Chapter 11 #2
Arek took a breath. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. He was being careful with me, and I hated that. “I want you at the game, Mac. Kace wants you there. But not today. Today, you need to rest, eat, and let your body recover. There’ll be another game next week.”
The rational part of my brain knew he was right. My hand was throbbing, my head was lighter than it should be, and the effort of sitting upright at the table was costing me more than I’d admit aloud. I was in no shape for a gymnasium full of shouting teenagers.
But the part of me that had said I would go wasn’t operating on rationality.
It was operating on something older and more desperate, the need to show up for a kid who’d asked me to be there because I hadn’t shown up for my own kid in five years.
Kace’s eager face was a mirror I couldn’t look into without seeing Boden’s face looking back.
I couldn’t say any of that. So I sat with my jaw tight and my good hand wrapped around the coffee mug, the silence stretching until it ached. “Next week,” I finally said, directing it at Kace. “I’ll be there next week.”
Kace studied me with an expression that was more perceptive than I would’ve given him credit for. “Promise?”
“Yeah. Promise.”
“Gold Bar. They’re terrible. We’ll crush them.”
“Sportsmanship, Kace,” Jules said with a sigh.
“We’ll crush them with dignity and grace.”
Something in the air released. Arek’s shoulders dropped, and he picked up his coffee.
Our eyes met across the table, and the argument sat between us, unresolved in the ways that mattered, but settled enough for a Saturday morning in a kitchen full of teenagers and things neither of us was ready to say.
After breakfast, Arek drove me to the clinic to get my truck. The drive was short and mostly quiet, the silence between us different from the porch silences or the couch silences. This one had texture, the grit of an argument that had been smoothed over but not sanded clean. And that was on me.
“I didn’t mean what I said,” I told him as he pulled into the clinic lot. “About you not being my doctor.”
“Yes, you did. And you were right.” He put the car in Park and looked at me. “Fir was right. I can’t be your doctor, Mac. That’s not a limitation. It’s a line I’m choosing not to cross because our friendship matters more than what I could do for you clinically.”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
“Take care of the hand,” he said. “No work for a week. I mean it.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“I just said I’m not your doctor.”
“Force of habit.”
The ghost of a smile. Just barely. “Go back to your mountain, Mac. Rest.”
I got out. Watched him drive away. Then sat in my truck for a minute, my bandaged hand resting on my thigh, the morning sun warming the cab through the windshield.
The drive up Bear Creek was slow and careful, the steering wheel awkward under one hand, the curves requiring more attention than usual.
The mountain welcomed me the way it always did, with silence and green, the smell of pine, and the distant murmur of the creek.
I sat on the porch in my chair—my chair, next to Arek’s chair—and let the solitude settle.
I’d needed this. The quiet. The aloneness. The space to decompress from twenty hours in someone else’s world, someone else’s noise, someone else’s warmth. My nervous system was recalibrating, the way it always did after exposure to people, finding its baseline in the silence.
But the baseline had moved. I could feel it, the way you feel a change in elevation before your ears pop.
The silence was the same silence. The mountain was the same mountain.
But I wasn’t the same man who’d embraced isolation for six years.
I wasn’t the same man who’d driven up here eighteen months ago with a truck full of tools, determined to stay away from town like I had stayed away from the two previous towns.
I was sitting in Arek Jacobson’s sweatpants pants on a porch with two chairs.
I’d promised a fourteen-year-old I’d come to his basketball game next weekend.
And my hand throbbed with fourteen stitches from a moment of distraction that had everything to do with the fact that I’d been thinking about a pair of green eyes when the saw kicked.
I wasn’t going to examine that last part.
Instead, I picked up my phone with my good hand. Opened contacts. Scrolled past the short list of numbers that now included Arek, Cas, and Fraser, down to F.
Fay.
Boden’s birthday was thirteen days away. Sixteen years old. My son, becoming a man hundreds of miles away while I sat on a mountain and let the years pile up between us like snowfall, each one making the path back harder to find.
I opened a text to her number. The cursor blinked on the empty screen.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard. Five years of silence that I’d chosen and maintained and defended and was now, sitting on this porch in borrowed clothes with a stitched-up hand and a heart that was cracking open whether I wanted it to or not, beginning to question.
I typed four words.
How is Boden doing?
I stared at them for a long time. Then I closed the app without sending, put the phone on the arm of the chair, and sat with my hand in my lap, the mountain around me, and the unsent message glowing behind my closed eyes like a signal fire I wasn’t brave enough to light.
Not yet.
But the words existed now. I’d typed them.
They were real, even unsaved, even unsent.
They lived in my fingers and my phone and the thirteen days that stretched between now and my son’s sixteenth birthday, and for the first time in five years, the distance felt like something I might be able to cross.
If I could figure out how to stop being afraid.