Chapter 10
Rhett
I wake up before she does, and for the first time in four years the first thing I feel isn’t pain.
The leg is there. It’s always there, the low hum of nerve damage that greets me every morning whether I want it to or not.
But it’s not the first thing. The first thing is warmth.
The weight of her body tucked against my right side, her head on my chest, her hand resting over my heart.
Red curls fanned across my skin. The slow, even rhythm of her breathing.
I don’t move.
The cabin is still. Gray light coming through the windows, the woodstove burned down to coals; the air carrying that particular cold that means the fire needs tending.
Chief is at the foot of the bed, curled in the space between our feet, his chin resting on Bianca’s ankle. His eyes are open. He’s watching me.
I wait for the guilt.
It’s a reflex. The way you wait for a blow you’ve learned to expect. Every morning for four years, the guilt has been sitting in the chair across from me before I’ve had my first cup of coffee, asking the same question. Why you? Why are you the one who gets this?
I wait.
It doesn’t come.
The light grows stronger through the windows. Bianca shifts against me and makes a small sound in her sleep. Chief’s tail moves once against the blanket.
Gratitude.
I don’t examine it. Don’t try to name the shape of it or figure out where it fits. I just let it sit there, filling the spaces that used to be empty, and I don’t kill it.
I press my mouth to the top of her head and breathe in.
I let it stay.
She wakes up. A shift in her breathing, a stretch of her fingers against my skin, and then her eyes open and she blinks at the cabin and at the light and at the chest she’s been using as a pillow, and I watch the moment she remembers.
The flush starts at her collarbones and climbs.
“Hi,” she says. Soft. Almost shy, which doesn’t track with what we did last night, and the contrast makes my ribs ache in a way that has nothing to do with pain.
“Hi.”
She presses her face into my chest. “What time is it?”
“Early.”
“I have to be at the clinic by nine.”
“I know.”
Neither of us moves.
Chief solves it for us. He stands up on the bed, shakes, and steps onto my bad leg on his way to the floor. The pain is sharp enough to make me grunt, and Bianca sits up fast, concerned, and I’m laughing before I can stop it.
Laughing.
I can’t remember the last time I laughed.
The sound is rusty and surprised and it makes Bianca stare at me with her mouth open and her eyes wide and then she’s laughing too, pressing her hand over her mouth, and Chief stands at the bedroom door with the patient disapproval of a dog who does not understand what’s funny and would like to go outside.
I make coffee. She borrows a flannel that hangs past her thighs and sits at the table with her legs pulled up, and I stand at the counter and watch her drink from my mug in my shirt in my kitchen.
The cabin has never looked like this. Like somewhere a person would choose to be.
“I’ll drive you to work,” I say.
She looks up. The offer sits between us, and we both hear what’s underneath it. Not just a ride. Driving into town together. In the morning. In yesterday’s scrubs and his flannel. In front of Iron Peak and everyone in it.
“Okay,” she says.
Main Street at eight-thirty in the morning.
I park in front of the clinic and get out of the truck and walk around to her side and open the door, and the entire act is so normal and so foreign that my hands feel strange doing it.
I’ve opened truck doors for equipment. For Chief.
For bags of chain oil. Never for a woman wearing my shirt.
Bianca steps out. Her scrubs are wrinkled. She’s wearing my flannel shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. Her hair is loose and wild, and she hasn’t tried to tame it, and she looks like she spent the night exactly the way she spent the night, and she’s not hiding it.
I put my hand on her back. Between her shoulder blades. A point of contact that says I’m here and I’m not pretending otherwise. She glances up at me, and the look on her face is happy that I feel it land somewhere behind my ribs. Warm. Unfamiliar. Good.
Iron Peak notices.
Mrs. Garcia is sweeping the sidewalk outside the post office, and she stops mid-sweep, and her face breaks into a grin so wide it could light the valley. She doesn’t say a word. Just grins and starts sweeping again, humming something that sounds suspiciously like a love song.
Hank is leaning against his cruiser with a coffee cup in his hand. He sees us. He sees my hand on her back. He looks at me for a long second, and his expression isn’t surprise. Isn’t amusement.
Relief.
He tips his Stetson. I nod back. And this time, for the first time in four years, the nod isn’t a dismissal. It’s an acknowledgment.
Colt is outside the feed store. Of course he is. Same fence, same crossed arms, same dark eyes that miss nothing. He watches me walk down the sidewalk with my hand on Bianca’s back, and his expression doesn’t change.
He gives me a nod.
One nod. No words. But I can read Colt, and what the nod says is about damn time. And under that, quieter: I’m glad you’re still here.
My throat tightens. I nod back.
At the clinic door, Bianca turns to face me. She’s standing in the morning light with her wild red hair and my flannel and the green eyes that saw through me from the very beginning, and she rises on her toes and presses a kiss to my jaw. Quick and certain.
“Pick me up at four?” she says.
“Yeah.”
She smiles. Full. Unguarded. Bright. It hits me in the chest with the force of something I’ve been bracing against my entire life.
She walks inside. The door closes.
I stand on the sidewalk in Iron Peak with the mountains rising above me and the sun on my face, and I don’t put my head down.
Nora finds me before I make it back to the truck.
She comes out of the bakery next to the clinic, and I know she was waiting because Nora Bell doesn’t go to the bakery.
Nora Bell is the bakery. She bakes everything herself and has no reason to be in this building at eight forty-five on a Friday morning except the reason that’s walking toward her in a flannel and boots with an expression on his face that he can’t quite control.
She stops in front of me on the sidewalk, wearing her usual cardigan and smelling of cinnamon. Her hazel eyes are already filling.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I’m not doing anything.” Her voice is thick. “I’m standing on a sidewalk.”
“You’re crying.”
“I have allergies.” She swipes at her eyes. “Rhett.”
“Nora.”
“Your mother would be so proud of you.”
The words land somewhere I’ve kept locked since I was a kid. Her voice. The way she smelled. The sound of her laughter in the kitchen. The last time she called me sweetheart, which was the morning before she didn’t come home.
I don’t flinch.
For the first time since I lost her, the words land, and they hurt the way true things hurt, and they don’t destroy me. They fill something instead.
“You planned this,” I say. My voice is hoarse. “The firewood. The dinner. You planned all of it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She sniffs. “I simply noticed that the clinic needed firewood and that a lovely young woman was eating alone on Saturdays and that—”
“Nora.”
She gives up the pretense. Her face crumbles, and she steps forward and wraps her arms around me and holds on, and I let her.
I put my arms around this woman who has been showing up at my door since I was sixteen with food and patience and the unshakable belief that I was worth showing up for, and I hold her back.
“Thank you,” I say. Into her hair. Against the smell of cinnamon and pine.
She squeezes tighter. “You bring that girl to dinner on Sunday, or I’ll come up there and get you both.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She lets go. Wipes her eyes. Smooths her cardigan and straightens her shoulders, and becomes Nora Bell again, cheerful and composed, and not at all the woman who was just crying on Main Street.
“Well,” she says. “I have things to do.” She walks past me, pats my arm, and disappears around the corner.
Dr. Theo is standing in the clinic doorway. I didn’t see him come out. He’s leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and his reading glasses on top of his head.
“Took you long enough,” he says.
He goes back inside and shuts the door.
I shake my head and sigh. It did. It’s time I do something else. Something that took me long enough. I drive over to the furniture store. It’s about time I got another chair.
* * *
The cabin is warm when we get back that night. I built the fire before I went to pick her up, stacked it properly, the way I should have been stacking it for years instead of letting it burn out before dawn. I cared tonight. I cared because she was coming back.
Bianca is on the porch with Chief, happily sitting in the extra rocking chair I got for her too, watching the valley turn purple below the ridge. She’s in my flannel again. She might never give it back. I’m not going to ask.
I stand in the doorway. She’s got her hands on the railing, and Chief is lying across her feet, and the mountains are behind her, and the light is doing something to her hair that I couldn’t paint if I had a hundred years.
Six weeks ago, I would have turned away from this.
Shut the door. Gone back to the dark cabin and the cold stove and called it enough.
I walk out onto the porch. Chief looks up when I come out, and his tail thumps once against the boards.
I sit beside her. Our shoulders touch. The mountains are going dark and the first stars are showing above the tree line and the air smells like pine and wood-smoke and the clean, particular scent of autumn in a place that feels, for the first time, like it belongs to more than just me.
“Bianca.”
She turns to look at me. Green eyes are steady. Open.
“I love you.”
It comes out quiet and simple. I thought it would feel like pulling a tooth, something that needed force and bracing. But it’s just the truth, said the only way I know how. No decoration.
Her eyes fill. Her mouth trembles. And then she smiles, the same full, unguarded smile from this morning, except brighter, and aimed at me with a certainty I spent four years convincing myself I didn’t deserve.
“I love you,” she says.
Not quietly. Not measured or careful. She says it with her whole heart. Clear and certain and full.
I pull her against my side. She tucks her head under my chin. The mountains are black against the sky, and the stars are coming in, one by one, and the porch is cold, but neither of us moves to go inside.
Chief stretches at her feet and settles with a low, contented sound. His head rests on his paws, and his eyes close.
I press my mouth to her hair.
The quiet is enough.
It’s more than enough.