Chapter Five #2
The kitchen door opened, and Jasper stepped through, pulling up short when he saw me. “Sorry,” he said, already backpedaling. “I didn’t realize you were in here.”
I gestured at the workbench. “You did this?”
Something flickered across his face—not quite worry, but adjacent to it.
“The kit needed it,” he said, the words coming out careful, like he’d chosen them from a list of phrases that couldn’t be challenged.
“I found some supplies in the cabinet when I was doing the inventory Rawley asked for. Hope that’s okay. ”
I looked at the first-aid kit again, seeing the thing my hands had fumbled through a hundred times now transformed into what it was supposed to be. “It’s better than okay,” I said. “The kit needed it.”
Relief washed over his face, then was gone, replaced by the careful neutrality he’d been carrying since last night. “Good,” he said, then paused, like he wasn’t sure where the conversation was supposed to go next.
I’d seen this before—the kind of restlessness that came from being caught between one place and another, not yet settled but no longer falling. The need to stake out a function, to establish yourself as something other than a problem that needed handling.
“You’ve got a good system,” I said, nodding toward the kit. “Military?”
He shook his head. “Hospital. We had to be able to find things in the dark. In a code, seconds matter.”
I nodded, understanding the shorthand. “They do.”
The kitchen door opened again, and Carter poked his head through the gap. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, eyes moving between us. “But I’m heading over to check on the O’Reilly baby—another one with a feeding issue—and I was wondering if Jasper would be willing to come take a look.”
Jasper straightened immediately, all trace of the careful wariness gone. “Yes,” he said, the word coming out with more force than anything else he’d said all day. “Absolutely.”
Carter’s face lit up. “That’s great. I’ll drive—“
“I’ll take him,” I said, cutting him off. “My truck’s already warmed up.”
Both men turned to look at me, Carter with mild surprise, Jasper with something I couldn’t quite name.
“Even better,” Carter said, accepting the offer without questioning it. “I’ll see you there in ten.” He ducked back through the kitchen door, letting it swing shut behind him.
Jasper stood where he was, eyes on my face, something moving behind them. “You don’t have to do that,” he said, the words coming out careful again, but in a different way than before—like he was testing the weight of them before letting them go.
“I know,” I said, reaching for my keys on the hook by the door. “You ready?”
He nodded once, then again with more certainty. “Give me one minute to grab my jacket.”
The drive to the O’Reilly place took twelve minutes—the main road, then the dirt track that wound through the stand of pines at the property’s edge.
The truck’s heater pushed warm air against my legs, and the windshield wipers cut a clean arc across the glass, pushing the steady rain to the edges of the frame.
Jasper sat with his hands in his lap, knees pulled up slightly, face turned toward the window. He hadn’t said anything since we’d pulled away from the ranch, but the silence between us felt different now—not empty or tense, but charged with something I didn’t have a name for yet.
The O’Reilly place appeared through the trees—a two-story farmhouse with a wide front porch and a red barn behind it, both buildings older than the Steele property, but maintained with the same careful attention.
Lights glowed in the windows despite the afternoon hour, yellow and welcoming against the gray day.
Carter’s truck was already in the drive, along with a beat-up sedan I didn’t recognize. I pulled in beside them and killed the engine, the sudden absence of noise making the rain seem louder on the roof.
Jasper reached for the door handle, then stopped, hand frozen halfway to the latch. “Thanks,” he said, the word simple but carrying more weight than its single syllable should have been able to. “For the ride. For—“ He stopped, the rest of the sentence hanging in the air between us.
I nodded once, accepting what he’d offered without demanding more. “Anytime.”
He nodded back, then pushed the door open and stepped out into the rain, jacket pulled up over his head as he made for the porch.
I followed, watching the careful way he moved, nothing wasted, everything with purpose. A man trying to take up as little space as possible, even when no one was watching.
Carter met us at the door, his face animated in a way I’d never seen it before. “They’re in the living room,” he said, gesturing us inside. “The baby’s been fussing all day. Mom’s pretty worried.”
We stepped into the entryway, the warm smell of baking bread and wood smoke wrapping around us. From the living room came the sound of a baby crying—not the theatrical wail of attention wanting upset, but the distress of actual pain.
Jasper was moving before the sound had fully registered, his body responding to the call before his mind had time to catch up. He crossed the living room in three quick strides, jacket still on, rainwater dripping from his hair onto the polished floor.
The baby was in a woman’s arms—a tiny thing with a shock of dark hair and a face screwed up with the effort of crying. The mother—Allison, according to Burke—looked up as Jasper approached, eyes widening slightly at the sight of a stranger.
“I’m Jasper,” he said, his voice already shifting into the low, even register I’d heard him use with Ethan after his fall. “I’m a neonatal nurse. Can I take a look at her?”
The mother handed the baby over without hesitation, relief washing over her face at the word “nurse.” Jasper took the child with practiced ease, one hand supporting her head, the other already moving to check her temperature, her breathing, the set of her tiny features.
“What’s her name?” he asked, voice steady, attention divided between the mother and the baby in his arms.
“Lily,” the woman said. “She’s five weeks.”
Jasper nodded, already working. “And she’s been having trouble feeding? Spitting up? Colicky?”
The mother launched into an explanation—symptoms, timing, things she’d tried—and Jasper listened, really listened, his eyes on her face, taking in every detail.
The careful wariness that had been sitting in his posture since Nebraska was gone, replaced by a focused certainty I hadn’t seen in him before.
His hands moved with steady purpose, checking the baby’s mouth, feeling along her jawline, his touch so gentle it barely registered as contact.
“She’s got a posterior tongue tie,” he said, the diagnosis coming with the simple certainty of someone stating an obvious fact. “It’s keeping her from forming a good seal when she nurses. We can work around it while we wait for the procedure.”
The mother’s face lit up with relief. “There’s a procedure? The doctor in town said she’d grow out of it.”
“She might,” Jasper said, his voice careful in a way that managed to convey respect for the doctor while still making it clear the man was wrong. “But there’s no reason she has to be uncomfortable until then. I can show you some techniques that should help right away.”
I stepped back, giving them space. The transformation was so complete it was almost physical—Jasper’s entire bearing shifted, the careful guardedness replaced by the natural authority of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
It was like watching water find its level—a thing returning to its natural state after being forced into an unnatural one.
I backed through the kitchen door and out onto the porch, where Macon was sanding a cabinet frame at a workbench set up under the eaves. He looked up when the door opened, nodded once in acknowledgment, then went back to his work, the sandpaper moving in long, even strokes across the wood.
“Making progress?” he asked, not looking up from his task.
“Looks like it,” I said, leaning against the porch rail where I could see the living room window. Jasper was still with the baby, demonstrating something to the mother with careful movements, his face animated in a way it hadn’t been since I’d met him.
Macon followed my gaze, then nodded once, understanding without being told. “He’s good with the little ones,” he said, the observation simple but carrying more weight than it should have. “Carter says he’s a neonatal nurse.”
“Eight years at Omaha General,” I said, offering the detail as a kind of peace offering—information freely given rather than carefully extracted.
Macon nodded again, accepting what I’d offered without pushing for more. “That explains it,” he said, then turned back to his sanding, the conversation apparently finished.
I stayed where I was, watching Jasper through the window, the rain coming down around us, the rightness of the moment settling into my chest like a physical thing.
The rain had stopped by the time we left the O’Reilly place, leaving behind puddles that caught the late afternoon light and turned it gold.
I drove with the windows down, letting the cool air push through the cab and carry away the smell of wet wool and wood smoke that had followed us from the house.
Jasper sat with his elbow on the window frame, face turned toward the passing landscape, his posture looser than it had been that morning.
The baby—Lily—had fallen asleep in his arms before we left, her small body finally giving in to the exhaustion of five weeks of ineffective feeding.
The mother had been close to tears with relief when we walked out, promising to call if anything changed and making Jasper swear he’d come back on Thursday to check their progress.
The road back to the ranch cut through a stand of pines, their dark trunks rising from the wet ground like columns. Water dripped from the branches overhead, catching the light as it fell.