Forgotten Mountain Man (Iron Peak Mountain Man #5)

Chapter 1

Bianca

That's the thing about starting over. You think it'll feel heavy—new town, new job, new everything—but it turns out your whole life fits into six cardboard boxes and a duffel bag that smells of airport carpet.

I set the last box on the kitchen counter and look around my apartment.

My apartment. One bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen the size of a generous closet, and a window that looks out onto a street I don't know the name of yet. It's perfect.

I've been in Iron Peak for five days. Long enough to learn that the grocery store closes at eight, that the woman at the post office calls everyone "honey," and that the mountains here don't just surround the town—they hold it.

Box canyon, Dr. Theo called it when he gave me the nickel tour on my first morning.

Sheer cliffs on three sides, one road in, one road out.

He said it with the pride people usually reserve for their children.

I unpack the kitchen box first because it's the most practical, and because being practical is the thing I'm best at.

Two mugs. A set of mismatched plates I bought at a thrift store in Montrose on the drive up.

A cast-iron skillet my sister Riley insisted I take, even though I told her I'd just burn everything in it.

"You'll learn," she'd said, as if she were sending me off to war instead of a mountain town with one stoplight.

I set the skillet on the stove and stand there for a moment, hands on the counter, breathing.

Quiet.

Not the manufactured quiet of noise-canceling headphones on a break room couch.

Not the exhausted quiet of falling asleep in scrubs on a hospital cot with fluorescent lights still buzzing above me.

This is real quiet. Wind against the building.

A truck engine somewhere down the block.

The creak of old wood settling in the cold air.

I close my eyes and let it sit in my chest.

This is why I came here.

* * *

The Iron Peak Clinic smells like pine cleaner and antiseptic, which is somehow the most comforting combination I've encountered in years.

It's a one-story cabin that someone converted decades ago, with fading green paint on the outside and a wooden sign by the door that just says CLINIC.

No hours listed. No doctor's name. Just CLINIC, like the building itself, is enough of an explanation.

Inside, the waiting room doubles as the town's bulletin board.

There's a flyer for a pancake breakfast at the fire station, a handwritten notice about a missing cat named Sergeant Whiskers, and a sign-up sheet for firewood delivery that's already full.

One exam room. One supply closet that also serves as a break room if you don't mind eating lunch next to boxes of gauze.

A generator out back that Dr. Theo warned me sputters "every other storm. "

And there’s my boss. Dr. Theo Merritt is the man who makes gruffness feel like a warm blanket.

White hair, tanned skin, green eyes that miss nothing.

He wears flannel shirts and worn jeans and carries a medical bag that looks older than I am.

He's been the only doctor in Iron Peak for over thirty years, and he talks about the town the way other people talk about a spouse—with deep, exasperated love.

"You'll get used to the pace," he tells me on my third morning, watching me reorganize the supply closet for the second time. "Or you won't, and you'll leave. Either way, stop alphabetizing the bandages."

I stop alphabetizing the bandages.

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize." He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Just settle in. The town'll tell you what it needs soon enough."

I nod and close the supply closet. That's the other thing about Iron Peak. Everyone says things that sound simple but feel enormous. The town'll tell you what it needs. As if the mountains themselves have opinions.

Maybe they do.

The patients come in a slow trickle. A logger with a gash on his forearm from a chainsaw chain that jumped.

A woman in her seventies with a persistent cough and a refusal to slow down.

A teenager who sprained his ankle on the trail behind the high school and insists, very seriously, that he was not doing anything stupid.

Dr. Theo stitches, listens, prescribes, and sends them on their way with the same parting line every time: "Stay out of trouble. "

Nobody stays out of trouble. I can already tell.

By Thursday, I've learned the rhythms. Morning is quiet. Afternoons bring walk-ins. Dr. Theo takes lunch at his desk with a sandwich and a medical journal that's at least six months out of date. I eat in the supply closet, which is fine since I've eaten in worse places.

I'm writing notes at the front desk when I hear it.

Maybe not hear it. But feel it. A shift in the air outside the window. The cadence of something uneven.

I look up.

A man walks past the clinic. Tall. Broad shoulders, a heavy-buff build, the frame suggesting he uses his body for work, not vanity.

Dark hair, almost black, and a jaw shadowed with stubble.

He's wearing a flannel with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, and even from behind the glass I can see the ink on his left arm—tattoos that climb from his wrist and disappear under the fabric, trailing up toward his neck.

He limps.

Not slightly. Not the kind you can ignore or explain away with a twisted ankle.

His left leg drags just enough to throw his whole stride off-center, and there's a tightness in his shoulders that tells me it hurts more than he's showing.

I know that tightness. I've watched patients carry it through hospital corridors for months.

Those who won't ask for help. The ones who set their teeth and keep walking because stopping means admitting something they're not ready to admit.

There's a scar on the left side of his face. Long, deliberate, like something tried very hard to break him and didn't quite finish the job.

A German Shepherd walks beside him. Close. Pressed to his left leg, moving in perfect sync with the uneven gait. Not on a leash. The dog doesn't need one. It watches the street with a calm, sweeping vigilance that doesn't belong to a pet.

The man doesn't look at the clinic. Doesn't look at anything. His eyes stay forward, fixed on the middle distance, and my chest tightens.

Not pity. I know the difference.

Recognition.

I know what it looks like when someone tries to move through the world without being seen. I've been doing it my whole life.

He passes the front door, which is all window. The dog's ears flick once in my direction, but the man doesn't turn.

My pen hovers over the chart. I haven't written a word.

I set the pen down carefully, as if I've been caught doing something I shouldn't, and go back to my notes.

My handwriting is terrible for the next three lines.

* * *

Riley picks up on the second ring, which means she’s on break at Maggie's Diner in Evergreen Lakes or she's ignoring a customer. Knowing Riley, both.

"You're alive," she says. "I was planning the search party."

"You spoke to me yesterday."

"Twenty-four hours is a long time when my baby sister is living in a town with one road and no cell signal."

"I have cell signal."

"Barely," she huffs.

I tuck my legs under me on the couch—my couch, in my apartment, a thing I'm still getting used to—and press the phone to my ear.

Riley's voice is the most familiar sound in my world.

Louder than mine, always. Faster. She talks the way she moves through life, with the certainty that whatever's on the other side of the door will be glad to see her.

I have never once felt that certainty. But hearing it in her voice is almost enough.

"So," she says. "How's the hermit life?"

"I'm not hermit-ing."

"Bianca, you moved to a town that's literally inside a canyon. That is the geographic equivalent of crawling into a blanket fort."

I smile. She's not wrong. "It's beautiful here. And quiet."

"Of course it's quiet. There's like forty people."

"More than forty."

"Fifty?"

"Riley."

She laughs, and something loosens in my chest. This is what she does.

She reaches through the phone and unknots me, one joke at a time.

She's been doing it since I was ten years old, sitting on the floor of whatever apartment we'd landed in that month, waiting for parents who were never going to come through the door the way parents are supposed to.

Riley came through the door instead. Every time.

"Tell me something good," she says, and her voice is softer now. The real Riley, the one underneath the noise. The one who worries about me and pretends she doesn't.

"The clinic is good. My boss is a sixty-something-year-old man who keeps emergency whiskey in his desk drawer and keeps telling me to stop apologizing."

"I already love him."

"And Nora, the woman who runs the bed-and-breakfast where I stayed when I came for my interview and again for my first couple of nights before the apartment was ready. She brings me lunch at the clinic even though I told her she doesn't have to."

"Sounds like she's already adopted you."

"She might have."

We talk for twenty more minutes about nothing important. Riley tells me about a customer at Maggie's who tried to order a steak well-done with ketchup, and I laugh harder than the story deserves because I miss her so much it sits like a stone below my ribs.

After we hang up, I sit in the quiet and stare at the ceiling, thinking about the man with the limp.

I don't know why. It’s not like I know him. But my brain keeps replaying the way he moved. The way his dog stayed so close. The scar. The set of his jaw.

The way he didn't look.

I pull a blanket over my legs and close my eyes, and I tell myself it's just the nurse in me. Noticing. Cataloguing. It's what I'm trained to do.

It's not a very convincing lie.

* * *

On Friday afternoon, the clinic is empty. Dr. Theo left an hour ago to make a house call up the mountain, muttering something about a rancher's bad knee and worse attitude. I'm restocking exam room supplies and pretending it's productive when the front door opens and the smell of cinnamon walks in.

Nora Bell is the woman who makes a room warmer just by being in it.

Mid-fifties, soft and round, with curly gray hair pinned loosely at the back of her head and hazel eyes that twinkle in a way I'd call fictional if I hadn't seen it myself.

She always smells of cinnamon and pine, and carries herself with the cheerful certainty that every single person she meets was put in her path for a reason.

She is, without question, the most aggressively kind person I've ever met.

"Lunch," she announces, setting a paper bag on the front desk. "Turkey and Swiss on sourdough and one of those oatmeal cookies you pretended you didn't like."

"Nora, you don't—"

"Eat it before it gets cold. The soup won't keep." There's soup, too. Of course, there's soup.

I take the bag because I've learned that arguing with Nora is a waste of energy better spent elsewhere. She settles into the chair across from the desk and folds her hands in her lap, watching me with that expression she gets. The one that says she's not just looking at me. She's seeing me.

It's terrifying. In the warmest possible way.

"How are you settling in, sweetheart?"

"Good."

"Mhm." She tilts her head. "And how are you really settling in?"

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.

"It's a lot quieter than I expected," I say, which is the truest thing I can manage.

Nora smiles. "Iron Peak is good at quiet. Some people find it restful. Some people find it unbearable." She pauses. "The ones who stay are the ones who needed the quiet more than they knew."

I don't know what to say to that, so I unwrap the sandwich.

We sit together for a few minutes. Nora talks about the B&B—a couple from Denver coming this weekend, the rocking chair on the porch that needs fixing, and the guest-book she swears has predicted at least three marriages. I listen and eat and feel something I haven't felt in a long time.

Welcome.

Not the kind you perform for someone. The kind that just exists, steady and unearned.

That's when the movement catches my eye.

Through the clinic window. Across the street.

The man. The same man. Dark hair, broad shoulders, that uneven stride that pulls something tight behind my ribs. The German Shepherd at his side, ears forward, tail low and steady. He's carrying an axe handle over one shoulder, and his jaw is set against whatever his leg is doing to him today.

I watch him cross the street and disappear around the corner of the hardware store.

I watch him for too long.

When I turn back, Nora is looking at me.

Not at the window. At me. And there's something in her expression I can't quite read. Something warm and knowing and entirely too satisfied.

"That's Rhett Hawthorne," she says. Casual. Like she's mentioning the weather. "Lives up in the mountains. Keeps to himself."

She picks an invisible piece of lint off her sleeve.

"Good man," she adds. Quieter. "Very good man."

My face is hot. My neck is hot. I am a full-body thermometer of embarrassment, and I have no reason to be because I was just looking out the window, and people look out windows all the time.

"I wasn't—" I start.

Nora smiles.

It’s the most knowing smile I’ve ever seen on a human face, containing entire volumes of information I’m not ready to process. It says I saw everything, sweetheart, and this is going to be fun.

"The soup," she says, standing and smoothing her skirt. "Don't forget the soup."

She pats my shoulder on the way out, leaving the scent of cinnamon in her wake.

I stare at the sandwich in my hands.

Rhett Hawthorne.

I take a bite and pretend my pulse isn't doing something reckless.

Through the window, the street is empty. Just mountains and sky and the faint sound of wind moving through pine trees.

I wasn't staring.

I wasn't.