WREN
The cruiser pulls into the lot at a quarter past three, and my stomach drops even though I've been expecting it since they said they'd drive to Vance’s house.
Paige sees it through the front window first. She stops mid-sentence—something about the Hendersons' cat and its ongoing war with their new baby gate—and her hand goes flat against the reception counter.
“I see it.”
Deputy Carl Munson climbs out, settles his hat on his head, and takes his time crossing the gravel.
Carl brings his coonhound in every spring for heartworm season and once cried in exam two when we saved her from a snakebite.
He's not walking like a man coming to save anything now, though.
He's walking like a man who drew the short straw.
The bell over the door jingles.
“Afternoon, girls.” He takes his hat back off. Turns the brim in his hands. “Is, ah—is everybody here? On shift, I mean.”
“Just us and Dr. Reyes,” Paige says. “He's finishing a dental in the back.”
“Might want to get him.”
Paige goes. My hands find each other in front of my apron, and I make myself breathe the way she taught me. Out for four.
I know what he's going to say. I've known since Friday night. It doesn't matter. When Carl says it, the floor still tilts.
“Doc Vance is dead.” He's not looking at any of us as he talks. “Found him out at his place. In the barn.” His throat works as he swallows. “He, ah. He did it himself. Shotgun. Left a note in the kitchen.”
Dr. Reyes sits down hard in one of the waiting room chairs. Paige makes a sound behind her hand.
And I stand there with the cold spreading up from my feet, because knowing a thing and hearing a deputy say it in your reception area are two different animals.
Carl's hat keeps turning in his hands. The radio on the counter is playing the same country station it was playing when Vance came through that door, and some distant part of me thinks I should unplug it and throw it in the dumpster.
“Are you—” My voice comes out thin. I clear it. “Are you sure he...”
Carl shakes his head slowly. “No doubt, hon. Coroner was out there all day. Everything at the scene, the note, the—” He catches himself before the details get loose.
“His wife's been notified. She's in Ohio. She, ah.” He looks at his hat.
“She wasn't surprised. That's all I'll say. Practice was failing, marriage was done, man was drinking. Whole town watched it coming and nobody wanted to see it.”
I wait to feel like a monster. Instead, I look at Paige, unhurt, three feet away, crying into a wad of tissue over a man who was always mean to her.
“There'll be some paperwork,” Carl says. “Estate stuff, the practice, patient records. Lawyers'll sort it. Y'all keep the doors open best you can for now—animals don't know to grieve.” He puts his hat back on and pauses at the door. “I'm sorry, girls. Doc Reyes.”
The bell jingles. The cruiser crunches out of the lot.
For a long moment, nobody moves. The radio sings about a dirt road.
“I brought him coffee Thursday,” Paige whispers. “He didn't even look up. I should've—I don't know. Noticed something.”
“You couldn't have,” I tell her, and it's the truest lie I'll ever say, because there was nothing to notice. He didn't decide anything. Four men decided it for him in the dark, and one of them is going to sit across from me at dinner tonight.
I hug her because she needs it and because I need it, and we stand in the middle of the waiting room holding on while Dr. Reyes rubs his face with both hands and asks nobody in particular what happens to the practice now.
That question takes over the rest of the shift.
We cancel the afternoon appointments—nobody has the stomach, and Mrs. Delgado cries on the phone when I tell her why, and then apologizes for crying, and then tells me Vance spayed her first cat in 1998, back when he was different.
Everyone has a version of him from before.
The town will spend the next month choosing which Vance to bury.
By five, the three of us are sitting around the break room table with cold coffee.
“Vet Corbin might absorb the client list,” Dr. Reyes says. “Or somebody buys the building outright. Either way, this place needs a vet who wants to stay. You'd be first in line, Wren. Six years here, the clients love you. Whoever takes over would be insane not to—”
“I'm not staying,” I blurt.
Both of them look at me.
“I mean—” I turn my mug in a slow circle.
“I'm thinking about leaving. There's an offer. A staff position.” My heart is going too fast for how casual I'm pretending to be.
“With the carnival. Full-time vet for the menagerie.
They travel year-round, and they've got an elephant and a lion and a bear and now six peafowl, and no practice within driving distance most weeks, and—”
“You're thinking about it,” Paige says.
“I'm thinking about it.”
She looks at me the way she looks at an X-ray. Long. Careful.
“Dr. Reyes,” she says sweetly, without breaking eye contact with me, “would you give us a minute?”
He takes his coffee and goes to close out the charts, and the second the break room door clicks, Paige leans across the table.
“Thinking about it.”
“Paige.”
“Wren. Honey. Light of my life. You are the worst liar in this county.” She jabs a finger at me. “You've already said yes. It's all over your face. You said yes days ago.”
“I—”
“Does this have anything—anything at all, even a little—to do with a certain animal tamer with cheekbones from God and forearms of sin?”
The heat starts at my collarbone and climbs. My throat, my cheeks, my ears—I feel every inch of it happening and I am powerless, absolutely powerless, to stop it. Paige watches the blush conquer my entire head like she's watching a sunrise.
“Oh my god,” she breathes. “You're in love with him.”
“Paige—”
“You're going to run away with the circus for love. This is the plot of a movie. This is the plot of a movie I would watch twice.” Her eyes are shining, and then they spill over, and her voice cracks. “You're actually leaving.”
“Hey. Hey, no—”
“No, I'm happy. These are happy tears. Mostly happy tears. Seventy percent.” She swipes at her face with her sleeve and laughs.
“You've been here six years and you never once looked like this.
You know that? You'd come in, you'd do the work better than anyone, and you'd go home to an octopus documentary.
And then a monkey bruises its hand and suddenly you're—” she gestures at all of me, “—glowing. You glow now. I hate it. I love it. I hate how much I love it.”
“I'll write. I'll call. The route loops back through—”
“You'd better.” She points at me, deadly. “And I want an invite when there's something to be invited to. I don't care if it's in a tent.”
“It'll definitely be in a tent,” I say dryly.
The laugh bursts out of both of us at the same time, and then she's around the table, and we're hugging, really hugging, her chin on my shoulder, squeezing hard enough to make my ribs creak.
“He'd better deserve you,” she mumbles into my hair.
“He does.”
“He'd better know he'd better.”
“He knows.”
We hold on for one more second. Then she pulls back, wipes her face, and straightens my collar like a mom sending a kid to picture day.
“Go on. Get out of here. I'll lock up.” She sniffs. “Go see your lion.”
The carnival rises out of the fields in the evening light, the Big Top catching the last of the sun, and my chest does the thing it does now—that loosening, that homecoming—before I've even turned onto the access road.
Rowe is in the lot. Of course he is. Standing in the gravel with his hands in his pockets, tracking my car the way Caesar tracks him, and the whole terrible day slides off my shoulders at the sight of him.
I park. He walks over, and then, instead of coming around to open my door the way he's done every day since the beginning, he pulls open the passenger side and folds himself into the seat next to me.
I blink at him. He's never been in my car. His knees barely fit. He smells like hay and soap, and he's smiling, that rare full one that shows in his eyes, and it's aimed at me from eighteen inches away in a space the size of a phone booth.
“Hi,” I manage.
“Hi.” He pulls the door shut. “Drive.”
“Drive where?”
“Your apartment.” He buckles the seatbelt and settles in like this was always the plan.
“We're packing you up tonight. All of it. I cleared space in the trailer this afternoon—built shelves into the closet, moved my gear to the equipment storage. Silas found boxes.” His eyes cut to me, warm and completely serious.
“Trucks roll in six days, and I'm not spending another one of them with you driving back and forth like we're dating.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Aren't we dating?”
“We're done dating. You live with me now.” A beat. “If you want.”
“You built shelves.”
“I built shelves. And I ordered a huge bed.”
Something enormous and sweet swells up under my sternum.
This man. This man, who couldn't let a person within arm's reach two weeks ago, is sitting in my passenger seat with his knees against the glovebox, commandeering my evening, moving me into four hundred square feet like it's the most obvious thing in the world.
“Everything comes,” he adds. “Your books. The avian references you keep complaining about not having. The laundry chair.”
A laugh punches out of me. “The laundry chair doesn't come. The laundry chair gets folded and put away like a civilized—”
“The laundry chair comes.” His mouth quirks up. “It's sentient. You said so. We don't abandon family.”
I'm giggling now, actually giggling, alone in a car with the strangest, gentlest, most dangerous man in three states, and he watches me laugh like it's his favorite show under the Big Top.
I start the engine, pull out of the lot, and turn the car toward town, toward the little rental apartment with its sentient chair and its life-sized loneliness that I am about to fold into boxes and never live in again.