Chapter 2
AREK
The thing about small towns was that you couldn’t buy dish soap without it becoming a social event.
I didn’t mind. I’d chosen Forestville for this, for the endless gossip, for the chalkboard sign outside the bakery that changed with Brianna’s mood, or the way people stopped in the middle of the grocery store to catch up, like the aisle between canned goods and pasta was a living room.
I’d grown up in a town like this in upstate New York, small enough that my pediatrician had also been my Little League coach, and I wanted that for my boys.
The texture. The knit of it. The way a place could hold you.
Collins had been packed, thrumming with the chaos of children with no structure for a week.
I’d talked to Ellen Marsh about her mother’s hip, promised Dave Stamoulis I’d look at his shoulder if he came by the clinic, admired three separate photos of dogs on three separate phones, and refereed Kace and Jules’s chip negotiation, all before making it to the register.
I was good at this.
I liked people. I liked remembering their dogs’ names and asking about their mothers’ hips. I liked being someone a town was glad to have.
In the car on the way home, Kace rode shotgun and Jules was in the back seat with his nose in a book, some fantasy series he’d been devouring. Nine hundred pages per volume, and he was on book four.
“Dad, was that the hermit?” Kace asked.
“Hmm?”
“At the store. The one you shook hands with. Silver hair, leather jacket, looked like he chews nails for breakfast?”
“He didn’t look like he chews nails for breakfast,” Jules said from behind his book.
“He kind of did.”
“He looked like he didn’t want to be there,” Jules said matter-of-factly.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. Jules’s eyes were on his book, but I could tell he wasn’t reading.
He was thinking. Kace talked and Jules thought, and never had I imagined twins who looked so much alike—though they were fraternal, not identical—could be so vastly different in character.
“His name is Macallister Heald. And yes, he lives up on Bear Creek Mountain.”
Kace huffed. “Tyler says he’s a hermit. Says he never comes to town. Says he might be a serial killer.”
“Tyler watches too many horror movies.”
“So he’s not a serial killer?”
“He’s not a serial killer, Kace.”
“How do you know?”
“Because serial killers don’t shake your hand and introduce themselves at the grocery store.”
Probably not true, but that was all I had for him.
Kace considered this with the gravity it deserved, which was none. “Fair. Can we have tacos?”
“We just bought the ingredients for pasta.”
“Tacos are better.”
“We’re having pasta.”
“Tacos.”
“Pasta.”
Jules turned a page. “Just make tacos, Dad. You know he’s going to keep going.”
He wasn’t wrong. I made tacos.
Our house was a cozy three-bedroom craftsman two blocks off Main Street, with a porch that needed repainting and a kitchen I’d fallen in love with the moment the realtor opened the door.
It had butcher-block counters, a big window over the sink that let in the light, and enough room for all three of us to be in there without colliding.
That mattered when your kids were teenagers and growing into their limbs like foals learning to walk.
It had become a home since we’d moved here over a year ago.
The beating heart of the living room was a massive IKEA couch with stains of undetermined origin and candy, chips, and probably socks between the cushions.
It also held a dining table we actually ate at most nights because that was the rule: dinner together, devices down—or books in Jules’s case—even when they groaned about it.
It wasn’t tidy, but that was impossible with two teens. Their stuff was everywhere, all the time. Their sneakers by the back door. Kace’s basketball wedged between the couch and the wall. Jules’s books overtaking every horizontal surface.
The house was warm in the way that mattered, which had less to do with insulation and more to do with the two young humans who left their wet towels on the bathroom floor, argued about tacos versus pasta, and made me want to bang my head against the wall some days.
And yet I’d never imagined a human was capable of the amount of love I had for them. They were the center of my universe.
I stood at the stove, browning beef, while Kace set the table with the enthusiasm of a man being marched to the gallows. Jules sat at the counter reading, occasionally surfacing to steal a shred of cheese from the cutting board.
I shot him a look. “Stop eating the toppings.”
“I’m quality testing.”
“You’re stealing my cheese.”
He almost smiled. Jules’s smiles were rare, and I hoarded them like a miser.
Kace was like me in the sense that he smiled at everything—at strangers, at dogs, at mildly funny commercials.
Jules only smiled when he meant it. You had to earn it, and when you got one, it felt like finding something valuable in your pocket that you’d forgotten was there.
They were good kids. Better than good. They were the best thing I’d ever done, the truest and most important thing, and not a single day went by that I didn’t acknowledge that.
Dinner was loud in the Kace way and quiet in the Jules way, which averaged out to something that felt like exactly the right volume for a family of three.
Kace talked about Tyler Marsh and a hiking trip some of the kids were planning.
Jules mentioned a book he wanted from the library and asked if Pascal—the librarian—would be there over break or if the library had different hours.
“I’ll find out,” I said because that’s what I did. I found out. I handled things.
After dinner, Kace disappeared into his room with his phone, probably texting the group chat that seemed to generate roughly four hundred messages per hour.
Jules helped me clean up. He always did, without being asked, which was both a testament to his character and a sign that my quieter son felt the need to earn his place in a household that had never once required him to earn anything.
Nine years with me, and he still hadn’t been able to let that need go.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
Jules was drying a pan with methodical precision. “The Bear Creek guy. Mr. Heald. He seemed… I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Sad, maybe. But not regular sad. Like, sad underneath something.”
I turned off the faucet and looked at my son.
Fourteen years old and already fluent in the language of what people hid beneath what they showed.
He’d come by it honestly. Three years in the foster care system had taught Jules brutal survival skills, including the need to read the gap between someone’s surface and their truth because that was where the danger lived.
He’d seen in a brief grocery store encounter what most people never would in their lifetime.
“Some people are going through things we can’t see,” I said. It was a careful answer. A doctor-and-dad answer. The kind of thing I said when I didn’t have a better one.
Jules nodded, then put the pan away and went to his room.
The call from Fir came at eight-thirty. I was on the couch with a beer I’d earned—Fir was on call—and a medical journal I was pretending to read.
“Hey. You got a minute?”
“Of course.” I always had a minute. I had a minute for everyone.
Fir wanted to talk about Savannah Gibbons—sixteen, recurring migraines, nothing on the scans, but Fir wasn’t satisfied.
We went back and forth for twenty minutes, two doctors doing what doctors did: turning a case over and over, examining it from every angle, trying to find the thing we were missing.
Fir was meticulous, thorough. The kind of physician who didn’t let things go, which I respected and recognized because I was the same way.
We worked well together. Complementary instincts, similar standards, and an easy professional shorthand that we had developed.
“I’ll pull some literature on adolescent migraine with aura,” I said. “There’s a Johns Hopkins study from last year that might be relevant.”
“Appreciate it.” A pause. “I heard you were busy at Collins today. Dave Stamoulis told me you diagnosed his shoulder.”
I laughed. “I told Dave I had a hunch what was wrong, but to come to the clinic for confirmation. I’m not examining anyone between the yogurt and the eggs.”
“Good luck with that. This town thinks the grocery store is an extension of the exam room.”
“All part of the small-town charm, right?”
After a few more pleasantries, we hung up.
I loved working with Fir. He was professional, warm, and kind.
He and I weren’t friends. Not really, not in the way that meant knowing each other’s dark corners.
We were partners, and good ones at that.
He had his kids and, of course, his husband Tomás Banner, plus a tight circle of friends who’d known him since childhood. He didn’t need another friend.
And I…
Well.
Not a thought I wanted to finish.
After taking another swig from my beer, I picked up the journal again.
The house was quiet, though not silent. Old craftsman homes settled and creaked and breathed like living things.
But it was quiet in the sense that the boys were behind closed doors, the kitchen was clean, and there was nothing left to manage.
No one to feed. No one to drive. No patient to call back. No committee email to answer.
It was just me, sitting on a couch in a lovely home in a small town I’d chosen for all the right reasons, with a medical journal I didn’t care about, a beer I’d already finished, and that stillness that only settled in when I stopped moving long enough to feel it.
I didn’t like the stillness. I’d moved to Forestville to slow down, and I had.
Somewhat. Fir had hired me because the practice had become too much for him alone, and the first few months, the workload had been perfect.
But then the first phase of a new construction project in Monroe had wrapped up and fifty families had moved in, all seeking a family practice.
Phase two had been six months later, and phase three had been finalized six weeks ago.
We’d taken in the bulk of the patients since there were so few family practices left in the area.
Compared to Chicago, I still worked fewer hours and was home more, though not as much as I had hoped.
And god knew I tried to relax. The somewhat slower pace was supposed to have fixed that bone-deep fatigue, the feeling of being poured out and never refilled.
Like the way I sometimes stood in the middle of my kitchen and forgot why I’d walked in there, not because of absent-mindedness but because my brain had simply run out of processing space.
Forestville had been my attempt to fix that. Fewer patients. Shorter hours. More time. It hadn’t quite worked out because even when I’d found more time, all it had done was create more stillness, and I had filled that stillness as quickly as possible. Stillness and I didn’t get along.
I put my head back against the couch and closed my eyes.
My body was tired from a full day, from being useful.
But underneath the tired was something else, something I didn’t look at directly, the way you don’t look at the sun.
A low, chronic ache that lived in my chest and under my skin and in places I couldn’t even name.
When was the last time someone had touched me?
The thought surfaced uninvited, and with it came the skin-hunger, the deep need to be touched. This body hadn’t been held or wanted or pressed against another body in…how long?
My last hookup had been eight months ago at a medical conference in Portland.
A man whose name I remembered, for some reason, but whose face I wouldn’t be able to pick out of a crowd.
We’d flip-fucked each other’s brains out in his hotel room, and I’d left before the cum on my skin had dried.
It had been quick, efficient, and mutually understood to be exactly what it was: a pressure valve.
I was forty-five years old. I had two kids, a practice, a house, and a town that knew my name. I had a full life. A good life. A life that had everything I needed.
So why couldn’t I feel it?
I blew out a breath, then opened my eyes. Time to redirect. I was really good at that.
I was fine. I was always fine.
After rinsing out the beer bottle and putting it with the recycling, I checked on the boys. Kace lay sprawled diagonally across his bed, phone on his chest, asleep with his mouth open. I put his phone on his nightstand, then turned off the lights and let him be.
Jules was reading, of course, not even looking up when I opened the door. “Sleep well, buddy,” I said.
“Love you, Dad.” It came with the automatism of someone who’d grown used to saying it, and I stood for a moment, watching him. My quiet, careful, watchful boy.
They were enough.
I went to my room. Brushed my teeth. Got into a bed that was exactly the right size for one person and too big for the same reason.
And I didn’t think about the man at Collins with the blue eyes and the silver hair and the two-second handshake that had felt, for reasons I couldn’t explain, like being caught at something.
I didn’t think about the way he’d looked at me—not at the smile, not at the mask or performance, but through it.
Like he’d walked into a room I kept locked and glanced around without asking permission.
I didn’t think about any of that.
I was very good at not thinking about things.