10. Rob
Rob
Six weeks later, I walked into Havenwood clinic on a Thursday with a persistent issue with my left shoulder, legitimate, from a rogue incident I'd been ignoring for ten days, and Jessie Walker met me in the hallway with a patient chart in one hand and the specific expression of someone who was both pleased to see me and prepared to be professionally annoyed.
"Examination room two," she said.
"I made an appointment."
"You made an appointment four days after you should have, which I know because Alaric told me." She pushed open the door. "Sit."
I sat.
She assessed the shoulder with the same focused efficiency she brought to everything, and I watched her work and thought about how she'd rearranged the cabin's medical supply shelf in the second week, organized it by urgency and frequency rather than category, a system that made complete sense and had immediately made me feel vaguely embarrassed about twenty years of improvisation.
She'd found the half-finished carving on the workbench and asked what it was. A raven, I'd told her. She'd asked why.
Because one woke me up the morning of the bridge, I'd said.
She'd been quiet for a moment and then said: Make sure you finish it.
"Soft tissue," she said now, pressing careful fingers to the joint. "You've been compensating for at least a week. What happened?"
"Rogue in the eastern boundary. Resolved."
"And you didn't mention it."
"It was handled."
She looked at me levelly. "Rob."
"I'll mention it next time."
"That's not a promise, that's a placeholder."
"It's an improvement."
She held my gaze for a moment, assessing, then something shifted in her expression, the professional layer settling alongside something warmer. "It is, actually." She finished the examination. "Anti-inflammatory, rest the rotation for a week, come back if it worsens."
"And if I come back anyway?"
"Then I'll treat whatever you've decided to ignore by then." But she was almost smiling. Almost.
I caught her hand as she reached for the chart. She let me.
"Dinner tonight," I said. "Greypaw has a place Alaric recommends. Apparently."
"Alaric recommended a restaurant."
"He's been campaigning for this dinner for two weeks. I think he wants a progress report."
"That man," she said, with the fond exasperation she'd developed for Alaric. "Fine. Dinner."
She didn't take her hand back.
Outside, through the clinic window, the Rockies did what they always did — held the sky up, indifferent and enormous, beautiful in the way that required no audience.
I'd patrolled that territory for twenty years, known every trail, every boundary line, every place where the light fell right. I'd thought I knew what the northern corridor had to offer.
Turns out I'd only known half of it.
The raven on the cabin eave had known before I did. Ravens usually did.
Jessie squeezed my hand once, brief, sure, a gesture that asked nothing and offered everything, and then let go and went back to her chart, and I sat in examination room two in the Havenwood clinic and felt, for the first time in a very long time, completely in the right place.