Chapter 3
Bianca
Dr. Theo is halfway through a story about a hiker who tried to set his own broken finger with duct tape and a popsicle stick when Nora breezes through the clinic door with a basket of muffins and a smile that means she’s already decided something.
I’ve known Nora Bell for eleven days. That’s long enough to recognize the smile.
“Theo,” she says, setting the basket on the counter. “Your woodpile is pathetic.”
Dr. Theo doesn’t look up from his chart. “My woodpile is fine.”
“It’s three logs and a prayer. You’re going to freeze some poor patient to death in here. I can see my breath.”
“You cannot see your breath.”
“I’m being illustrative.” She waves a hand. “I’ve already asked Rhett to bring a load down. He’ll be by this afternoon.”
Something kicks behind my sternum. A small, stupid jolt I have no business feeling.
Dr. Theo looks up. He glances at Nora, then at me, then back at Nora with the slow, measured expression of a man who has known this woman for a very long time and trusts none of what she’s doing.
“My back can’t handle stacking wood anymore,” Nora continues, smoothing the napkin around the muffins. “And yours shouldn’t. So Bianca, sweetheart, would you mind showing him where Theo keeps the woodpile out back? He’ll do the heavy lifting. You just need to point.”
“I can—sure. Of course.”
My voice comes out too fast. I press my lips together and busy myself straightening a stack of intake forms that don’t need straightening.
Nora beams. Dr. Theo sighs the sigh of a man who has seen this play before and knows better than to get in the way.
“Muffins are blueberry,” Nora says to no one in particular, and leaves.
The clinic door swings shut. Dr. Theo stares at it for a long moment.
“She’s up to something,” he says.
I don’t ask what. I already know, and I’m not ready to say it out loud.
* * *
Dr. Theo leaves at two for a house call. A rancher’s wife with recurring migraines, he says, grabbing his ancient medical bag and muttering about people who refuse to come into town for proper scans. He tells me to lock up if nobody comes in before four.
Nobody comes in.
I spend an hour reorganizing the exam room drawers, which don’t need reorganizing.
Restock the gauze. Wipe down the counter twice.
And I’m aware that I’m cleaning things that are already clean, and I’m doing it because my hands need something to do that isn’t thinking about the fact that Rhett Hawthorne is coming to this clinic and I’ll be alone when he arrives.
This is ridiculous. I’m a medical professional, and have inserted chest tubes in screaming patients, held a man’s hand while third-degree burns were debrided from his back. I can handle a firewood delivery.
At a quarter to three, I hear a truck engine. Low, heavy, the sound of something that works for a living. Tires on gravel. Then the engine cuts, and there’s nothing but the wind and the faint creak of a truck door opening.
I don’t go to the window. I stay at the desk and look at the chart in front of me and read the same sentence four times without absorbing a single word.
The clinic door opens. He fills the doorway.
That’s the first thing I notice, and it’s not a thought so much as a physical fact.
He’s tall enough that the frame seems built for someone else, and broad enough that the afternoon light narrows around him.
Dark hair. Stubbled jaw. The scar I remember from the window, running down the left side of his face, and the tattoos climbing his left arm, disappearing into the rolled sleeve of a flannel that’s seen better days.
His eyes find mine, and I forget how to hold a pen.
I don’t know what color they are. That’s the thing.
He’s standing ten feet away, and I can’t process the color because all I can register is the way he looks at me.
Guarded. Careful. Not cold, but not warm either.
He’s already decided how this interaction is going to go, and he’s not planning to stay long enough for it to go any other way.
“Nora sent me,” he says. His voice is low. Rough. Gravel under boots. “Firewood.”
“Right.” I stand up and the chair rolls back too far and hits the wall. I pretend that didn’t happen. “Yes. The woodpile is around back. I can show you.”
He nods once. Doesn’t move.
That’s when the German Shepherd pushes past his leg and walks into the clinic.
The dog is enormous up close. Dark face, tan legs, intelligent brown eyes that sweep the room with the same calm vigilance I noticed from the window. He moves to the center of the waiting room and stops, standing still, ears rotating.
I wait. I don’t reach for him. Somewhere in the back of my mind, past all the noise my pulse is making, this isn’t a dog you approach. This is a dog you let come to you.
He takes his time. Looks at the chairs. The bulletin board. The desk. Then he walks to me.
His nose touches my hand. A single, deliberate nudge. Not a sniff. A decision. He presses his muzzle into my palm and holds it there, and my breath catches so hard it almost hurts.
I look at Rhett.
He’s staring at his dog. Not at me. And his expression is unguarded for a second. Surprise, maybe. Or confusion. Then he pulls it shut.
“He doesn’t do that,” Rhett says. Quiet.
“Do what?”
He shakes his head. Doesn’t answer.
I run my fingers over the dog’s ears. He leans into it, just slightly, and his tail moves once. Not a wag. Something smaller. An offering.
“Hi,” I whisper to him. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
His tail moves again.
Rhett clears his throat. “Woodpile.”
“Right. Yes. This way.”
The woodpile is behind the clinic, against the back wall, under an overhang that keeps the rain off. It’s low. Nora wasn’t exaggerating about that. A few split rounds, some kindling, and a lot of empty space where a proper stack should be.
Rhett looks at it and says nothing, which I’m understanding is his version of a strong opinion.
He goes to the truck. I follow because standing still feels worse than being useful.
Split firewood, neat and tight, fills his truck bed; someone who’s been doing this a long time stacked it.
He drops the tailgate and reaches for the first armload, and I watch the way his body adjusts.
His right leg takes the weight. His left leg follows, stiff, a half-beat behind.
He doesn’t grimace, but his jaw tightens. The smallest tell.
He carries the first load to the woodpile and stacks it with surgical precision. Every piece fitted against the next. No gaps. No wasted space.
I pick up two logs from the truck bed.
He turns around and sees me carrying them and stops.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
I carry them to the pile and set them down. They’re heavier than I expected, and I can feel the bark biting into my forearms, but I don’t put them down early, and I don’t fumble. I set them on the stack the way he did. Snug. Fitted.
He watches me for a second. Then he turns back to the truck and gets another load.
We work in silence.
It should be awkward. Two strangers who’ve exchanged maybe ten words, carrying firewood back and forth without speaking.
But the silence doesn’t feel empty. It feels like the silence in the exam room when a patient is finally breathing normally and you don’t need to say anything because the worst part is over and everyone knows it.
I notice his hands. They’re large, scarred across the knuckles, calloused in the places that come from gripping tools. He handles the wood carefully, deliberately. No wasted motion.
I notice the scar on his face more clearly now. It runs from just below his left eye down to his jaw, a thin white line against tanned skin. Not surgical. Something rougher. Something that happened fast and healed slow.
I notice the way he favors his left leg more as the work goes on.
The slight hitch that gets less slight with each trip to the truck.
He’s pushing through it. The signs are clear.
I’ve seen a hundred patients do exactly this—refuse to stop, refuse to ask for help, refuse to admit that the body has limits the will can’t override.
I want to say something. But I don’t.
The nurse in me wants to say sit down, let me finish this, you’re making it worse. The rest of me knows saying those words to this man would be the fastest way to make him leave and never come back.
So I just carry wood. And I make sure I carry the pieces from the end of the truck bed closest to the woodpile, so his trips are shorter.
If he notices, he doesn’t say so.
His dog lies in the dirt between the truck and the woodpile, chin on his paws, watching us both. His eyes move from Rhett to me and back again, steady and patient, and something about that steadiness makes me feel like I’m being evaluated by a dog who takes this sort of thing seriously.
The last load goes on the pile. Rhett stands back and looks at the stack, and I see something shift in his shoulders. Not quite relaxation, but the absence of strain. A task completed. A thing he can measure.
“That’ll hold you through the month,” he says.
“Thank you. You didn’t have to—”
“Nora asked.” He says it the way someone else might say the sun came up. Inevitable. Non-negotiable.
I almost smile. “She’s hard to say no to.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. Not a smile. The ghost of one. A hairline fracture in something that hasn’t cracked in a very long time.
“Yeah,” he says. “She is.”
He looks at me for one more second. I hold his gaze, and it costs me something. My chest is tight, and my skin feels too warm, and I don’t look away because looking away right now feels like losing something I haven’t earned yet.
Then he turns.
“Chief.”
The dog rises immediately, shakes once, and falls into step at Rhett’s left side. They move together toward the truck with the same uneven, synchronized rhythm I watched from the window. Two creatures who’ve learned to match each other’s damage.
Rhett opens the truck door. Chief jumps in. Rhett follows, slower, and I see the way he grips the door frame to pull himself up. The way his left leg trembles when it takes weight.
He doesn’t look back.
The truck pulls out of the gravel lot and turns toward the mountain road, and I stand behind the clinic with bark dust on my forearms and the smell of pine sap on my hands, and I realize I’m shaking.
Not a lot. Just my hands. A fine tremor in my fingers I can feel when I press them together.
I know why. I just don’t have the courage to name it yet.
Inside, I wash my hands at the exam room sink and watch the water run brown with dirt, and I think about the way Chief pressed his nose into my palm. The way Rhett said he doesn’t do that with something in his voice that sounded almost like fear.
I think about the ghost of a smile.
I dry my hands on a paper towel and sit down at the desk, and they’re still shaking.