Chapter 6
AREK
The drive down from Bear Creek took fifteen minutes.
I knew because I timed it, the way I timed everything—appointments, patient consultations, how long the boys could survive unsupervised before the house descended into chaos.
Fifteen minutes of winding road through old-growth forest, the canopy closing overhead like a tunnel, then thinning as the elevation dropped and Forestville materialized below.
Fifteen minutes of silence.
I wasn’t good at silence, that much I could admit, but something about the silence on this drive was different. It had a residue to it, like the quiet on Mac’s porch had followed me into the car and settled into the passenger seat.
Twelve years. He’d been carrying this for twelve years.
I turned a curve and the river appeared below, silver and fast with snowmelt. My hands were steady on the wheel, and my breathing was normal. There was no reason for the low, persistent hum in my chest, the one that had started on that porch and hadn’t stopped.
His eyes. That was the thing I couldn’t shake. When Mac had said twelve years, give or take, he’d been staring at his coffee, but then he’d looked up, and those blue eyes had been…
I didn’t have the right word. Haunted was close, but it didn’t fit. Haunted implied something ghostly, passive, and Mac’s eyes weren’t passive. They were honest in an almost aggressive way, like a man who’d stopped having the energy to hide anything and didn’t care if you saw the wreckage.
Most people hid. I would know. I was an expert.
Mac didn’t hide. He’d simply removed himself from everyone else so he wouldn’t have to.
I pulled onto my street and parked in the driveway, where I sat in the car for a moment with the engine off. The boys were inside, and dinner needed to happen. The day needed to resume its normal shape, but for some reason, I struggled to step back into the familiar rhythm.
With a deep breath, I shook it off and went inside.
The kitchen looked like a crime scene. Kace was at the stove with a pan of what appeared to be scrambled eggs mixed with hot sauce and shredded cheese. Jules was at the counter, eating cereal and reading.
“What is that?” I asked, looking at the pan.
“Protein,” Kace said.
“It smells like something burned.”
“It’s innovative.” He pointed his spatula at me. “Where were you? You said you were running errands.”
“I was. I drove up to Bear Creek to drop off some supplies for Mr. Heald.”
Kace turned from the stove with the wide-eyed alertness of a teenager who’d been handed information he intended to weaponize. “You went to the hermit’s house?”
“He’s not a hermit, Kace.”
“He literally lives alone on top of a mountain. That is the definition of a hermit.”
“He’s renovating a campground.”
Jules turned a page. “Is he okay?”
I looked at my quiet son. He wasn’t looking at me, eyes on his book, but I knew that posture. That was Jules paying very close attention while pretending not to. “Why do you ask?”
“He seemed like someone who might not be.” Jules shrugged, still not looking up. “And you don’t usually make house calls on your day off. Not unless you’re worried about someone.”
The kitchen went quiet for a beat. Kace glanced between Jules and me with his fork halfway to his mouth.
I fought to keep my face blank and my voice neutral and calm. “It wasn’t a house call. I was dropping off the replacement kit stuff. Like I promised.”
Jules nodded and turned another page, but I could tell he’d filed my non-answer exactly where it belonged, which was in Jules’s mental cabinet labeled Things Dad Isn’t Saying. My son saw too much. Always had.
Dinner happened around the kitchen table despite Kace’s insistence that his egg masterpiece constituted a meal and Jules having eaten a full bowl of cereal. They were always hungry, like bottomless pits.
I made pasta because it was fast, and we sat together like we always did. Kace talked about Tyler’s plan to hike to the overlook that weekend, and Jules asked about a summer reading program at the library. I listened and nodded and participated and loved them so much my chest ached with it.
And underneath all of it ran that low hum I couldn’t turn off. Blue eyes staring at coffee. The flat way Mac had said, “I gave it a year, then gave up,” like hope was a tool he’d tried and returned to the store.
It had broken me in a way I found hard to put into words.
Monday morning, I found Fir in his office before the first patient arrived. He was reviewing charts with a cup of tea and the quiet focus that was his default state when at work.
“Got a minute?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe.
“Always.”
I sat across from his desk. “I was wondering about PTSD treatment options in the area. What do we have access to, beyond the VA in Seattle?”
Fir looked at me over his tea with those steady eyes. “The VA in Seattle is the obvious route, but they offer only conventional therapy, and their wait times are significant. For someone who’s already had a negative experience with VA services, it could be a barrier.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“There’s a therapist in Monroe, Sarah Delgado, who specializes in trauma. She’s trained in EMDR.”
“EMDR for PTSD?” I knew the acronym, which stood for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, but it wasn’t my specialty.
“It’s been showing strong results for combat-related PTSD, especially in cases where traditional talk therapy hasn’t been effective.
The research over the last five years is compelling.
” He paused. “It works differently from talk therapy. Less about narrating the trauma, more about reprocessing how the brain stores it. For veterans who’ve hit a wall with conventional approaches, it can be a game changer. ”
“You’ve referred patients to Delgado?”
“A few, and with good outcomes. She’s practical, no-nonsense, the kind of clinician who doesn’t waste a patient’s time.” Another pause. “She’s also former military herself. Air Force. That matters, for some patients.”
“Yes, it does.”
Fir sipped his tea, looking at me with an expression that was carefully, professionally neutral. “This is about Macallister Heald.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Fir had been this town’s doctor for over twenty years. He knew everyone, including those who might not want to be known. “Yes.”
“He had an episode during the spring festival.”
“How do you know?”
Fir smiled at me. “Auden told me. Not to gossip, but because he wanted me to be aware in case it ever happened again.”
A strange guilt filled me. “Should I have told you?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps, but I can see why you wouldn’t want to betray his trust. Auden knows that what he tells me stays confidential.”
“Macallister is not my patient,” I said.
“I know.”
“Even so, I wanted to know what’s available. In case it comes up.”
Fir nodded. The neutral expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes softened by a degree. “I’ll get you the contact information for Sarah Delgado. Monroe is thirty minutes away, which is manageable. And, Arek?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s been up on that mountain for over a year. I’ve tried twice to get him in for a basic checkup. He’s not an easy man to reach.”
That was the understatement of the century. “No, he’s not.”
“But someone seems to be managing it.”
“He helped when Jules got injured on the hike.”
“That doesn’t explain why you drove up to see him today.”
How the hell did he know? He must’ve seen something on my face because he laughed. “You drive a blue BMW, Arek. Everyone in town knows, just like everyone knows you were off today and seen driving up Bear Creek Road. Alone.”
Small towns. I should’ve known. “I dropped off replacements of the supplies I used for Jules’s injury. Mac and I had coffee.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Mac?”
“He told me to call him Mac.”
“And you had coffee.”
I worked hard to keep my shrug nonchalant. “He was being polite, I’m sure.”
Fir snorted. “Polite. Sure, we’ll go with that.”
I didn’t respond to that. I thanked him for the information and went to prep for my first patient. And if my ears were warm, it was only because of the clinic’s heating system.
That evening, after the boys were in their rooms and the house had settled into its nighttime sounds—the creak of old timber, the wind whooshing around the corner, Kace’s muffled music through his door—I sat on the couch with my laptop and pulled up recent studies on EMDR for combat-related PTSD.
Professional interest. This was nothing more than professional interest.
I read for an hour. The research was genuinely promising, showing a measurable reduction in symptoms, effectiveness in cases resistant to traditional therapy, and shorter treatment timelines. The kind of data that would’ve caught my attention regardless of who it was for.
Except I wasn’t reading it regardless of who it was for. I was reading it for a specific man, and the clinical distance I was trying to maintain kept collapsing under the weight of his eyes.
Those eyes. Honest in a way that bordered on reckless. When he’d looked at me on that porch and said twelve years, there had been no self-pity in it. He’d been a man reporting the facts of his own damage like a soldier giving a field assessment.
I was thinking about Mac too much. I knew that.
But it wasn’t what it might look like from the outside.
It was concern. Professional concern that had crossed into personal territory because I’d sat on his porch and he’d told me the truth.
Mac hadn’t lied and said he was fine. Mac had told me he’d had PTSD for twelve years and that treatment had failed and that he’d moved to a mountain.
And he’d said it without once asking me to do anything about it.
He hadn’t asked me to fix him. That was the thing I kept circling back to.
Everyone always asked me to fix them. That was the implicit contract of every relationship I had—professional, social, parental. Dr. Jacobson fixed things. Dad handled things. Arek was the guy who would solve your problems.
Mac hadn’t asked. Mac had let me sit there, and it had been the most honest hour I’d spent in months.
I finally went to bed and lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. I thought about blue eyes and bad coffee and a man who said his PTSD didn’t feel like an injury because injuries healed. Like he’d already written his own prognosis and the condition was permanent.
I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to hand him Sarah Delgado’s number and the stack of EMDR studies, beg him to understand there were options he hadn’t explored yet, and then beg him to try again.
But Mac hadn’t asked. And showing up on his mountain with unsolicited treatment plans was a line I couldn’t cross without becoming exactly what I was afraid of—another person who saw Mac as a problem to solve rather than a person to know.
So I lay in the dark and didn’t text him, didn’t plan my next visit, didn’t strategize. I thought about those blue eyes. And the way the silence on his porch had felt like being allowed to stop performing for the first time in longer than I could remember.
Professional interest. It was professional interest.
I was very good at lying to myself. But even I could feel this one starting to thin.