Chapter 4
IRELAND
The smell of coffee wakes me, and it's wrong.
My coffee is good. I buy good beans, I measure properly, and the result is reliably solid.
But this is different. This smells like someone approached the process with the focus of a man who treats every task like lives depend on it, and the difference between my good and his deliberate is enough to pull me out of a bed I barely slept in.
Boone is in my kitchen.
The thought lands with a weight that has nothing to do with caffeine. He stayed. He slept on my couch with a blanket I pulled from the hall closet and a pillow I handed him while we stood at the bottom of the stairs, the space between us holding so much tension I could feel it in my teeth.
He took the pillow and said good night. I went upstairs and lay in my bed and listened to the quiet sounds of a man settling into the space below me.
I did not sleep well. The reason has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that my body spent the entire night aware of exactly how many stairs separated us and exactly how little it would take to close the distance.
I pull on leggings and a sweater and go downstairs.
He's standing at the counter with two mugs, his hair damp.
He's in the same clothes from last night because he doesn't have others here, but the damp hair means he went upstairs and used the guest bathroom, which means he walked past my bedroom door while I was sleeping, and I didn't hear a single footstep.
The man moves through a house like a wraith, and the realization that he was that close to me in the dark without making a sound does something complicated to my nervous system.
The morning light through the kitchen window catches the scars across his knuckles and the steady way his hands hold the mugs.
I stop on the last stair because the image of Boone Aldridge in my kitchen at 0630, backlit and broad-shouldered and holding coffee he made for me, is doing things to my cardiovascular system that I'm not prepared to process before caffeine.
The man fills a room without trying, and my kitchen is not a large space.
He looks up. His eyes move over me once, quickly, taking in the leggings and the sweater and the hair I didn't bother taming, and whatever he finds makes his jaw tighten in the way I've learned means he's choosing not to say the thing he's thinking.
The restraint is visible in his hands, the way his fingers tighten on the mug, and I want to know what the thing is badly enough that the wanting registers in my pulse.
"You found the good beans," I say.
"You were hiding them behind the decaf. I figured it was a security measure." He holds out the mug. "You're out of cream."
"There's half-and-half in the door."
"Found it. Used it. Not cream, but it’ll have to do. Your coffee situation is significantly better than mine."
"Everything about my situation is significantly better than yours. You own one towel."
The corner of his mouth lifts, and the warmth behind the reserve surfaces just enough that my pulse does something unprofessional. "I own two towels. The second one's in the wash."
"That's worse, Boone. That's actively worse."
I take the mug and let my fingers brush his during the handoff.
The contact is brief and deliberate. I hold his gaze while it happens, and the way his breath catches, just barely, makes the heat climb my throat.
"You might want to rethink your domestic standards if you're planning to spend time in civilized spaces. "
Something shifts behind his eyes, and for half a second the reserve cracks and I can see exactly what he's thinking about spending time in my spaces. Then the control is back, and the almost-laugh surfaces with a warmth that makes me want to break it open the rest of the way.
"Noted," he says, and the single word carries enough weight to press against the air between us.
We take his truck to the base. My car stays in the townhome driveway, and I don't think about it, because the thing occupying my mind is the way his hand rests on the gearshift between us for the entire drive, close enough that I could cover it with mine.
I don't. The not-doing is louder than the doing would have been.
His knuckles are scarred, his fingers are long, and his hands have been saving lives for eighteen years. I am thinking about all the things those hands could do that have nothing to do with saving anyone, and the specificity of what I'm imagining is enough to make me shift in my seat.
The rehab center looks the same as it did yesterday, bright and clinical and humming with the mechanical rhythm of recovery. The eucalyptus and antiseptic smell hits me at the door the way it always does, familiar and clean.
Underneath the familiarity is the new awareness that someone in this building is using the trust as cover for something I can't see yet. The fluorescent brightness has edges now, and every corner holds a question I didn't have a week ago.
I change into the spare scrubs I keep in my locker and pull my hair back, and the woman in the mirror looks the same as she did yesterday. The woman behind the mirror does not.
I walk through the treatment floor and check the equipment the way Rivera told me to: normally, routinely, without alerting anyone that I'm looking for something other than clinical readiness.
My hands test the calibration settings on each station before the first patients arrive.
The motions are the same ones I've done every morning for a year, but the purpose underneath has changed.
Every dial and display is a question now. Every surface might hold the answer.
Falk is at station four when I arrive, logging a patient's session data with the focused efficiency that makes her easy to overlook. She catches my eye and gives me a brief, professional nod, and I return it with a warmth I have to pull from somewhere behind the anger.
She asks about Welling's updated protocol.
The question is specific, clinical, and demonstrates the kind of attention to patient detail that makes a good rehabilitation aide.
I answer with my normal voice and my normal face while Rivera's investigation sits in the back of my mind like a stone in a shoe.
Across the room, Boone is working a patient on the parallel bars, and for a moment I let myself watch.
His hands guide the patient's gait with the same steady precision I felt on the small of my back last night, and the memory of that contact, his palm warm against my spine and his fingers spreading wider when I leaned in, sits in my body like a low current I can't switch off.
I run the rest of my sessions with precision that feels different from the inside. Every calibration check is deliberate. Every piece of equipment gets a second look before a patient touches it.
Welling comes in for his session, and the frustration on his face has settled into something quieter and more dangerous than frustration.
A resignation sits in his posture and softens the edge that used to drive his reps.
The kid who walked into this program with raw certainty that his body would come back to him is starting to doubt whether it will.
I push him harder than yesterday because the alternative is watching him quit on himself, and I will not let that happen while I'm standing in this room.
"Three more, Welling. Ugly ones."
"You always want ugly ones."
"Because the ugly ones are the ones that count. The pretty ones just look good on the chart."
He gives me three ugly ones. The last rep makes his jaw clench and his deltoid tremble, and the four degrees of external rotation he gains are four degrees that someone in this building has been trying to take from him.
My hand stays on his joint through the full range, steady and sure, and the fury underneath my clinical calm is a current I'm not fighting anymore. I'm swimming with it.
After work, Boone walks me to his truck. The professional distance we maintained inside the rehab center dissolves the moment the parking lot door closes behind us.
His eyes sweep the parking lot before we step off the curb, a quick systematic scan that reads every vehicle, every shadow, every space between the buildings where someone could wait. The assessment takes two seconds, and I doubt he's even aware he's doing it.
His hand finds the small of my back as we cross the lot, and the contact sends a line of heat straight down my spine.
The man who just cleared the perimeter with his eyes is touching me like I'm the only thing in it worth protecting.
I don't step away from it. I step into it, and his thumb traces one slow circle against my lower back that makes my breath shorten before he opens the passenger door.
He drops me at the townhome and heads to his on-base house to shower and change. "I'll be back in an hour," he says, and the fact that neither of us questions this arrangement tells me everything about where we are.
I'm halfway to the front door when I see it.
My car is in the driveway where I left it this morning.
The driver's side door is slightly ajar, not open and not obviously wrong, just not fully closed the way it looks when someone has shut it without pulling hard enough to engage the latch.
My gym bag is on the passenger seat where I left it, but the zipper is open.
The glove box is open. The center console is open.
My feet stop moving. My keys are in my hand.
The evening air is warm and still, the cicadas loud in the trees along the street, and the realization hits my body before my brain catches up.
Someone was here. Someone came to the driveway of the townhome I bought as proof that I could make a life worth having, and went through my car while I was at work, while I was pretending everything was normal in a rehab center where nothing is normal anymore.