Charged
SIX
WYATT
My shirt is damp where she lets go.
The rough purr of the generator thrums through the floorboards, a low, mechanical heartbeat keeping the deep cold from reclaiming the clinic.
Bella stands in the center of the office, her shoulders still shaking under the oversized wool sweater she borrowed. She has stopped crying, but her hazel-gold eyes are shadowed, wide, and dark in the amber wash of the emergency lamp.
She looks smaller than she did when she first knocked on the door. Smaller, and completely spent, like a bird that flew too long into the wind and finally ran out of sky.
Atlas lies by the desk, his gray muzzle resting on his paws. His breathing is deep and even now that the spasm in his shoulder has passed. He doesn’t look up when I move, only tracks me with one watch-dog eye, watchful and quiet.
“Go to bed. I’ll get the woodstove in the clinic hall stoked before I turn in.”
She chews on her thumbnail, looking at the closed door to Jesse’s old room. “I can sleep on a cot or one of the couches in the waiting room. I don’t have to stay in his room.”
“I’m not letting you sleep on a couch,” I cut in, not looking at her as I reach for the keyring on the desk. “Jesse’s room has a bed. The quilt is warm. Use it.”
She doesn’t argue this time. She doesn’t have the fight left in her. She just nods, a slow, quiet movement, and follows me down the narrow hall.
Jesse’s room smells of old cedar, dry paperbacks, and the faint, sweet trace of the cherry-blend tobacco he used to keep in a tin by the window.
I stoke the small cast-iron stove in the corner, throwing in two split logs of pine until the dry bark catches with a hiss and a snap.
The orange light leaks through the door vents, drawing long, flickering lines across the floor.
Bella stays near the door, her hands tucked into her sleeves. “It’s cold.”
“It’ll warm up in ten minutes. The pine burns hot.”
I stand, brushing the soot from my palms. The room is tight.
Two steps from the stove to the desk, three more to the edge of the mattress.
With both of us in here, the air feels crowded.
The heat from the stove is already rising, thick and dry, making the damp flannel of my shirt stick to my shoulders.
I look at her. The lamp in the hall casts her profile in gold, highlighting the curve of her throat, the way a loose curl of chestnut hair clings to her temple. Her lips are still dry, parting slightly as she watches the fire.
There’s a heaviness between us, a shared weight that has nothing to do with the storm outside. We’re two strangers who loved the same man, standing in the room he built, surrounded by the silence he left behind.
“Bella.”
She turns her head. Her gaze meets mine, honest and completely unguarded.
I step toward her, intending to tell her where the extra blankets are, but the distance between us vanishes too fast. I’m close enough to smell the cold wind still clinging to her clothes, close enough to see the gold flecks in her hazel eyes.
The space in my chest, the part Atlas pried open on the porch, gives another hard, sudden pull.
I reach out, my fingers catching the edge of her collar, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. My knuckles brush the skin of her neck.
She freezes.
Her skin is soft, warm, and slightly damp from the snow. The touch is a current, sharp and hot, shooting straight through my hand and settling deep in my gut. My thumb finds the edge of her jaw, resting there. Her pulse is fast, a frantic little flutter against my skin.
She doesn’t pull back. Her eyes search mine, her chest rising and falling in shallow, quick breaths.
“Wyatt.” Her breath catches, a warm, barely audible puff against my mouth.
My name on her tongue sounds like a question I don’t know how to answer.
I lean down, my head tilting, my gaze dropping to her mouth.
The heat of her breath hits my chin. Every warning in my head, every rule I’ve lived by since the Tuesday call, the funeral, and the day it became clear I couldn’t save my friend—they all start screaming.
Don’t. Keep your distance. She’s here to sell. She’s leaving.
But the draw is too strong. I slide my palm down the side of her neck, my fingers tangling in the hair at the nape. I pull her a fraction closer, my mouth hovering just an inch above hers. I want the heat of her. I want to lose the quiet in the taste of her.
Her hand comes up, her fingers pressing against the center of my chest. She doesn’t push. She simply rests her palm there, hot through the flannel, right over my heart.
Then she lets out a small, fractured sigh, her forehead dropping to rest against my shoulder.
“I still see him.” Her forehead presses harder into my shoulder, the words muffled by the flannel of my shirt. “Every time I close my eyes, he’s there in the garage.”
The words are a bucket of ice water, quenching the heat between us.
The tension in my arms snaps. The heat doesn’t go out, but the direction of it shifts, hollowing into the familiar, dull ache of the grief. I close my eyes, my hand sliding down to rest on her shoulder, holding her steady but no longer pulling her in.
“I know.” The admission is flat, stripped of the heat from a second ago. “Me too.”
I let my hand drop. I step back, putting two feet of cold air between us. The fire in the stove crackles, a bright, cheerful sound that has no business in this room.
I keep my eyes on the pine boards of the floor. “The food Eleanor brought. It’s on the counter. Eat some if you’re hungry. The plates are in the cupboard above the sink.”
“Thank you.” Her voice is small, steady again. She’s rebuilt the calm, the counselor’s wall, before I can even look back up. “How did you and Jesse meet?”
“Jesse.” The name is dry on my tongue, but I force it out anyway. “You’ve seen the scar on Atlas’s shoulder. The night he got it, a mortar came down on the south end of the kennel run.”
“He never told me.” Bella looks up, her eyes wide.
“He wouldn’t have. The shrapnel folded that shoulder like wet cardboard.
I worked half the night on a folding table, and for most of it, I believed I was stitching a dead dog back together.
Jesse knelt in the dirt the whole time, holding his head, keeping the light steady.
Never said a word. When it was over and Atlas was still breathing, he didn’t sleep.
He cleaned his rifle, over and over, until the steel was raw.
He never talked about that night again. He didn’t let things go.
He just kept them inside until the weight broke him. ”
She watches me, her gold eyes bright with a sudden, wet understanding. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you think you missed the signs. But the signs were there ten years ago. He was always that man. You couldn’t have fixed the foundation.”
I turn before she can answer, before the look on her face makes me step back across the floor.
“Goodnight, Bella.”
“Goodnight, Wyatt.”
I walk out, pulling the door closed until the latch clicks.
Atlas stays in the room with her, settling down with a heavy sigh against the cedar floorboards. He knows where he belongs tonight.
My bedroom is cold, the emergency lamp cast in a dull amber. I pull the wool blanket off the shelf and lie down on my bed. My boots are still on. The springs creak under my weight as I turn onto my side.
The wall is pine, thin as paper.
Through the wood, her movements reach me. The soft rustle of the quilt as she pulls it over her shoulders. The creak of the mattress springs. The slow, shallow rhythm of her breathing as she tries to sleep.
I lie in the dark, my hand finding the cold metal of Jesse’s dog whistle on my keyring, my fingers tracing the initials Jesse carved into the brass.
Nobody should have to be afraid alone in the dark.
His voice, clear and quiet in my head.
I close my eyes and listen to the steady rise and fall of her breath through the wall. I’m three feet from her. I’m a man who built a whole life out of keeping things alive, out of keeping my distance so nothing could ever finish what Jesse started in me.
And I’m already failing.
The thrum of the generator under the floorboards is the only constant, keeping time for the silence that pools in the corners. I turn on my side, the old mattress complaining under my shoulder.
Sleep is a mile away.
Through the pine planks, her shifting movements reach me. Her mattress springs sigh. She’s restless, too. Or cold. Or simply trapped in the same loop I am, running the same calculations on a Tuesday call where tired was the only tell.
I sit up. The air in the room has dropped three degrees since the light died, the draft from the window working its way through the plastic insulation Jesse stapled over the sash last autumn. He used the heavy-duty kind, double-layered, yet the wind still finds the gaps.
I stand, drag the wool blanket around my shoulders, and walk back out to the clinic hall.
The backup lights cast long, orange fingers down the corridor, reflecting off the steel tables and the glass front of the medicine cabinet.
It looks like a field hospital at night. Same low hum. Same smell of iron, wet wool, and copper. In the recovery runs, the sheepdog is asleep, her nose tucked under her flank, but Dolly—the blind collie—is standing by her gate. Her ears are up, swiveling toward the sound of my boots.
I reach a hand through the wire. She presses her muzzle flat into my palm, her cold nose checking my skin.
“Still here, girl.” My voice is a quiet rasp, meant only for the old dog’s ears.
A floorboard creaks behind me.
I turn. Bella is standing at the end of the hall, near the clinic kitchen. She’s wrapped Eleanor’s wool scarf over a borrowed sweater. My sweater. She has a chipped ceramic plate in one hand, steam rising from the mound of green chile she’s heated up.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Bella pulls Eleanor’s scarf tighter around her shoulders. “The stove is warm, but the room... it’s very quiet.”