Chapter 14
AREK
The week had tried to kill me with the slow, grinding accumulation of need after need after need until I felt like a sponge that someone kept wringing out and dipping back into the water.
Saturday morning, I woke up with a deep tiredness, the kind that lived in my bones, my chest, and the spaces behind my eyes.
But it was game day, and Kace had been vibrating at a frequency that could shatter glass since he’d woken up, so I put my feet on the floor and became the version of myself the day required.
“Dad.” Kace was in the kitchen doorway, already in his Forestville Foxes warm-ups, his hair freshly spiked in a style he thought looked cool and I thought looked like he’d been lightly electrocuted. “Do you think Mr. Heald will actually come?”
“He said he would.”
“Yeah, but he said he’d come the first time, and then he didn’t.”
“He had fourteen stitches in his hand the first time, Kace. I’m the one who told him it was a bad idea, remember?”
“I’m just saying. Do you think he’ll come?”
“I think if Mac says he’ll be somewhere, he’ll be there.”
I believed that. Mac, who went to great lengths to avoid any kind of social gathering, had looked a fourteen-year-old in the eye and made a promise, and I knew with a certainty I couldn’t explain that he would keep it.
Jules appeared behind Kace, book in hand, dressed and ready with his characteristic lack of fanfare. “Can we stop at the library before the game? Pascal said he’s holding a book for me.”
“What book?” Kace asked.
“One you won’t read.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it has over five hundred pages.”
“I read long books.”
“Name one.”
Kace changed the subject.
I drove them downtown, waited in the car while Jules ran into the library, then headed to the high school. The parking lot was already half full, which for Forestville constituted a major sporting event.
Inside, the gym smelled the way every small-town high school gym in America smelled: polished wood, rubber, sweat, and the ghost of a thousand PE classes.
The bleachers were filling in with the steady trickle of parents and families who’d been doing this every Saturday for years.
Banners hung from the ceiling—FORESTVILLE FOXES in green and gold, district championships from decades past, a faded state tournament qualifier from 2011.
Kace disappeared into the locker room with a wave.
Jules settled himself at the far end of the bottom bleacher with his new book, close enough to the court to watch but removed enough to read between plays.
I climbed to the fourth row and found a spot near center court.
Sheriff Frant was already there, sitting with Keaton, his husband.
Milton, their youngest son, was on Kace’s team.
“Arek.” Auden nodded. “Good turnout.”
“Kace would disagree. He thinks our fan section is, and I quote, ‘Depressing.’”
Keaton laughed. “Milton says the same thing. Apparently, we need air horns and face paint.”
“Don’t give Kace ideas,” I said. “He’ll show up next week with a megaphone.”
Fir and Tomás arrived a few minutes later, their son Josiah hurrying into the locker room to join the team.
Tomás settled next to me, which was always an experience because the man radiated such effortless sex appeal that everyone around him felt slightly less put together.
When Fir caught my eye, he gave me a look that I read instantly.
You okay?
I gave him a smile. The clinic smile. The one that said I’m great and meant Please don’t ask again because I don’t have the energy to maintain the lie if you push. Fir held my gaze for one beat longer than casual, then turned to Auden and said something about the opposing team’s record.
The gym continued to fill. The noise level rose in increments—voices bouncing off the hardwood, sneakers squeaking during warm-ups, the PA system crackling to life with a test that was mostly feedback.
I settled into it, let it wash around me.
I’d spent my whole life in rooms full of noise and people.
This was where I functioned. This was where the performance lived.
Except today, the performance was costing more than usual.
Each time someone called my name—and people kept calling my name because that was what happened when you were the town doctor—I had to reach for the warmth, pull it up from somewhere deeper than where it usually lived.
The smile was there, but it was slower to arrive, and in the gaps between conversations, my face wanted to do nothing.
Just rest, exist without expression for one minute.
I was scanning the bleachers, not looking for anyone in particular—a lie so transparent I couldn’t even sell it to myself—when the gym door opened and Mac walked in.
He stopped just inside the entrance, and I watched him do the scan.
Doors, exits, sight lines, crowd density.
He registered it all in the space of two seconds, the tactical assessment so deeply embedded it was as involuntary as breathing. His jaw was set, his shoulders squared.
He was wearing a clean Henley, jeans, and his leather jacket.
His silver hair was neatly combed, and the effort of that—the clean shirt, the combed hair, the deliberate presentation of a man who usually didn’t care how he looked because there was no one to look—made my insides go weak.
He’d dressed up. For a kids’ basketball game. Because he’d promised.
His eyes swept the bleachers and found me with the precision of a scope finding its target.
I raised a hand. He nodded with one sharp dip of his chin and made his way up the bleachers.
People shifted to let him pass, the same instinctive parting I’d noticed in Collins, and he climbed to my row and sat down next to me, close enough that I could smell pine and soap and the leather of his jacket.
“You came,” I said.
“I promised.”
His eyes were already tracking the court, finding Kace in the warm-up line, and something subtle happened in his face—a loosening around the eyes, the faintest easing of the jaw—that told me he’d located what he’d come for and was settling in.
“Mac.” Auden leaned forward from my other side, extending a hand. “Good to see you.”
Mac shook it. “Sheriff.”
“How’s the hand?”
Mac flexed his left hand, which was still bandaged but less heavily now. “Getting there.”
“Glad to hear it.” Auden said it simply, without fuss, and sat back.
Keaton gave Mac a warm smile that Mac returned with a nod, and that was it.
There was no interrogation, no production, just a quiet acknowledgment that he was here and that was welcome.
I caught Auden’s eye, and something passed between us, a shared understanding of what it meant for this man to be sitting in these bleachers.
The game started.
Kace was electric. He’d been starting for three games running, and his confidence showed in the way he moved—quick and aggressive, bordering on reckless sometimes. He drove the lane too hard on his second possession and turned the ball over, and his face flashed with frustration before resetting.
Next to me, Mac watched with an intensity that would’ve been intimidating if I hadn’t known what I was looking at. He tracked Kace’s movements with focused precision, leaning forward slightly, his bandaged hand resting on his thigh.
Kace hit a three-pointer in the second quarter and the gym erupted. He pointed at the bleachers—directly, unmistakably, at Mac—and Macallister Heald, the hermit of Bear Creek Mountain, raised his good hand in a gesture that was half wave, half salute.
Kace’s grin could’ve powered the scoreboard.
At halftime, Kace ran over to the bleachers, sweaty and beaming. “Mr. Heald! Did you see the three?”
“Hard to miss. You telegraphed it though. Defender was late recovering, but a better one would’ve closed that lane.”
Kace blinked. Then his face split wide open. “You know basketball?”
“I know angles.”
“Dad, Mr. Heald knows basketball!”
“I heard.” I handed Kace his water bottle.
Kace took the water, said something to Jules, who’d migrated closer during the first half, and jogged back to his team. Jules settled on the bleacher below us, his book closed for once, his eyes on the court with the quiet attention he usually reserved for novels.
The second half was tighter. Gold Bar had adjusted, and the Foxes were struggling.
Kace was pressing, trying to force plays that weren’t there, and I could feel his frustration building from across the gym.
I wanted to call out to him, to remind him to breathe, to slow down, to trust his teammates.
But this wasn’t my court. I couldn’t coach his game any more than I could treat his fevers with objectivity.
Some things you had to let your kids fight through.
“He’s in his head,” Mac said quietly, watching Kace with narrowed eyes. “He plays better when he stops thinking. First half, he was moving on instinct. Now he’s calculating. Calculating slows you down.”
“You got all that from watching half of a middle school basketball game?”
“I got all that from watching people under pressure for twenty years. Different arena, same mechanics.” He paused. “He’ll figure it out. He’s smart.”
The quiet confidence of that statement hugged me like a warm embrace.
Kace did figure it out. With two minutes left and the Foxes down three, he stopped forcing and started moving, and the instinct came back.
He drove the baseline and passed it to a teammate for an open three that tied the game.
In overtime, he hit a floater in the lane that put them up for good.
When the buzzer sounded, the gym erupted and Kace jumped into a pile of teammates.
I was on my feet yelling and Mac was standing next to me, not yelling, but present and upright and there.