23. Wren
WREN
The area around the cantina smells like bacon and burnt coffee, and every eye swings to us when Rowe walks into the mess area with me.
“Don't panic,” he murmurs. “They already like you.”
“They like me because I stabbed someone,” I say without moving my lips.
“That's how affection works here.”
The family has claimed two picnic tables pushed together near the serving line.
Jules waves me over with a fork. Nova pats the bench beside her.
Cole is straddling the end of the table backward, spinning a butter knife, and Logan is arguing with Jonah about something involving a winch.
Elias sits at the head with his coffee, Teddy across from him reading something on his phone, Marek at the far corner shuffling cards next to a plate he hasn't touched.
I slide onto the bench, and Rowe settles across from me—close enough that his knees bracket mine under the table without ever touching.
I'm still finding my breath from this morning. Every time I shift my weight, the ache between my thighs reminds me exactly where he's been, twice, and I have to stare very hard at the saltshaker.
“Doc.” A shadow falls over me. The cook—Deke, big forearms, apron that looks like it's seen wars—sets a plate down in front of me. Eggs, bacon, biscuits split and buttered, a mug of coffee that's actually fresh. He did it himself. Carried it from the line with his own hands.
The whole table goes quiet.
Cole whistles, long and low. “Well, I'll be damned.”
“Shut up, Pike,” Deke growls, already retreating.
“Ten years, Deke. Ten years I've been getting my own tray like a peasant. Elias gets served. Elias. Nobody else. And now—”
“She fixed Cujo's ear the other day without being asked.” Deke jabs a spatula in Cole's direction from behind the line. “You want table service, grow a medical degree.”
Heat floods my face all the way to my ears. I duck over my plate and shovel in eggs so I don't have to respond, and Rowe is looking at me like I hung the moon over the Big Top.
“It was a hematoma,” I mumble around a biscuit. “It took ten minutes.”
“You've dethroned Elias,” Jules stage-whispers. “There will be consequences.”
“There will be pancakes,” Elias says mildly, not looking up from his coffee. “I find I don't mind the company.”
Three younger workers move behind the serving line—a girl with a messy braid refilling the coffee urn, a broad-shouldered boy stacking trays, a lanky one wiping the counter with more force than any counter requires.
The lanky one keeps glancing at the girl.
The girl keeps glancing at the tray-stacker.
The tray-stacker is glancing at absolutely no one with the rigid determination of a man who knows he's being glanced at.
The triangle. It has to be. Jules mentioned it last night—the love triangle in the cafeteria—and never finished the story.
I look at Jules. Jules looks at me. Then Nova leans past my shoulder, follows my sightline, and makes a small, knowing sound into her orange juice.
“Braid girl,” she murmurs.
“No,” Jules whispers back. “Tray boy. Watch his ears when she walks past.”
The girl walks past. The boy's ears go scarlet.
The three of us dissolve into giggles, and the lanky one drops his rag, and Teddy looks up from his phone with the expression of a man who has learned not to ask.
As we finish up eating, Silas waits until the last fork goes down.
“News,” he says, and the table stills.
He sets his phone flat on the wood, screen up, and spins it so it faces the middle. A photo of a newspaper page. Local, cheap ink, a headline about the school board.
“Marlene Pickett got her teeth into the scholarship fund.
She pulled the financials. Which she was legally entitled to do the whole time and never had a reason to until someone painted one on a wall.
She found inconsistencies. Disbursements that don't match recipients. Interview expenses with no receipts. Two finalists from three years ago that no school in the county has any record of.” He lets that sit.
“The board voted last night. Emergency session. Samuel Harlan is suspended pending review.”
Nobody cheers. I look at Rowe. He's gone very still, both hands flat on the table.
“Suspended,” he says. “Not removed.”
“Suspended is the crack in the dam.” Silas takes his phone back.
“The review means auditors. Auditors mean the diner talks.
By Tuesday, the casserole women will have chosen sides, and the side they choose is never the man under audit.
His church already pulled him off the reading rotation.
It was done quietly, but Marlene isn't a quiet woman, so it won't stay quiet.” His mouth curves, cold.
“By the time he disappears, half this town will believe he ran.”
“It's a start,” Logan says, low.
“It's exactly on schedule.” Elias rises, coffee finished, and rests both hands on the head of his cane. “Anything else?”
“One thing.” Silas stands too, and for the first time this morning, there's something almost boyish underneath his smirk. “I'm expecting a special delivery this afternoon. For the act. Nobody needs to concern themselves with it.”
“That means everyone should concern themselves with it,” Nova says.
“It means the opposite of that, little fugitive.”
“It has never once meant the opposite of that,” she counters deadpan.
He kisses the top of her head on his way past, and the meeting dissolves into noise and motion and Cole stealing the bacon off Jonah's abandoned plate.
Rowe waits for me, and we walk into the morning together, ten inches apart, and I am ridiculously, dangerously happy.
The special delivery screams at four in the afternoon.
I'm elbow-deep in Rome's foot care—his pads need checking twice a week at his age, and he tolerates it from me now, which still makes my chest do stupid things—when a sound like a murdered woman rips across the lot. I freeze. Rome doesn't even flick an ear.
“What,” I say, “was that?”
Rowe leans on the rail, unbothered. “Silas's delivery.”
The scream comes again. Then an answering scream. Then a third voice joins in, and I abandon Rome's foot and jog around the equipment trailer to find a crate the size of a garden shed and Silas standing beside it with a clipboard and a man in a delivery uniform who clearly wants to leave.
Inside the crate, iridescent and furious, are peacocks.
“You bought peacocks.”
“I acquired peacocks.” Silas signs the clipboard without looking at me. “Four hens, two males. They walk the stage during the levitation. Very dramatic. Very biblical.”
“They're going to scream every dawn for the rest of your life.”
“Everything worthwhile does.”
By evening, they've claimed the strip of grass behind the menagerie tents like feathered landlords, and one of the males has already fanned at Cleopatra through the fence and been ignored so thoroughly I almost felt bad for him.
I find a dropped tail feather in the grass at dusk—longer than my arm, the eye green and bronze and impossibly beautiful—and I carry it around for the rest of the day like a kid with a prize.
The only sour note comes at dinner, when I pull out my phone and Rowe's hand appears in my peripheral vision, hovering.
“Not yet,” he says gently.
“I was just going to text her. Not about… anything. Just that I'm okay.”
“Wren.” His voice stays soft. “No one can know you ran out of the practice in a torn blouse yesterday.” He holds my eyes. “A few more days. When the news breaks, you call her, and you're as shocked as anyone. And then you never have to lie to her again.”
I put the phone away.
“She's going to be okay,” he adds.
“I know.” I do know. That's the whole point of what happened in that barn. “I just miss her already, and I haven't even left yet.”
“You'll write. You'll call. You'll visit when the route loops back through.” A beat. “And if she ever needs anything, she has seven brothers-in-law she's never met.”
The Saturday show is the best one yet.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe every show looks like this from now on.
Maybe once you've watched a man walk a lion through a spotlight and known what he feels like inside you, the whole world gets brighter.
But the crowd is huge and loud, Brutus milks his wave for three encores, and when Rome makes his emperor's crossing, a little boy in the second row starts crying from pure joy.
Afterward, we do the chores side by side, hay and water and Caesar's evening feed, the routine already fitting me like a coat I've owned for years. And then his trailer, and the lamp, and the door clicking shut on the world.
I flop onto the bench with the peacock feather still in my hand, twirling it slowly, watching the eye catch the light.
“I can't believe he just added peafowl to the menagerie. Without telling anyone. Who does that?” I spin the feather.
“Six new patients. Avian. I don't even have my large avian references with me.
He couldn't have mentioned it at breakfast?
'Oh, by the way, incoming birds, Doc'?” I look up.
“For the record, I don't actually mind. They're gorgeous. But it's the principle—”
Rowe isn't listening.
He's sitting in his chair with his forearms on his knees, and he's somewhere else. His thumb has found his left sleeve, moving over the fabric, back and forth, and his eyes are on the floor between his boots.
I stop twirling. “Hey. What's up?”
He doesn't answer right away.
“This morning,” he says finally. “With the chains. I kept my clothes on.”
“I noticed.” I keep my voice level, easy. “I figured you had reasons.”