Chapter 28
AREK
The first morning I didn’t make the boys’ lunches, I stood in the kitchen and watched Kace do it.
It was Wednesday, two days after the crash. Mac had stayed Monday and Tuesday night, sleeping in my bed, his body a warm wall around me. He’d left this morning to get some work done on the cabins, but only after I had insisted I would be okay. I wasn’t, but I would be.
So that left me alone with the boys and the morning routine, except the routine was different now.
“PB&J, no crusts,” Kace said, wielding the bread knife with more enthusiasm than precision. “Jules, you want turkey or ham?”
“Turkey,” Jules said from the table, where he was eating cereal and reading. “Swiss, not cheddar. Mustard, no mayo.”
“I know what you like, Jules. I’ve watched Dad make these a thousand times.”
I stood at the counter with my hands wrapped around my coffee mug and my mouth closed. I wanted to correct, reach over Kace’s shoulder to realign the bread and take off half of the peanut butter, but I didn’t. I was standing here, sipping my coffee while watching my son make lunches.
It was excruciating.
The peanut butter was slathered way too thick. The turkey was folded wrong. Kace put the sandwiches in before the granola bars, which meant the sandwiches would get crushed. I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.
“Dad,” Jules said, without looking up from his book, “you’re vibrating.”
“I’m not vibrating.”
“You’re watching Kace make sandwiches like he’s performing surgery.”
“I’m just—”
“Drinking your coffee,” Jules said. “That’s what you’re doing. Drinking your coffee.”
I drank my coffee. Kace finished the lunches, zipped them into the bags with the water bottles and the apple slices—cut too thick, but cut—and held them up with the triumphant grin of a kid who’d accomplished something meaningful.
“See? Lunches. Done. The world didn’t end.”
“The world didn’t end,” I agreed, and the words tasted like the first step of something terrifying and necessary. I had to focus on that last part. This was necessary. Fourteen-year-olds could make their own lunches.
I drove to the clinic. Fir was already there, in his office. I closed the door behind me, took a deep breath, and said the thing I’d been rehearsing in the car. “I need to cut back.”
Fir looked at me with the steady, patient attention I’d needed on Monday when my world had narrowed to a single point. “Okay. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m seeing too many patients. I’m taking every walk-in, every overflow, every case that should be referred out.
I’m answering emails at midnight and reviewing labs at six in the morning, and I’m not sleeping enough and not eating properly, and I had a panic attack in my own exam room, so… Something has to change.”
“I agree. We took on way more new patients than I had expected, more than we should have, and most of those ended up on your schedule. It’s not sustainable. Tell me what you need.”
Mac and I had talked about this. Or rather, I had talked, and Mac had listened, asking questions when needed to help me clarify my thoughts.
“I want to cut my patient load by twenty percent so I can build in some breathing room for emergencies. And I need to stop taking walk-ins on days when the book is already full.” I paused.
“And I want to leave by five. Every day. Not five-thirty, not six, not whenever I finish. Five.”
Fir nodded. “I’ve been thinking about bringing in a nurse practitioner. With that new influx of patients, we can financially justify it, and it would take pressure off both of us. They could take the walk-ins, for example.”
The implications of what he said hit me. “You’ve been thinking about that.”
“For a few months, yes.”
“You were waiting for me to get here on my own.”
“You needed to arrive at it yourself. If I’d suggested it, you would’ve heard it as criticism.”
He wasn’t wrong. Three months ago, I would’ve taken any suggestion to reduce my workload as evidence that I was failing, that I wasn’t enough.
Now I heard it as what it was—a colleague and a friend offering structural support for a problem that had nearly broken me and wasn’t even mine to fix.
“Thank you. I think that would be a perfect solution.”
“You’re welcome.” He paused. “How are you feeling? Honestly.”
Honestly. The word Mac and Fir and probably the entire town of Forestville had been trying to get me to use for months. “I’m tired, but it feels different. Before, I was tired and pretending I wasn’t. Now I’m tired, and I know it, and knowing it is… It’s worse and better at the same time.”
“That sounds like the beginning of something.”
“Mac said the same thing.”
“Mac is a perceptive man.”
“You try telling him that. The man doesn’t know how to take a compliment.”
Fir chuckled. “Go see your patients, Arek. And leave at five.”
I saw my patients. I left at five.
It was the hardest thing I’d done all day, walking out of that clinic with paperwork I hadn’t been able to finish and lab results that would have to wait until the morning. But I did it, and on the short drive home, pride battled with fear and a sense of failure.
At home, the boys were alive and fed. They’d made themselves quesadillas as an afternoon snack—more of a meal, really—so the kitchen was a disaster zone.
Jules was reading on the porch, curled up on the patio loveseat, while Kace FaceTimed Tyler at a volume that could be heard from space.
Normal. Functional. A household that could exist without my constant supervision, which was a necessary, if painful, reminder.
I sat on the porch with Jules. He glanced up from his book, registered my presence, and went back to reading.
After a moment, he shifted slightly, his shoulder leaning against my arm, the briefest, most Jules form of contact.
I leaned back and we sat together in the evening light, and I didn’t do a single thing.
The days that followed were hard. Not dramatic, not crisis-level, but the grinding, unglamorous work of rewiring a lifetime of patterns. I caught myself reaching for my phone at ten p.m. to check clinic emails, so I put it in a drawer instead.
Mac came down on Thursday afternoon. His presence in the house was different now—not a guest or a visitor, but a load-bearing wall.
He cooked dinner—burgers to celebrate the start of summer break.
After dinner, he played basketball with Kace in the driveway, my son’s delighted laughter ringing out, bringing tears to my eyes.
Then Mac sat on the porch with Jules. They sat and barely talked for forty-five minutes.
Jules’s shoulders were the most relaxed I’d ever seen them.
And with me, Mac was steady, direct, present.
He wasn’t hovering or trying to manage me.
He did what he’d always done: showed up, paid attention, and told the truth.
When I caught myself reorganizing the pantry at nine p.m.—a task that did not need doing and that was transparently a displacement behavior—he took the canned goods out of my hands and kissed me until I forgot what alphabetical order was.
When I started to spiral about the clinic schedule, he put his hand on the back of my neck and said, “Not today.”
Friday night, the boys were at the Marshes again.
Tyler’s family had become our unofficial support system, a fact that I was learning to accept rather than feel guilty about.
Mac and I had driven up the mountain for the night, the house quiet and warm, the valley spread out below us in the last of the June light.
We’d had dinner on the porch, a delicious lasagna accompanied by a glass of wine.
Our conversation was easy and unforced. Mac told me about his sessions with Sarah—the Kandahar memory, the bilateral work, the way the sound was getting quieter.
I told him about the clinic changes, about Janine’s visible relief when I’d told her to stop booking me past capacity, and about Fir already putting out an ad for a nurse practitioner.
“Fir was waiting for you to figure this out,” Mac said.
“Apparently, everyone was.”
“You’re a slow learner.”
“Says the man who lived on a mountain for eighteen months before admitting he was lonely.”
“Never said I was any better.”
We sat in our chairs and watched the stars come out. His hand found mine on the armrest, our fingers lacing together. The silence was the good kind—full, warm, shared. The kind of silence Mac had always known how to inhabit and that I was slowly, painfully learning.
When it got too cold, we went inside, and by unspoken agreement, headed for Mac’s bedroom.
We undressed slowly, neither of us in a hurry, though the sexual tension had been building.
We’d learned each other’s bodies over the past few weeks—hands and mouths and the growing vocabulary of what worked, what felt good, what made the other person lose their mind.
We’d mapped the terrain. We’d built the foundation.
Tonight, I wanted more, and if I was reading Mac correctly, he was ready too. I’d prepared for this, just in case.
Mac kissed me standing up, both of us bare, his hands cupping my face with that roughness I craved.
I leaned into him, the full length of our bodies pressing together—chest to chest, hip to hip, his cock hardening against my thigh, mine against his.
The contact still overwhelmed me. Weeks of this, and it still overwhelmed me, the reality of being wanted by this man, of being touched by hands that moved over my skin with a reverence that made me feel like something precious.
We fell onto the bed together. Mac was on top of me, his weight pressing me into the mattress, and I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him closer because it still wasn’t enough.
His mouth was on my neck, the spot below my ear that made me lose language, and his hips were rocking against mine in a slow rhythm that built heat between us.