Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
SAGE
Dawson bleeds on my hands and doesn’t look away from the tattoo on my hip.
I’ve got the first aid kit spread across the kitchen table, needle threaded, his left forearm propped on a folded towel because he’s done this before and hates it exactly as much every time.
The cut runs four inches from wrist toward elbow, ragged at the edges where the beam caught him instead of clean like the cut he opened on someone else an hour ago.
That’s the detail I can’t stop circling.
His knife made a decision. The beam just happened to him.
Holt’s text came in on the drive home. Second man. Tree line. Lost him at the county road. Got his name off the lift crew sign-in sheet. Nothing since. I read it once and put the phone face down on the counter, because the man in front of me is bleeding and the one Holt lost isn’t.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“You flinched.”
He reaches past me for the bottle of whiskey I set out earlier, more habit than plan, and takes two long pulls straight from the neck before I’ve even got the needle threaded.
“That’s not anesthesia, Dawson. That’s a coping mechanism.”
“I didn’t flinch. I anticipated pain and my body responded rationally.
” He says it deadpan, boardroom-calm, the exact voice he probably used on federal auditors, and it’s such a ridiculous sentence for a man who just drank like the needle was already in him that I almost laugh, which I think is the point.
“You made a noise.”
“Men don’t make noises. We vocalize tactically.”
“That was not a tactical vocalization, Dawson. That was a whimper.”
“I’m choosing not to fight you on this while you’re holding a needle.”
“Smart man.”
My hands are steadier than they have any right to be, steadier than they were an hour ago standing in that gravel watching him hold a knife like it belonged in his fist, and I think that’s a tell all by itself.
The body knows the difference between danger and this.
This is just thread and skin and a man who lets me hurt him a little because it’s the only kind of help he’ll take without arguing about it.
He watches my face instead of his own arm.
He’s been doing that since we got home, since he peeled out of his bloody shirt in the mudroom and didn’t say a word about it, since I found the suture kit without being asked.
These things you just know how to do when you grow up in a family that keeps its wounds off paper.
Nobody in this valley calls an ambulance for something a kitchen table can fix.
My mother stitched Knox’s eyebrow shut at fourteen with fishing line and a bottle of whiskey he wasn’t allowed to drink from.
Kathleen’s probably done the same for her five children more times than anybody’s counted.
You go to the hospital when you’re dying.
You go to family when you’re just bleeding.
“You’re staring,” I say.
“I’m making sure you don’t miss.”
“I’ve stitched a horse’s leg shut in the dark with worse light than this. I’m not going to miss.”
“Then I’m staring for no reason.” The whiskey’s caught up with him somewhere between the second pull and now, the adrenaline finally draining out and leaving something looser behind, softer at the edges than he lets himself when sober. “Or I just like your face better than the ceiling.”
Heat climbs my neck, warm and stupid, the exact kind of warm and stupid I don’t have room for while I’m holding a needle over an open wound. I duck my head so he can’t watch it happen on my face like I’ve been watching everything happen on his.
“Hold still,” I say again, mostly so I have something to say. “Or I’ll make this hurt on purpose.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me, Sullivan.”
He doesn’t buy the threat for a second. He doesn’t say anything about it.
He doesn’t have to. I watch him read the deflection for exactly what it is, that unnerving fluency he’s always had for reading me, the one that let him see the step back I took an hour ago and set it aside instead of flinching from it.
It should feel like an invasion, being known this thoroughly by a man I’ve spent the last week trying to keep at arm’s length.
Instead, it just feels like being caught, gently, by someone who isn’t going to make me pay for it.
He’s not hiding any of it anymore. Not the jealousy at the fair, not his hand at my back in front of half the county, not two years of going home to an empty house because some stubborn, broken part of him apparently couldn’t make himself want anyone else.
I know that part is true. Two years, clean, since Chicago.
He’s telling the whole valley I’m his without a shred of hesitation, and I still haven’t let myself say the same thing back where anyone could hear it.
I tell myself it’s the clause. Paper only, clean exit, no custody of assets beyond what we brought in.
The truth is smaller and worse. He tried to tell me why he left, at the cove, water still on both of us, and I didn’t let him and chose the day instead.
I’ve had since Cornell to wonder what Ashley had that I didn’t, and one afternoon to find out, and I picked not knowing.
But not knowing isn’t an answer I can survive.
I tie off the last stitch and cut the thread close to the knot, and he flexes his fingers once, testing the pull of skin, and doesn’t say anything about how it feels.
I wrap it clean, gauze then tape, my thumb steady against the small sage-green sprig hiding just past the edge of the bandage on his inner wrist.
I rise and put the kit away, then head for the stairs, because I need ten minutes alone under hot water to scrub this whole morning off my skin before I can trust my own face again.
I don’t get the ten minutes.
His phone rings before I’ve cleared the second step, and something in his voice when he answers stops me cold.
“Yeah.” Braced. “It happened four hours ago, dad. I know what’s coming at six.”
A pause.
“That’s six hours away. I’m not handing you a name at noon just so you can feel better about the evening news.”
I go still on the stairs, one hand on the rail.
“I don’t have a name for you. I have a scared man who said one under duress, and a piece of paper Sage sat on for three weeks that might mean nothing at all. That’s not a name, dad. That’s a guess with somebody’s life attached to it, and I’m not handing it to a newsroom before I know it’s true.”
Whatever comes back is short. His answer comes even faster.
“Then let six o’clock run with no name in it. I’d rather own that for one news cycle than hand you a name that turns out wrong.”
Silence, longer this time.
“Then be disappointed at six.” His voice doesn’t rise. It just goes very quiet, which hits harder than shouting would. “You want a name so you feel ready for tonight. I want the right one. Those aren’t the same job.”
The call ends like most of his calls with Declan seem to end, abruptly, with nothing on either side worth calling a goodbye.
I don’t move. I can hear him not moving either, a man deciding if his own hands are done shaking for the day.
I go the rest of the way up before he catches me listening. Neither of us is ready to admit what just happened, him refusing his father, me choosing to hear it, both of us keeping something back from the people who think they’re owed it.
I don’t have a name for it yet, this thing we’re both apparently willing to do now. I just know it’s new, and I know we’re already getting good at it.
Rimrock doesn’t wait for the dust to settle before it starts grieving.
I haven’t managed more than a few bites of leftover chicken, standing at the island instead of sitting down, when Tessa texts three times in a row, the third one just on our way, which in Tessa means she’s bringing food whether we’ve eaten or not, because that’s how this valley processes a bombing.
You bring casseroles to the people who survived it.
She shows up at eight with Eli trailing behind her carrying two more foil pans like a man drafted into service against his will.
I’ve already got my laptop open on the counter, GoFundMe half filled out, because somebody has to do it and Nell’s idea of fundraising technology still stops at a mason jar on the diner counter.
“You’re doing this now?” Tessa says, peering over my shoulder at the screen.
“Mick’s got a wife and a mortgage and a leg that isn’t the same shape it was this morning. Now is when I’m doing this.” I type Sullivan Transport crew, own family into the description and don’t think too hard about which word I meant.
“You’re terrifying,” Tessa says, with real affection.
“Somebody has to be, while everyone else is busy being sad about the right things.”
I close the laptop and take a pan out of Eli’s hands before he drops it. “How’s he doing?”
“Stable. Out of surgery. Leg’s bad, but stable.” Eli looks wrecked, a man who spent the afternoon in a hospital waiting room instead of at work. “Maren’s still at the hospital. Finn won’t leave either.”
“Half of Rimrock’s already dropped something off at his place for when he gets home,” Tessa says, setting her own pan down like a woman who’s fed this town through worse. “Somebody set up a meal train before the smoke even cleared.”
Dawson stands in the doorway with his sleeve rolled down over the bandage, saying almost nothing, watching his own town do the thing it does best. I’ve never seen him look more like a man carrying weight he refuses to put down in front of people who love him.
“You should eat,” I tell him.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You pulled a man out of a collapsing building this morning. Eat the lasagna.”
He eats the lasagna. He doesn’t argue with me about it, which tells me more about how the day sits on him than anything he’d say out loud.