CHAPTER ONE
Three years later
Now
The kid on my table is seventeen and lucky, though he doesn't know it yet, not with a compound fracture in his left forearm and a laceration across his scalp that bled enough to scare the friends who carried him in more than it actually threatens him.
I keep my voice level while I cut his sleeve away, the particular calm I've built for exactly this kind of night, blood and fluorescent light and someone's mother somewhere about to get the worst phone call of her year.
"You're going to be okay," I tell him, and I mean it, and some small, separate part of my brain notes that I am good at this, genuinely good, in a way that has nothing to do with the life I used to have and everything to do with the one I built instead.
It's 4:52 in the morning by the time the kid is stitched, splinted, and wheeled up to imaging, and I finally get thirty seconds to lean against the med station counter with a cup of coffee that went cold an hour ago.
Halloway Bay General never had equipment like this.
Halloway Bay General barely had equipment at all, just Everhart's old first aid kit and whatever Eldin's connections could scrounge from a sympathetic pharmacist two towns over.
I don't let myself finish that thought. I've gotten fast at not finishing that thought.
"Hargrove." Dr. Okafor drops a tablet on the counter next to me, not looking up from the chart he's reading. "Nice work on the kid. Clean field triage before he even got here, somebody knew what they were doing."
"Friends panicked less than usual." Which is true. Someone had actually applied pressure correctly, which happens maybe one time in ten with a scared seventeen year old's buddies.
"You should teach the residents." He says it like he's said it before, because he has, at least three times this year, and I give him the same noncommittal shrug I always do.
Teaching means staying in one place long enough to build something.
I don't do that. I've built exactly one thing that lasts, this specific skill set, hands that don't shake no matter what's in front of them, and I've made peace with that being enough.
Down the hall, a woman is crying into a pay phone that technically hasn't worked in years but that the hospital keeps mounted on the wall anyway, out of some administrative inertia nobody's bothered to fix.
I've walked past that dead phone a hundred times.
Tonight it snags something in me I can't name, and I look away before I can decide why.
I get off shift at six. The city outside the hospital doors is doing its early gray thing, delivery trucks idling, a handful of joggers who think 6 a.m. is a reasonable hour, steam coming up off a grate near the bus stop like the whole block is breathing out after holding it in all night.
I like this hour. Nobody wants anything from me at this hour.
I walk the eleven blocks home instead of taking the bus, because walking uses up the last of the adrenaline the ER always leaves in my system, a low electrical hum under my skin that doesn't fully quiet until I've moved enough to burn through it.
My apartment is on the fourth floor of a building that doesn't care about me and that I have never once tried to make care.
Blank white walls. A couch I bought secondhand and never quite got around to replacing.
A window that looks out at another building's brick wall instead of any view worth having.
Tabby used to call it my witness protection apartment, back when she still lived here, back before she moved in with her boyfriend and left me with a lease I renew every year out of something closer to inertia than attachment.
I make eggs I don't really want because my body runs better on routine than on hunger cues, and I'm halfway through them, phone propped against the salt shaker while I scroll nothing in particular, when it rings.
Gilda's name on the screen stops my fork halfway to my mouth.
I haven't heard from anyone in Halloway Bay in three years.
Not one call, not one text, nothing, by design, mine and apparently theirs too, a mutual silence I told myself was mercy.
Seeing her name lit up on my screen at 6:40 in the morning does something to my chest that I don't have a clinical term for, something that skips past my usual careful management and goes straight to the animal part of my brain that already knows, before I've even answered, that this is not a social call.
"Gilda." My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is its own kind of skill.
"Niamh." A pause, and in that pause I hear every year that's passed between us compressed into one held breath. "It's your father. He had a heart attack last night. They got him stabilized, he's at County, but honey, it wasn't a small one. You need to come home."
I have delivered this exact sentence to a hundred strangers in a hundred waiting rooms. I have never once had it delivered to me.
The floor of my kitchen doesn't move, the eggs don't fall, nothing dramatic happens except that the coffee mug in my other hand suddenly feels too heavy to hold, and I set it down very carefully, the way you set down something you're afraid of dropping.
"How bad." Not a question, really. A demand for information I can use, because information is the only thing that's ever made fear survivable.
Gilda tells me what she knows in the clipped, efficient way of someone who has spent a lifetime around men who get hurt and women who have to stay calm about it.
Cardiac event. Significant. They're calling it a warning shot they're lucky to survive, though nobody's used the word lucky to my father's face because he'd hate it.
He's asking for me, she says, and then, more quietly, like she's not sure she should say it at all, he's been asking for you before this happened too, Niamh. For a while now.
I don't ask about anyone else. I don't say his name, and Gilda, generous or careful or both, doesn't say it either.
"I'll leave within the hour," I tell her, and I mean it before I've even fully processed what leaving means, before I've let myself think past the immediate mechanics of packing a bag and calling in every favor I have at the hospital to cover my next four shifts.
I call Tabby first, because some habits are load bearing.
She picks up on the second ring, sleep still thick in her voice, and I tell her in short, clinical sentences, my father, cardiac event, I have to go, I don't know for how long.
She doesn't ask the questions I know she wants to ask, the ones about the town I've never fully described to her, the club I've mentioned exactly twice in four years of friendship, the man whose name I've never said out loud to another living soul in this city.
She just says, quietly, be careful driving in the rain, call me when you get there, and I love her for the restraint of it, for knowing which door not to push on.
I stand in the middle of my living room after we hang up, phone still warm in my hand, and for one long, useless minute I don't move at all.
The apartment looks exactly the way it did ten minutes ago, blank walls, secondhand couch, the brick wall view I've never once resented until right now, when I need it to be something other than a place that has absolutely nothing to say to me about what to do next.
There's no one here to tell me it'll be fine.
That's always been the arrangement I chose.
I just didn't know, until this exact moment, how loud that choice could get.
Packing takes eleven minutes. I know because I count, the way I always count when the ground under me stops feeling solid, one two three, scrub tops I won't need but pack anyway, jeans, the one good sweater that isn't scrubs colored, my mother's cross that I wear so rarely it's gone slightly tarnished at the clasp.
I open the bottom drawer of my dresser last.
The cut is folded exactly the way I folded it three years ago, leather gone slightly stiff from disuse, Everhart's road captain patch still stitched into the left side, faded at the edges the way everything fades if you leave it in the dark long enough.
I haven't touched it since the day I put it there.
I don't touch it now either, not really, just look at it long enough to confirm it's still real, still mine, still evidence of the one theft I've never confessed and the one debt I've never paid, and then I close the drawer with more force than the moment strictly requires.
I don't pack it. I've never packed it, not on any of the small trips I've taken in three years, not once. It stays in the dark where it belongs, the way I've told myself the whole rest of it belongs there too.
The drive to Halloway Bay takes just under three hours on a good day.
Today is not a good day. The rain starts twenty minutes outside the city, thin and gray at first, thickening steadily the farther the highway carries me from everything I've built and toward everything I left, until by the time I hit the county line the wipers can barely keep pace and the radio has dissolved into static I don't bother fixing.
I drive with both hands on the wheel and my jaw tight enough to ache, running through everything I know about cardiac events, ejection fraction, likely intervention, recovery timelines, because thinking like a nurse is easier than thinking like a daughter, and infinitely easier than thinking about the fact that in roughly two hours I am going to walk back into a room I swore I would never set foot in again, and I have absolutely no idea, after three years of careful silence, who or what is waiting for me on the other side of that door.
Somewhere past the second hour, the highway narrows into the two lane state road that hugs the coastline, and the landscape starts turning familiar in a way that feels almost hostile, like the land itself remembers me and isn't sure it's glad.
Fishing towns strung along the water every twenty miles or so, half of them boarded up more than they used to be, faded signs for bait shops and diners that closed when the canneries did.
I used to know every one of these towns by the sound their gas station bells made.
I'm surprised, and a little ashamed, that I still do.
My phone buzzes twice on the passenger seat, both times a text from Tabby, first just checking on you, then, twenty minutes later, you don't have to do this alone you know.
I don't answer either one. Not because I don't believe her.
Because I'm not sure yet what alone even means once I cross back into this particular stretch of coastline, and I'd rather find out before I try to explain it to anyone.
The sign for Halloway Bay appears out of the fog exactly where I remember it, faded green, one bolt missing so it hangs slightly crooked, the old cannery smokestack visible behind it against a sky the color of wet slate.
My hands go tight on the wheel.
I am home, and I have absolutely no idea what that word means anymore.