Chapter 6
Rhett
Chief won’t put weight on his front left paw, and that gets me out of my own head faster than anything else could.
I notice it at dawn, when he stands from his bed by the woodstove and takes two steps and stops. He doesn’t whimper. But he lifts the paw and holds it off the ground and looks at me, and the look says something’s wrong and I need you to handle it.
I’m on the floor beside him in three seconds, bad leg be damned. I run my hand down his foreleg, gently, feeling for swelling or heat. He lets me. He’s always let me. I find it at the wrist joint. Swollen. Warm to the touch. He flinches when I press, just barely, and pulls the paw back.
“All right,” I tell him. “All right. I’ve got you.”
I call Kellan Blackwood’s office before seven. He picks up on the second ring, which tells me the man sleeps about as well as I do. His voice is clipped and professional, the voice of someone who prefers animals to people and doesn’t bother hiding it.
“Bring him in at nine,” Kellan says. “Don’t let him walk on it.”
“He’s eighty-five pounds.”
“Then carry him.”
He hangs up. I look at Chief. Chief looks at me. Eighty-five pounds of German Shepherd who hasn’t been carried since he was pulled out of a blown-out building in Kandahar, and a man with a left leg that buckles on stairs.
This is going to be a problem.
I manage to get him to the truck by half-carrying, half-guiding him with his weight against my right side.
It takes ten minutes and leaves me gripping the truck bed with both hands, breathing hard, the leg shaking so badly I can feel it in my teeth.
Chief is in the passenger seat, paw lifted, watching me with patient brown eyes that say I know this is hard for you, and I’m choosing not to comment.
I drive to town with the windows down and my jaw locked.
Kellan’s office is small, clean, smelling of disinfectant and hay. I park out front and sit in the truck for a minute, doing the math. Eighty-five pounds. Three steps up to the door. My leg is already spent from the cabin.
I’m working out the angles when someone knocks on my window.
Red hair. Green eyes. The clinic must be visible from here, or maybe she was on her way to work, or maybe the universe has decided that this woman is going to keep appearing in my peripheral vision until I stop pretending I don’t see her.
Bianca is standing beside my truck with a paper bag in one hand and concern written across her face, sharpened by that focused attention I’ve started recognizing as her default setting.
I roll down the window.
“Is he okay?” she asks. Not hi or good morning, or any of the pleasantries that most people use to fill the space before they get to what they mean. She’s looking past me at Chief, reading him the way she reads a patient chart. Fast. Accurate.
“Front paw,” I say. “Swollen. Kellan’s going to look at it.”
She nods. Glances at the steps to Kellan’s door. Glances at me. At my leg. And I see the calculation happen in real time. The nurse’s brain running the same math I just ran: eighty-five pounds, three steps, one bad leg.
She doesn’t say any of it.
“Can I help you get him inside?”
There’s no pity in it. No performance. She’s offering the way she offered to carry firewood. Practical. Matter-of-fact. Help without strings, because she doesn’t know how to attach them.
I should say no. I should say I’ve got it, the same way I’ve said it to everyone about everything for four years.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’d help.”
The words taste foreign. A language I used to speak and have forgotten.
She sets the paper bag on the hood of my truck and comes around to the passenger side. Chief lifts his head when she opens the door. His tail moves once. That careful, deliberate wag he only gives her.
“Hey, buddy,” she says, soft. “Let’s get you looked at.”
She slides her arms under his chest the way someone who knows animals does.
Supports his weight against her body. I come around and take his hindquarters, and together we lift him out of the truck and carry him up the steps, and the whole time she’s talking to him in a low, steady murmur that settles somewhere behind my ribs.
Chief rests his head against her shoulder.
I almost stop walking.
Kellan is efficient and thorough and doesn’t waste a single word, which makes him one of the few people in this town I can stand for more than ten minutes.
He examines Chief’s paw with careful hands, bending the joint, palpating the swelling.
Chief holds still. Seven years of military discipline doesn’t leave a dog, even in a vet’s office.
“Sprain,” Kellan says. “Nothing torn. Rest and anti-inflammatories. Keep him off it for a week.” He looks up at me with dark, unreadable eyes. “He’s not young anymore, Hawthorne. Start thinking about joint supplements.”
I nod and don’t want to think about Chief not being young anymore. Or think about the number seven and what it means for a German Shepherd and how many years that math leaves me.
Bianca is in the waiting room when I come out. She didn’t leave. I expected her to leave. She should be at the clinic, not sitting in a plastic chair with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for a man and a dog who aren’t her responsibility.
“Just a sprain,” I tell her.
Something loosens in her face. Relief. Actual relief for a dog she’s met three times.
“Good,” she says. “That’s good.”
We carry Chief back to the truck together.
She’s careful with him. Careful with me, too, staying on my right side, matching her pace to mine without making it obvious.
The same thing she did with the firewood.
Quiet consideration that costs her nothing and costs me everything, because I don’t know what to do with someone who pays that kind of attention.
I should say thank you and go home.
“I have coffee at the cabin,” I say instead, and the words are out before I’ve decided to say them. “If you want. Before you go back to work.”
She blinks. A flush creeps up her neck. She looks down the street toward the clinic, and I expect her to turn me down.
“Okay,” she says. Quiet. “Okay. It’s my morning off. I don’t have to be in until noon.”
Shock overtakes me. I didn’t expect her to say yes, but this strange feeling of pleased pulses through my chest. I do my best to ignore it.
She says nothing for the first five minutes of the drive up the mountain. I don’t either. The gravel road switchbacks through dense pine, climbing above the valley, and the only sounds are the truck engine and Chief breathing between us.
She’s in the passenger seat, looking out the window at the mountains, her red curls loose around her face, her hands resting in her lap. Not fidgeting. Not filling the silence. Just sitting in it, the way she stood in it on the porch.
The cabin looks the way it always looks. Old logs, tin roof, the porch my grandfather rebuilt the summer I turned twelve. Smoke-stained chimney and a splitting block out back and a view of the valley that stops people mid-sentence when they see it for the first time.
Bianca sees it for the first time.
She says nothing. She stands beside the truck and looks at the cabin and the mountains behind it and the forest pressing close on both sides, and her mouth opens slightly and then closes.
Wonder.
“Rhett,” she says. Soft. “This is where you live?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s beautiful.”
I’ve never thought of it as beautiful. It’s the place I came back to because there was nowhere else. The place my grandfather built and my mother died in, and I’ve been hiding in for four years.
We get Chief settled on his bed by the woodstove.
Bianca stands in the doorway, taking in the cabin.
I see her eyes move over the kitchen, the percolator, the stack of split wood by the stove, the single chair at the table.
She doesn’t comment on how spare it is. She doesn’t look around for the things that aren’t here—a couch, a second chair.
Evidence of a life that includes other people.
I make coffee. She sits at the table and watches me move through the kitchen, and I’m aware of every step, every reach, every adjustment my body makes around the leg. I pour two mugs and bring them over and stand across from her, and for a minute we just drink coffee and listen to the fire pop.
“How long has he been with you?” she asks.
“Seven years. Since he was a pup.”
“Kellan said—” she stops. Reconsiders. “He’s lucky to have you.”
“Other way around.”
She looks at me over the rim of her mug. Patient. Steady. Not asking for more than I want to give.
I give more anyway.
“He was the unit’s dog,” I say. I don’t know why I’m saying it.
I don’t talk about this. I’ve never talked about this, not to Colt, not to Nora, not to the therapist the VA assigned me, who I stopped seeing after three sessions.
But Bianca is sitting at my table with her hands wrapped around a mug and her eyes on mine, and she’s not leaning forward.
She’s not bracing for the story. She’s just there.
“There were eight of us. And Chief.”
I stop. The words are there, but they’re caught behind my ribs, the way they’ve been caught for four years, and I stare at the table and try to breathe.
“Seven didn’t come back,” I say.
The cabin is silent.
“Chief pulled me out. Dragged me by the vest until someone found us. I don’t remember most of it. Just his teeth in the fabric and the sound he was making.” I swallow. “He’s the reason I’m here and the reason I can’t—”
I stop again. My hand is shaking. Not the leg. The hand. And the guilt is pressing up against the inside of my ribs, trying to get out the way it always does when I let the wall thin.
They’re all dead and I’m drinking coffee.
That’s what it sounds like when it gets past the wall. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just the flat, brutal arithmetic of being alive when the people you were responsible for are not.
I push back from the counter I was leaning against. Move too fast. The left leg buckles.
It doesn’t give out the way it does on bad mornings, slow and grinding. It goes out from under me all at once, the femoral nerve firing a white blank where the muscle should be, and I catch the edge of the counter with one hand and go down on one knee, hard, on the cabin floor.
The pain is a bright, clean thing. It clears my head.
Chief lifts his head from his bed, ears forward.
Bianca is beside me. Not in front of me. Beside me. She’s on the floor, her hand on my arm, and she didn’t gasp, didn’t flinch. She moved the way emergency nurses move. Fast and already working.
“Don’t stand yet,” she says. Her voice is steady and quiet, and without fear. “Just breathe.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re on the floor, Rhett.”
“I’m fine.”
She doesn’t argue. Or let go of my arm, either. She stays beside me on the floor and waits. Her hand is warm through my sleeve. Not gripping. Just there.
I breathe.
The nerve fires again, weaker this time, and the muscle engages. I can feel the quadricep coming back online. Slowly. I press my hand against the floor and push up, and Bianca shifts her weight to support my right side without being asked, and between the two of us I get back to standing.
We’re close. Closer than we’ve ever been. Her hand is still on my arm and I can smell her. Something clean. Something warm under it. Her head comes to my shoulder, and her eyes are looking up at me, and her expression is the one I’ve been afraid of since the porch.
She’s not afraid of me, or the leg. Or the scars.
Not the dead men I carry everywhere. She stood in this cabin and heard me say seven men didn’t come back, and she didn’t try to fix it. She didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. Didn’t offer the words people offer when they don’t know what else to do.
She just stayed.
“I should get back to the clinic,” she says. Quiet. Not pulling away.
“Yeah.”
Neither of us moves.
Chief shifts on his bed, lets out a long breath, and settles his chin back on his paws.
I drive her back to town. We don’t talk much. She thanks me for the coffee. I tell her thank you for helping with Chief, and the words aren’t enough for what she did, but I don’t have better ones.
She gets out of the truck at the clinic and gives me a small wave and walks inside, and I sit in the idling truck and watch the door close behind her.
The cabin is going to be quiet when I get back. It’s always quiet. I’ve spent four years making sure of it. Cutting away every connection, every voice, every presence that might remind me I’m alive in a world where seven better men are not.
I drive up the mountain. The quiet in the cabin when I walk through the door is the same quiet it’s always been.
It doesn’t feel the same.