arrived and the same way it would be long after I was gone.
I sat at the table with my hands flat on its surface and made a decision: I would call my grandfather on Sunday like we’d agreed. I would ask him, directly, if he’d heard anything—if anyone had been asking questions or showing unusual interest.
And then, depending on his answer, I would decide what to do next.