Chapter 12
AREK
The texts had been getting shorter.
Saturday, after I’d dropped Mac off at the clinic and watched him drive one-handed up his mountain in a stubbornness that bordered on performance art, I’d texted to make sure he’d gotten home safely.
Did you make it home okay?
Yeah. Home.
Sunday morning, I’d texted again.
How’s your hand?
Fine.
Sunday evening.
Are you taking care of yourself? And by that I mean getting plenty of rest and eating decent meals?
Yeah.
Monday morning, I tried another approach.
Brianna has new cinnamon rolls. They’re amazing. Totally worth a trip down the mountain.
Maybe.
Monday evening.
How are things going?
The screen had stayed empty for four hours before a single word appeared.
Fine.
Fine. The word that meant nothing and covered everything.
I knew fine. I’d built a career on fine, had spoken it a thousand times in my own kitchen after the boys went to bed, had smiled through it at the clinic and at community events and at every dinner table where someone asked how I was doing.
Fine was the word you used when the truth was too complicated.
Coming from Mac, who had been texting in full sentences and initiating conversations, had invited me to his mountain, built me a chair, and made me stew, the regression was deafening.
I knew what was happening. Mac couldn’t work.
The renovation, his therapy, had been taken from him by fourteen stitches and doctor’s orders, and he was alone on that mountain with one functional hand and a mind that filled idle space with the things he spent every waking hour trying to outrun.
Take away the coping mechanism, and the thing being coped with comes roaring back.
Tuesday morning, I rearranged my schedule. Fir gave me a look when I asked him to cover my morning patients, but he didn’t ask why, which I appreciated more than I could say.
I stopped at Brianna’s. Brianna smiled when she saw me, and I bought croissants, krentenbollen, two slices of the Dutch apple pie I knew Mac loved—with a healthy dollop of fresh whipped cream—and a bag of the medium roast, plus two cups of it to go.
Mac had probably been drinking that terrible stuff all week since the good coffee I’d seen in his cabinet last time would feel like an extravagance he hadn’t earned.
That was how Mac thought. Good things were for other people. Mac got the grudge coffee.
“How’s Macallister doing?” Brianna asked.
I mentally sighed. I could pretend I had no clue what she was talking about, but that would be an insult to both her intelligence and genuine care. “I’m about to find out.”
She winced. “That injury sounded bad.”
Of course she’d heard. Everyone had, by now. “It was. That’s why I’m gonna check on him.”
“I thought Fir was his doctor.”
That one quirked eyebrow spoke volumes, and I let out another mental sigh. “He is. I’m going as a friend.”
“A friend,” Brianna repeated as she rang me up. “Okay then. Tell him I said hi. The apple pie is on me as a get better soon gift.”
How could you be upset with a woman who did something as sweet as that?
I drove up Bear Creek Road with the bag on the passenger seat and a feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with the curvy road.
The campground was quiet in a way that felt different from its usual peace.
The tools were where Mac had left them—the table saw still set up near Cabin 4 with a dark stain on the ground beneath it that I quickly looked away from.
The cabins sat in various stages of completion, waiting for hands that couldn’t hold a hammer. Everything was still.
Mac was on the porch. Not in his chair but on the top step, his elbows on his knees, his bandaged hand resting on his thigh.
He was wearing a flannel shirt I’d seen before and jeans that looked like he’d slept in them.
His silver hair was unwashed, and his beard looked messy and unkept.
He looked like a man who had stopped bothering with the small maintenance tasks that kept a person tethered to the world.
He looked up when my car appeared and something crossed his face—relief, shame, resistance—all of it flickering through in the time it took me to park and get out.
“You drove up my mountain again,” he said. His voice was rough and flat, the underused quality I recognized from the very first time he’d spoken to me in Collins.
“I brought goodies. Brianna says hi and get better soon, but with apple pie.” I held up the bag. “And I brought real coffee because I know you’ve been drinking the battery acid.”
“The battery acid is fine.”
“I don’t think that word means what you think it does. Now move.”
He moved. Not to his chair, but enough that I could sit beside him on the step, which was where I wanted to be.
I set the bag between us and didn’t say anything about the fact that he was on the step instead of in the chair, that his clothes looked slept in, or that his responses for the past three days had been shrinking toward silence.
We ate croissants on the step. The valley lay below us in its greens and grays, the river catching the morning light. The coffee was hot and good, and as Mac sipped it, his shoulders eased a little bit. It was a step.
“How’s the hand?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“Can I see?”
He hesitated. The pause lasted long enough that I felt the reluctance, the calculation of a man deciding how much access to grant. Then he held out his hand, palm up.
I took it carefully, cradling his wrist with one hand while I unwrapped the bandage with the other.
His hand was warm and rough with calluses, and the intimacy of holding it registered in my body the way it always did when I touched Mac, as something that exceeded the clinical context I was trying to contain it in.
“I’m doing this as a friend,” I said. “Not a doctor. For the record.”
“Noted.”
The wound looked good. Fir’s sutures were clean and holding, the edges approximated well, the surrounding tissue pink and healthy rather than the angry red of infection. I cleaned it gently with an antiseptic wipe from the first-aid kit I grabbed from under his sink, working around the stitches.
I applied fresh antibiotic ointment, then rewrapped the hand with clean gauze, taking my time with the layers, making sure the tension was even and the coverage was complete.
I was thorough. More thorough than strictly necessary.
Because his hand was in both of mine and I was in no hurry to let go, and if that was something I needed to examine later in the privacy of my own head, so be it.
I secured the bandage and released his hand. The loss of contact was immediate, like stepping out of sunlight into shade. “Looks good. Healing well.”
“Good.” He flexed his fingers slightly, then winced and stopped.
“No testing.”
“I wasn’t testing.”
“You were testing. Stop it.”
The ghost of something moved across his face, the memory of where a smile might live.
We sat on the step with our coffee, and the morning settled around us.
A woodpecker was working on a tree somewhere behind the house, its rhythm steady and persistent.
The creek bubbled over rocks below. I waited with the patience I’d learned on this porch, letting Mac come to things in his own time.
“It’s hard,” he said after a while. “Not working.”
“I know.”
“My hands need to do things. When they don’t, my head fills up.”
“Fills up with what?”
He stared at his coffee. The silence stretched, and I let it because pushing Mac was like pushing a boulder—pointless and exhausting and likely to crush you.
“Arek.” His voice had changed. Lower. Rougher. The way it sounded when he was about to say something that cost him. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not… It’s not easy. And after I tell you, things might change between us. I need you to know that I’ll understand if they do.”
My chest tightened, but I kept my voice even. “I’m listening.”
He set down his coffee mug on the step. His jaw was set, the muscle jumping beneath the silver stubble, and his eyes were fixed on the valley below as if he couldn’t say what he needed to say while looking at me.
“My PTSD episodes… You’ve seen what they look like.
The festival. The dissociation, the flashback. ”
“Yes.”
“They happen at night too. Nightmares, except they’re not regular nightmares. They’re… I’m back there. In theater. And my body responds like I’m in combat. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who’s around me.” He paused. “I don’t know who I’m touching.”
The last sentence landed with a weight that changed the air on the porch.
“What happened, Mac?” I asked it gently, but I did ask because he needed to say it and I needed to hear it. Dancing around it would be a disservice to both of us.
“I was married. Fay. I told you that.” He took a breath that had edges in it. “One night, I had an episode in my sleep. A bad one. I was back in Kandahar, defending a position. Hand to hand. And Fay was in bed next to me.”
I felt the ground shift under the conversation. The clinical part of my brain was already assembling the picture, already connecting the data points I’d been collecting since the first time I’d seen Mac flinch from human contact.
“I woke up with my hands on her. I was pinning her to the mattress. Both hands on her arms, full body weight. She was screaming my name, and I didn’t hear her, not at first. I was still there, still in the dream, still fighting.
When I came back, when I finally heard her…
” His voice cracked. A small fracture, quickly sealed, but I heard it split through the controlled flatness like a fault line.
“She had bruises for two weeks from where I’d held her. ”