Chapter 11
MAC
Iwoke up to the sound of a household coming alive, and for a few disoriented seconds, I didn’t know where I was.
Wrong ceiling. Too low, painted cream instead of exposed timber. Wrong light, filtered through curtains instead of trees. Wrong sounds, with footsteps overhead, the creak of old floorboards under someone’s weight, and water running through pipes.
Then my hand pulsed, a deep, hot throb that radiated from my palm up through my wrist, and everything came back.
The saw. The blood. The clinic. Fir’s steady hands under bright lights while I stared at the ceiling and breathed through it.
And Arek, sitting next to me with his hand on my arm, which had somehow been the thing that kept me from coming apart.
I had felt that touch radiate through my body, even through the pain and panic.
I was on Arek Jacobson’s couch, in Arek Jacobson’s living room, wearing Arek Jacobson’s sweatpants and a T-shirt he’d given me because my own clothes had been stiff with dried blood.
The sweatpants were slightly too short and a little loose in the waist, and the T-shirt smelled like detergent and something underneath it that I recognized as Arek.
Clean and warm, the scent of someone else’s skin embedded in the cotton.
I lay still for a moment, taking stock, the way I did every morning, running an internal assessment of my body and my mind before I committed to the day.
Hand: fucking bad. Throbbing with my pulse, stiff under the bandage, a constant low-grade fire that flared when I flexed my fingers experimentally and reminded me to stop doing that.
Body: heavy and drained, the blood loss sitting in my muscles like concrete.
Head: present and alert, no fog, no flashback residue, just the weariness of a body that had been through something and needed time.
I’d stayed the night. I’d resisted at first, when evening came and the boys were home, stating I wanted to go home.
Arek had suggested, then insisted, then flat-out told me that I wasn’t driving up a mountain in the dark with one functional hand and a blood volume that was still rebuilding. It had pained me to admit he was right.
He’d offered me his bed, but I’d refused.
I drew the line at staying in his house.
I was not kicking him out of his own bed.
So he’d given me a toothbrush, a blanket, and the couch, and the last thing I remembered was his footsteps going upstairs and the house settling into its nighttime sounds around me.
I hadn’t slept that well in months. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
From the kitchen came sounds that pulled at something deep and old in my memory.
A pan on a burner. The pop and hiss of bacon hitting hot metal.
Cabinet doors opening and closing. Coffee brewing, the gurgle and drip of it filling the pot.
The ordinary, unremarkable symphony of someone making breakfast for a family.
I sat up and scrubbed my good hand over my face. Time to face the music, whatever tune was playing today. I folded the blanket and straightened the pillows, then I walked to the kitchen doorway and stopped.
Arek was at the stove with his back to me, and the sight of him did something to me that I couldn’t define and didn’t try to.
He was in gray pajama pants and a white T-shirt, his hair flattened on one side from sleep and sticking up on the other, his feet clad in fuzzy socks.
Just a man in his kitchen on a Saturday morning, cracking eggs into a pan with one hand and adjusting the heat with the other, moving with the unconscious ease of someone who’d done this a thousand times.
He turned when he heard me, and his face opened the way it had when I’d shown up for pizza. Warm, unguarded, happy. Jesus, why did that hit me so hard? Maybe because no one had been that pleased to see me in a long time. Maybe ever.
Then his eyes dropped to my hand and concern joined the warmth. “How’s the pain?”
“Manageable.”
“On a scale of one to ten?”
“I don’t do scales.”
“That means it’s at least a seven.” He pointed to a chair. “Sit. Coffee’s almost done.”
I sat since standing was taking more effort than I wanted to admit. Besides, the chair was right there, and the kitchen smelled like coffee and bacon, and I was still tired, despite the best night of sleep I’d had in a long time.
Kace appeared first, thundering down the stairs with the subtlety of a herd of buffalo, wearing basketball shorts and a T-shirt that read FORESTVILLE FOXES. He spotted me at the table, and his face split into a grin so wide it practically had its own gravitational pull. “Mr. Heald! You stayed!”
“Wasn’t really a choice.”
“Dad said you were too weak to drive. No offense.”
“I wasn’t too weak, but I was advised against it.”
“Yeah, Dad’s advice is really more of an order. Oh, yummy, bacon. Thanks, Dad.” He was already loading a plate. The kid’s appetite was a force of nature.
Jules came down next, quiet and measured, a book tucked under his arm. He gave me a nod, studied my bandaged hand for a moment with those dark, assessing eyes, and sat at his usual place. “How many stitches?” he asked.
“Didn’t count.”
“Fourteen,” Arek offered from the stove. “Which is plenty, so don’t let him tell you it’s not a big deal.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
Arek gave me a look over his shoulder that said volumes about his opinion on that statement, then went back to the eggs.
I watched them. The way Arek moved around his boys, the casual choreography of it, sliding a plate in front of Jules, catching the juice Kace was about to knock over with a reflexive save that didn’t even interrupt his sentence.
The way Kace talked with his mouth full and Jules ate with methodical precision, and Arek somehow tracked both of them while managing the stove, pouring coffee, and being a person all at the same time.
The ache hit me slow and deep, rising from somewhere below my ribs. Grief for the version of this I’d had and destroyed. Boden at the breakfast table at ten years old, peanut butter on toast, talking about something he’d seen on TV, his legs swinging because they didn’t reach the floor yet.
They’d reach the floor now. He was almost sixteen. He was probably taller than Fay. His voice had probably changed. He would make his own breakfast, if he ate breakfast at all, if he hadn’t become one of those teenagers who slept until noon and called a granola bar a meal.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of it.
Arek set a plate in front of me. Eggs, bacon, toast. A mug of coffee, the good kind, not the grudge stuff from my mountain.
I looked up at him, and he met my eyes for a moment, and whatever he saw in my face made his expression soften into something I couldn’t hold, so I looked at the plate instead.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Eat.”
The food was good, simple, and it hit a spot I hadn’t realized was craving sustenance. The coffee was strong and hot. I drank it and felt the warmth spread through my chest and settle somewhere next to the ache, not replacing it but sitting alongside it, two things occupying the same space.
Kace was talking about his basketball game. This afternoon, three o’clock, against Monroe at the school gym. He’d been starting for the last three games and was radiating energy. “Are you going to come, Mr. Heald?”
“Kace,” Arek said from across the table, a gentle warning.
“He said he’d think about it, didn’t he? Our fan section is pathetic. It’s like twelve parents and Mrs. Henderson, and she falls asleep by halftime.”
I looked at Kace. At his eager, open face. At the way he leaned forward across the table like he could pull me to the game through sheer force of will. This kid, who’d known me for a handful of encounters, had decided, with the reckless generosity of youth, that I belonged in his bleachers.
“I could come,” I said.
It came out before the filter caught it. The same impulse that had made me text Arek about hiking boots and drive to his home for dinner. The same reckless, unfamiliar reaching toward something I hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve.
Kace’s face lit up like I’d handed him a championship trophy. “Yes! Dad, Mr. Heald’s coming!”
But Arek wasn’t smiling. His expression was careful, measured, his eyes on me with that assessing look I knew from the clinic, from the festival, from every moment when Arek shifted from person to physician without realizing he was doing it. “Mac, you lost a significant amount of blood yesterday.”
“I’m aware. I was there.”
“A basketball game is loud and crowded. You’ve been off the couch for less than an hour. You need rest, not bleachers.”
Something tightened in my jaw. I knew what he wasn’t saying. Loud. Crowded. Overstimulating. He was thinking of the festival, of the man who couldn’t handle a stack of falling crates without leaving the present tense. “Don’t coddle me.”
“I’m thinking about your blood pressure and hemoglobin levels, and the fact that fourteen stitches in your hand qualifies as a significant injury, regardless of how many times you say it’s not a big deal.
” His voice was steady, but there was an edge underneath it, a sharpness wrapped in clinical language, yet it still showed he cared.
“I’m only telling you what any doctor would tell you. ”
“You’re not my doctor. You made that pretty clear yesterday.”
Arek’s jaw tightened, and for a moment, something raw crossed his face before he locked it down. I’d hit a nerve I hadn’t meant to hit, and the guilt was immediate and unwelcome.
The kitchen had gone quiet. Kace was looking between us, his whole body stiff with frozen alertness. Jules had stopped pretending to read and was watching us openly, his guarded eyes tracking the exchange.