Chapter 4
AREK
The Forestville Spring Festival was held on the first Saturday in spring and was the kind of event that made me remember why I’d moved here.
Main Street had been transformed overnight with white tents lining both sides of the road, bunting strung between the lampposts, and the smell of Brianna’s cinnamon rolls competed with whatever Ennio was grilling at the Sunshine Corner pop-up.
Someone had set up a small stage near the Double F, where a guy with an acoustic guitar was working through a set of folk songs.
He was good enough to be pleasant and quiet enough to make conversation possible.
The sun was out, which in the Pacific Northwest in March felt like a personal favor from God.
I’d been here for two hours, and I’d already talked to roughly half the town’s population.
Mrs. Johnson wanted me to know the antibiotics were working—though why she was out and about when she had a nasty upper respiratory infection, I had no clue.
Dave Stamoulis cornered me near the lemonade stand to show me his shoulder’s range of motion, right there between the kettle corn and the face painting.
A woman whose name I was blanking on—Henderson?
Hendricks? Something with an H—asked me about her daughter’s ear infections, and I smiled, listened, suggested she make an appointment, and made a mental note to review the file before Monday.
The boys had disappeared within fifteen minutes of arrival.
Kace had spotted Tyler Marsh and the group near the stage and was gone like a bullet.
Jules had followed at a more measured pace, his leg still tender but functional after two weeks, the gash healing into a red, raised line that he wore with quiet pride.
I’d told him thirty minutes of walking, then sit.
He’d given me the look—the Jules look: equal parts patience and rebellion—and I’d let him go.
Hovering was a thing I was trying to do less of, even when every cell in my body wanted to.
So I worked the festival alone. Smiled. Shook hands. Remembered dogs’ names. Asked about knees and hips, children, renovations, and gardens. The usual choreography, the steps I knew so well I could do them in my sleep. Hell, I probably had.
Fir and Tomás were near the bakery tent. Tomás Banner was devastatingly handsome in an almost aggressive way—the man had retired from modeling, but modeling hadn’t retired from him—and Fir stood next to him with a face that radiated happiness and pride.
“You look like you need a break,” Fir said.
“I’m great.” I was always great.
“You’ve been going nonstop since you got here.”
“That’s called socializing, Fir. You should try it. Oh, wait, you married into it.” I nodded at Tomás, who grinned.
“He’s not wrong,” Tomás said.
Fir shook his head, but he was smiling. “Get some food. Sit down for five minutes.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
I didn’t sit down. I got a coffee from Brianna’s booth—caffeine was easier than rest—and I was standing near the edge of the crowd, deciding whether I had the energy for another lap, when I saw him.
Silver hair, leather jacket, standing at the far end of Main Street like a man who’d wandered into the wrong movie and was considering walking back out.
Mac.
I almost spilled the coffee. The hermit on his mountain, the man who only came to town for groceries, was standing at the entrance of the Forestville Spring Festival on a sunny Saturday morning. He looked about as comfortable as a cat in a bathtub.
He was doing what he always did, keeping to the perimeter. Back close to the buildings, away from the main flow of foot traffic, those blue eyes scanning the crowd with the relentless, automatic sweep I’d noticed at Collins. He hadn’t seen me yet, or if he had, he hadn’t acknowledged it.
I should’ve let him be. He clearly didn’t want to be approached. Every line of his body said solitary, self-contained, not here for conversation. A smart man would’ve respected that. A man with decent boundaries would’ve waved from a distance and moved on.
I walked over. “The hermit descends.”
His eyes cut to me. Blue and sharp and, for one unguarded second, not entirely displeased. Then the shutters came down, and he was Mac again: granite jaw, granite posture, granite everything. “Jacobson.”
“Arek,” I corrected. “We’ve shared a first-aid kit. That puts us on a first-name basis.”
The corner of his mouth did something. Not a smile, but the memory of a muscle that used to know how. “Arek.”
“How’s the mountain?”
“Quiet.”
“That’s the appeal, I’m guessing.”
“That’s the appeal.”
I sipped my coffee as I stood next to him, facing the crowd, mirroring his position against the building.
Shoulder to shoulder but not close, giving him space, the way you give a wild animal space.
“Kace is telling everyone his brother got mauled by a bear on Bear Creek Mountain. The story gets more dramatic every time. The last version had him crawling through the woods with a tourniquet made from his own shirt.”
Something shifted in Mac’s face. “The cut’s healing?”
“Clean and closing. He’ll have a good scar. He’s very proud of it.”
A pause. Mac watching the festival. Me watching Mac.
“Jules said your place is cool,” I offered. “Direct quote. The cabins, your house. He was impressed.”
“It’s a renovation project.”
“A big one. How many cabins?”
“Twelve. Eight are structurally sound. The other four need full rebuilds.”
“And you’re doing it all yourself?”
He looked at me sideways, clearly assessing whether this was small talk or real curiosity. I held his gaze and let him decide. “Yeah. Framing, roofing, plumbing. I’ll sub out the electrical.”
“That’s a lot of work for one person.”
He shrugged.
“And when it’s done?”
“I’ll sell it.”
The word landed flat, like a door closing. I nodded and didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that a man who builds something with his own hands for that long and then walks away from it is a man who is practiced at leaving. It wasn’t my business.
“You should come by sometime,” Mac said.
I turned to look at him. He was staring straight ahead, his jaw tight, like the words had escaped against his will and he was considering court-martialing his own mouth. “To see the renovation,” he added stiffly, almost defensively.
“I’d like that.”
He nodded once.
We stood in silence for a moment, watching the crowd, and I realized this was the most comfortable I’d felt all day.
Two hours of smiling and socializing and remembering everyone’s everything, and the most natural moment was standing next to a man who’d said maybe fifty words to me across three conversations.
What that meant wasn’t something I wanted to examine too closely.
“I should…” I gestured vaguely toward the festival, toward the next round of handshakes and how’s-your-shoulder, but then I stopped. Something had changed.
It was subtle. If I hadn’t been standing right next to him, I would’ve missed it.
Mac’s breathing had shifted into shorter, shallower puffs, the rhythm irregular.
His jaw, which had relaxed a fraction during our conversation, had locked down again, harder than before.
His eyes were still scanning, but the pattern had changed.
It was much faster, more erratic. Not observing anymore, but tracking, looking for something that wasn’t there.
His hand went to his right hip in the same gesture I’d seen him make at Collins, reaching for something, finding nothing, redirecting. But this time, the redirect didn’t come. His hand stayed at his side, fingers half-curled, frozen mid-reach.
“Mac?”
No response. His face had gone pale beneath the weathering, a grayish undertone that I recognized from a hundred clinical assessments.
Sweat beaded at his temples, and his pupils were dilated.
Every muscle in his body had drawn taut, his frame blading sideways, shoulders rolling forward, making himself a smaller target.
My medical brain lit up with pattern recognition. Something was wrong. Something was building.
Then, twenty feet away, someone dropped a stack of wooden crates.
Wood splintered against pavement in a rapid-fire series of bangs that echoed off the brick facades of Main Street like gunshots.
Half the crowd flinched. A few people laughed at themselves.
A vendor started apologizing, picking up scattered produce.
Mac didn’t flinch. Mac left.
Physically, he was still standing next to me, boots on the pavement, back against the wall.
But the man behind the blue eyes was gone.
Those eyes locked on something in the distance, something that didn’t exist. His breathing stopped, then restarted in short, rapid bursts.
His hands rose slightly, defensively, the posture of a man bracing for impact.
I knew this, even with only one deployment under my belt.
I’d seen this in a supply tent in Kandahar, when a sergeant who’d been fine five minutes earlier heard a truck backfire and went somewhere none of us could follow.
I knew what it looked like when the present tense stopped being real and the past came back to kick your ass once more.
That, combined with Mac’s military-grade medical kit, gave me a solid idea of what was happening.
I moved in front of him, positioning my body between Mac and the crowd, blocking the visual noise, reducing the input.
Every instinct in my body screamed to reach out, to grab his arm, to anchor him, but you shouldn’t touch someone in a flashback.
You had to give them space and a voice to follow back.
A hand landed on my shoulder, startling me. Auden Frant, wearing his sheriff’s uniform, pitching his voice low. “He’s a veteran. 82nd Airborne.”