Chapter 4
Rhett
Three days since I delivered the firewood, and I still can’t get her hands out of my head.
Not her face. Not the red hair, or the green eyes, or the way she stood there in the clinic doorway looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t want to.
Her hands. The way she picked up those logs without being asked.
The way she carried them to the pile and set them down, careful and fitted, and didn’t make a single sound about it. No complaint. No show. She just did it.
And she shortened my trips. She took the logs from the end of the truck bed closest to the woodpile so I wouldn’t have to walk as far.
She thought I didn’t notice.
I noticed.
I’m at the splitting block, driving the maul into a round of lodgepole, and every time the steel bites wood I think about her hands and I swing harder, because if I’m going to be thinking about a woman I have no business thinking about, I might as well be in pain while I do it.
The leg is better today. Not good. Better.
There’s a difference, and after four years I’ve learned to take what I can get.
Chief is lying in his usual spot, chin on his paws, watching me work. He’s been different since the clinic. Restless in a way that has nothing to do with perimeters or threat assessment. He keeps looking toward the mountain road. Toward town.
Toward her.
I don’t say anything about it. What would I say? Stop thinking about the nurse. He’d ignore me the same way I’m ignoring myself.
The thing I can’t shake is the way he went to her.
Just walked across the room and pressed his nose into her palm and stayed there.
Chief doesn’t do that. He doesn’t go to anyone.
Not Kellan Blackwood, the veterinarian who’s been checking him over for years.
Not Colt, who served in the same unit, who smells like the same dust and gunpowder and sweat that Chief spent his first three years breathing.
Chief tolerates people. He endures proximity. He does not choose it.
He chose her.
I split another round and stack the halves and tell myself it means nothing.
* * *
Nora calls at four o’clock. I’m in the kitchen, standing at the counter eating cold leftover stew.
“Rhett, honey. I’m doing a little community dinner at the Summit House on Saturday. Nothing fancy. Just some folks from town, good food, a reason to be in the same room together. You should come.”
“Nora.”
“It’ll be casual. Six o’clock. I’m making pot roast.”
Pot roast. She knows what she’s doing. My grandfather’s favorite.
My mother used to make it on Sundays, and after she was gone Nora took over, showing up with the same cast iron dutch oven and the same recipe and the quiet understanding that some things need to keep going even when the person who started them can’t.
“Who’s coming?”
“Oh, a few people. Shreriff Hank. Dr. Theo. The Garcia family. Bianca, probably. I told her she shouldn’t eat alone on a Saturday.”
There it is.
She drops the name the way you’d drop a lit match into dry kindling. Casual. Almost careless. Except Nora Bell has never been careless about a single thing in her life, and we both know it.
“Nora.”
“Six o’clock, sweetheart. Bring Chief. He can have the good scraps.”
She hangs up before I can say no. That’s her move. It has been since long before I left for the Navy. She makes the ask, provides the reason, and exits before you can build a defense. By the time you’ve thought of a good excuse, she’s already set an extra plate.
I put the phone down and lean against the counter. Chief is watching me from the doorway, head tilted, ears forward.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him.
He keeps looking at me like that.
I know what this is. Nora saw something at the clinic.
Maybe Bianca said something, or maybe Nora didn’t need anyone to say anything, because Nora sees things that other people miss and she’s been waiting for a reason to pull this thread for a long time.
She’s been watching me close myself off for years, and she’s been patient about it.
Now she’s found an opening, and she’s walking through it with a pot roast.
I should say no. Call her back and tell her I’ve got a delivery Saturday, or the truck needs work, or the leg is bad. She’d accept it. She’d be disappointed, but she’d accept it, and she’d try again next week because that’s what she does.
But telling Nora no feels like telling my mother no. And I’ve been telling my mother no for long enough.
I eat the rest of the cold stew. I don’t call her back.
* * *
The Summit House looks warm from the outside.
That’s the first thing I notice when I pull into the gravel lot on Saturday, because warmth is something I register the way other people register temperature.
The white Victorian with its green shutters is glowing.
Every window lit. The wraparound porch strung with small lights that Nora probably put up this afternoon.
I can smell the pot roast from the truck.
Chief shifts in the passenger seat, nose working.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I know.”
I sit in the truck for three minutes, and I count them.
Three minutes of sitting in the dark with the engine off, listening to laughter and conversation bleeding through the walls of the B&B, telling myself I can leave.
I can put the truck in reverse and drive back up the mountain and text Nora that the leg was bad and she’ll understand.
I get out of the truck with Chief in tow.
The porch stairs are a negotiation. Two steps, a railing I grip hard enough to whiten my knuckles, and a landing that puts me face to face with Nora’s front door.
Inside, I can hear Hank’s steady voice, the Garcias laughing, the clatter of plates being set on a table.
Normal sounds. The sounds of people who know how to be around other people.
I open the door.
Nora finds me in three seconds. She’s across the room with a glass of something in her hand and she crosses the space with a smile that says I knew you’d come and wraps her free arm around my waist in a half-hug that I tolerate because she smells like my mother’s kitchen, cinnamon, and fighting it would cost more than allowing it.
“You came,” she says.
“You knew I would.”
“I hoped.” Her eyes are bright. Warm. Dangerously satisfied. “There’s pot roast. And pie. Go fix yourself a plate.”
I scan the room out of habit. Hank by the fireplace, beer in hand, talking to one of the Garcia sons. Dr. Theo in the corner armchair, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, which means he’s where Nora told him to be. The Garcia family filling up the dining table with noise and warmth.
And Bianca.
She’s standing near the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of water with both hands. Red curls loose around her shoulders. Green eyes that find me and then drop to the floor. A flush climbs her neck.
She’s wearing a soft blue sweater and jeans, and she looks the way she looked at the clinic. Quiet. Contained. Trying very hard to take up as little space as possible.
My pulse does the same thing it did on the street, and I shove it down the same way I shoved it down then. Hard. Fast. Done.
I fix a plate because it gives me something to do with my hands. The pot roast is as good as it always is. I eat standing near the kitchen, out of the main flow, the way I’ve been attending Nora’s events for years. Close enough to count as present. Far enough not to have to perform.
Chief has positioned himself in the center of the room, which is unusual. He normally stays at my side, pressed against my leg, his own version of standing at the edge. But tonight he’s lying on the rug between the dining room and the kitchen, and his eyes keep tracking Bianca.
She notices. I see her glance at him, then away. Then back.
Dr. Theo catches my eye from across the room and raises his whiskey glass in a gesture that could mean anything from “good to see you” to “I’m not involved in whatever Nora’s planning.” I nod back.
Twenty minutes. I’ll stay for twenty minutes.
I last forty-five before the walls close in.
It’s not the people. It’s the noise. The layered, overlapping sound of multiple conversations happening at once, the ambient chaos that most people filter without thinking.
I can’t filter it. Haven’t been able to since the mission.
My brain parses every voice, every sound, tracks origin points and threat levels and escape routes, and after forty-five minutes the processing burns through whatever reserves I walked in with.
I step out onto the porch.
The cold hits my face and I breathe it in. The mountains are black shapes against a sky full of stars, and the only sounds are the wind in the pines and the muffled rumble of conversation through the closed door. Better. My shoulders drop half an inch.
Chief pushes through the door behind me and settles at the top of the steps.
I lean against the porch railing and let the quiet settle.
This is the part Nora understands. She doesn’t follow me out.
She doesn’t send someone to check on me.
She gives me the porch the way my grandfather used to give me the tree line behind the cabin.
Room to breathe without having to explain why you need it.
The door opens again.
Not Nora. I know Nora’s footsteps. These are quieter. Hesitant.
Bianca steps onto the porch and stops when she sees me. For a second, I think she’s going to turn around. Go back inside. Fold herself smaller until she disappears.
She doesn’t.
She walks to the railing, three feet from where I’m standing, and wraps her hands around the wood and says nothing. Doesn’t look at me. Just stands there, breathing the cold air, looking at the mountains.
Chief gets up from the steps, walks over, and lies down at her feet.
Traitor.
A minute passes. Maybe two. The silence between us isn’t uncomfortable. Two people used to being quiet, standing next to each other without needing words to justify it.
“It’s loud in there,” she says. Soft. Almost apologetic.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not very good at loud anymore.”
I look at her. She’s looking at the mountains, and the porch lights catch the side of her face, the curl of her hair against her cheek, the set of her mouth.
She’s not performing. Not making small talk because the silence scares her.
She’s telling me something true and small, and she’s not asking for anything in return.
“Me neither,” I say.
She glances at me. A quick look, barely a second, and then back to the mountains. But in that second, I see something I recognize. The specific exhaustion of a person who has spent their whole life performing comfort for other people and has never quite figured out how to feel it themselves.
I know that exhaustion. I wear a different version of it.
“How long have you lived here?” she asks.
“Four years this round. I grew up here before that.”
“Do you ever get used to it?” She gestures at the mountains, the valley, the dark expanse of sky. “The quiet?”
“Used to it isn’t the right word.” I think about it. She asked, so I give her an honest answer, which is more than most people get. “You learn to need it. And then you can’t go back.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “I think I might already need it.”
“Where were you before?”
“LA. Burn unit.”
Three words. They land with a weight that tells me everything I need to know about why she left.
I’ve seen burn units. I’ve been in burn units.
The fluorescent lights and the smell of debrided skin and the sounds that come from people whose nerve endings are still firing long after they should have stopped.
“That’s a hard place to be,” I say.
“Yes.”
She doesn’t elaborate. Doesn’t explain or justify. Just “yes.” One word that closes a door without slamming it.
I respect that.
We stand on the porch for another ten minutes.
She asks about Chief. Not the usual questions.
Not “what breed” or “how old” or “can I pet him.” She asks if he’s always this calm.
I tell her he’s calm because he trusts the perimeter.
She nods, and the nod says she understands what that means in a way that most people wouldn’t.
There are no questions about my leg. None about the scar. She doesn’t glance at them the way people do when they’re pretending not to look.
She just stands next to me and breathes the mountain air and doesn’t push.
And that terrifies me. Not the pushing. I can handle pushing. I’ve been handling pushing for four years. People push and I push back, and the wall stays up, and everybody goes home. It’s simple. It’s safe.
She doesn’t push. She just stands there with my dog at her feet and the mountains at her back, and something inside me shifts. I didn’t give permission to shift.
I feel it. A warning and a certainty at the same time. Walk away.
“I should go,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. “Early morning.”
She nods. “Of course.”
No protest. No stay a little longer. She lets me go the way she let me leave the clinic. Clean. No weight attached.
It makes it worse.
I call Chief. He stands, reluctant, and follows me to the steps. I take them cautiously, one at a time, gripping the railing. The leg is stiff from standing still too long, and the cold has settled into the joint.
At the truck, I open the door for Chief and he jumps in. I pull myself up after him. Turn the key. The engine catches.
I look back.
I shouldn’t and know I shouldn’t. But I look back, and she’s standing at the porch railing where I left her, her hands wrapped around the wood, her red hair catching the light.
She’s watching me go.
Not waving. Not smiling. Just watching, steady and quiet, and the look on her face isn’t expectation or invitation. It’s simpler than that. Worse. It’s an ‘I see you.’
I pull out of the lot and drive up the mountain in the dark, and the crack in the wall doesn’t close.
I don’t think it’s going to.