Chapter 2
Rhett
The leg wakes up before I do. That's how the bad days start.
Not with the alarm, not with the cold pressing through the cabin walls, but with a deep, grinding ache in my left thigh that drags me out of sleep and drops me into the dark with my teeth already clenched.
I lie there for a while, staring at the ceiling beams my grandfather put up forty years ago, and I wait for the muscles to stop seizing.
Chief is on the floor beside the bed in one of his many beds around the cabin.
He lifts his head when I move, ears forward, watching.
He knows the difference between a good morning and a bad one.
On good mornings, I swing my legs out, and he stretches and follows me to the kitchen.
On bad mornings he stays close and doesn't take his eyes off me until I'm upright and moving.
Today he stays close.
I get up in pieces. Sit on the edge of the bed.
Wait. Press both hands into the mattress and push to standing.
The left leg buckles for half a second, and I catch myself on the nightstand, the wood biting into my palm.
Chief is on his feet now, pressed against my good leg, steady. I drop a hand to his head.
“I’m all right.”
He doesn’t believe me. He’s smart enough not to.
The cabin is cold. I built the fire too small last night, and it died before dawn, so the air has that sharp, thin bite that settles into your joints.
I pull on jeans, a thermal shirt, and a flannel.
Boots take longer on bad days. I have to brace my foot against the floor and force the left one on while the femoral nerve sends white light up my hip and into my spine.
I breathe through it. I’ve been breathing through it for four years.
Chief follows me to the kitchen. I make coffee in the percolator my grandfather used every morning of his life, the one thing in this cabin I’d save if the whole place burned.
I feed Chief. He eats with the focused efficiency of a dog who spent the first three years of his life eating in combat zones and never quite learned to slow down.
I drink my coffee standing at the window and watch the light come up over the ridge.
The mountains don’t care about my leg. They don’t care about anything. That’s why I came back.
* * *
Chopping wood on a bad leg day is stupid.
I know it’s stupid. Dr. Theo has told me it’s stupid in at least four different ways, each one more creative than the last. But the wood doesn’t split itself, and the orders don’t fill themselves, and sitting in the cabin waiting for the nerve pain to calm down feels too much like the hospital.
Four months on my back in a room that smelled like gauze and industrial soap, staring at a ceiling that wasn’t mine, thinking about men who would never stare at any ceiling again.
I’d rather have the pain.
The splitting block is out behind the cabin, under a stand of ponderosa pine my grandparents planted before I was born.
I set a round of lodgepole on the block, swing the maul, and let the impact travel through my arms and into my chest. Split.
Stack. Set another round. The rhythm is the only meditation I’ve ever been able to stand.
No breathing exercises, no mantras. Just the weight of the steel and the clean crack of wood separating along the grain.
Chief lies in the dirt nearby, chin on his paws, watching the treeline. Always watching. He hasn’t stopped scanning perimeters since we came home, and I haven’t had the heart to tell him there’s nothing out there. Maybe because I’m not sure I believe it either.
By ten o’clock I have a full cord loaded in the truck bed.
My leg is shaking. Not the shaking anyone else would notice, but I feel it.
A tremor deep in the quadricep, the muscle firing and misfiring in a pattern that means I’ve pushed too far.
I lean against the tailgate and let the sweat cool on the back of my neck, and tell myself I’ll rest when the deliveries are done.
I won’t. But the lie gets me in the truck.
Iron Peak on a Tuesday morning is about as busy as it ever gets, which means there are eight trucks parked on Main Street instead of four.
I make my deliveries with the windows down and the radio off.
The Garcias need a quarter cord stacked by the side door.
Old Margaret Pruitt wants hers on the porch, and she’ll leave an envelope under the mat because she doesn’t want to come outside in her robe. Fine by me. Less talking.
I park outside the hardware store to pick up chain oil and sit in the truck for a minute, working up to the walk.
Bad leg days in town are worse than bad leg days at the cabin.
At the cabin, nobody sees me grip a doorframe or pause on the porch steps.
In town, people look. They try not to. But they look.
Chief is in the passenger seat, sitting upright, scanning the street through the windshield. His ears rotate, tracking sounds I can’t hear. A car door. Footsteps. Someone laughing outside the post office.
“Come,” I tell him. He pops out of the truck on high alert. No matter what, every time we come into town, he treats it like we’re in hostile territory.
I get out. The leg holds. I cross the street with my jaw set and my eyes on the hardware store, and I don’t look at anything else because looking at things in this town leads to conversations, and conversations lead to questions, and questions lead to that look people get.
The one where they’re trying to figure out how to say something kind to a man who doesn’t want kindness.
I almost make it.
The clinic is on my left. I’ve walked past it a hundred times without glancing over, because Dr. Theo knows where to find me if he needs me, and I’ve got no reason to go in there voluntarily. But today the front window catches the light at the wrong angle, or at the wrong time, and I see her.
Red hair. Not the red you see every day.
Tight curls, the color of copper left out in the weather, falling around a face I can only see in profile.
She’s sitting at the front desk, writing something, and even through the glass I can tell she’s concentrating.
Her mouth moves. Talking to herself, maybe, or reading something back.
Soft. Everything about the way she holds herself is soft.
She looks up.
I look away.
Fast. Mechanical. I keep walking, and my pulse does something it hasn’t done in years. A kick behind the ribs. Hard and unwelcome.
Keep moving.
I keep moving. The hardware store is twenty feet ahead, and I cover the distance without looking back, but the image stays. Red curls. The curve of her jaw. The quiet focus in the way she held her pen.
Stop.
I stop. Not the thought. The thought doesn’t stop. But I shove it down to the place where I keep everything else I’m not allowed to have, and I walk into the hardware store and buy chain oil and don’t say a word to anyone.
Nora calls while I’m loading the chain oil into the truck, and I already know I’m going to do whatever she asks.
It’s been that way since I was sixteen years old and she showed up at my grandfather’s cabin with a casserole dish and the quiet, unshakable certainty that we needed her whether or not we said so.
She was right. She’s always right. That’s the problem.
“Rhett, honey.” Her voice is warm and unhurried, the way it always is, like she’s got nowhere to be and all the time in the world to talk to you.
“I need a hand with something at the B&B. One of the porch posts is leaning, and I don’t trust that handyman from Montrose to come all the way up here before it falls on somebody. ”
“When.”
“Whenever you can, sweetheart. Tomorrow? Thursday?”
She says it as if it’s optional. It’s not.
Nora was my mother’s best friend. The only person who came to the cabin after Mom died, when my grandfather went so quiet I thought the silence would swallow us both.
Nora showed up with food, and she kept showing up, week after week, year after year, until showing up wasn’t a kindness anymore.
It was just the truth. She was family. The kind you don’t choose and can’t refuse.
Telling her no would feel like telling my mother no. And my mother’s been gone long enough that the things that remind me of her are the things I can’t bring myself to turn away from.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Wonderful. I’ll have coffee on.”
She will. She’ll have coffee and something baked, and she’ll ask how I’m doing, and I’ll say fine, and she’ll look at me with that gentle, knowing patience that says I see you lying, and I love you anyway.
And I’ll fix the post and drink the coffee and leave before she can ask anything that matters.
That’s the deal. That’s how we’ve done it for years.
I hang up and sit in the truck with the engine off. Chief puts his chin on my thigh. The good thigh. He always knows.
* * *
I’m pulling out of the hardware store lot when I hear my name.
Not shouted. Just said, at a volume that carries. I know who it is before I look.
Colt Ryker is leaning against the fence outside the feed store with his arms crossed and his hat pulled low.
Dark hair, dark eyes, a beard that hasn’t seen a razor in weeks.
He looks the way he always looks. A man who’s been through something he doesn’t talk about and came out the other side harder than he went in.
He was. He did. We both did.
“You look like hell,” Colt says.
“Thanks.”
“Leg?”
“It’s fine.”
He doesn’t push. That’s the thing about Colt.
He served with me. Was there for the worst of it, or close enough.
And he moved to Iron Peak two years after I came back home, bought a ranch on the north side of the valley, and never once asked me to talk about what happened.
He just checks in. Shows up at the cabin with a six-pack and sits on the porch and doesn’t say much, and somehow that’s enough. It’s more than enough.
He’s the only person besides Nora that I’d let get that close. The only person who doesn’t make the proximity feel like pressure.
“You eat today?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
I haven’t. He knows. He lets it go.
“I’ll come by this weekend,” he says. It’s not a question.
I nod once and pull away from the curb. In the side mirror, Colt is still leaning against the fence, watching my truck until I turn the corner. Keeping an eye. That’s what he does.
Across the street, Sheriff Hank Lawson is stepping out of his cruiser. Tall, broad, brown Stetson, the same steady expression he’s worn every day for the decade he’s been pretending the word “acting” is still in front of his title. He sees my truck and raises a hand.
I don’t wave back.
It’s not personal. Hank knows that. But I don’t have it in me today. The leg is screaming, and the drive home is twenty minutes of gravel switchbacks, and I’ve already spent more time around people than I can handle.
Chief presses closer to my side. I rest my hand on his back and feel the steady rise and fall of his breathing under my palm.
* * *
The cabin is quiet when we get back. It’s always quiet. That used to be the point.
I unload the chain oil, check the generator, and fill Chief’s water bowl.
The routine is the scaffolding that holds the days together.
Without it, I’d sit on the porch and stare at the mountains until the light was gone, and then I’d sit in the dark and stare at nothing, and the thoughts I spend all day outrunning would catch up.
So I don’t sit.
I sharpen the saw chain, then stack the wood I didn’t deliver. I heat leftover chili and eat it standing at the counter because sitting down means my leg stiffens, and getting back up is a negotiation I’d rather skip.
By the time the light turns amber through the west-facing windows, the pain has dulled to its usual background hum. Not gone. Never gone. Just quiet enough to carry.
I sit on the porch with Chief beside me. The valley is turning purple below the ridge, and the peaks above the tree line are still holding the last of the sun. Somewhere down there, Iron Peak is settling in for the evening. Lights coming on. Doors closing. People going home to people.
I think about red hair and I kill the thought.
I think about soft hands holding a pen and I kill that one too.
Chief puts his head on my boot. A long exhale, his ribs settling. Done for the day.
“You’re the only good thing about this town,” I tell him. My voice sounds rough. Unused. It’s been hours since I’ve spoken to anyone.
Chief lifts his head. Looks at me. Then turns and looks down the mountain toward town.
In the clinic's direction.
His ears come forward. Steady and certain, as if he heard something I didn’t.
I look away.
“Don’t start.”
Chief sets his chin back on my boot and closes his eyes, and I sit on the porch in the fading light and pretend that the quiet is still enough.