Chapter 1
Wren
I've been in love with Barrett Voss since I was fifteen years old, and somewhere around year ten I stopped waiting for that to change.
I remember the exact moment it started, which is either romantic or pathetic depending on who you ask.
We were fifteen, sitting on the hood of his father's old truck down at the marina, sharing a bag of gas station chips because neither of us had money for anything better.
He was telling some ridiculous story about Rhett nearly falling off the roof of the clubhouse trying to fix a satellite dish, and he was laughing so hard he could barely finish the sentence, and I remember looking at him — really looking, for maybe the first time — and feeling something shift under my ribs that had nothing to do with friendship.
I didn't say anything. I was fifteen. I didn't have the language for it, and even if I had, some instinct told me that saying it out loud would change something I wasn't ready to risk.
So I filed it away, the way you file away a splinter you can't quite dig out, and I told myself it would fade with time the way most teenage crushes do.
It didn't fade. It just got quieter, more practiced, better at hiding in plain sight.
It's not dramatic anymore. It's just a fact of my life, the way the tide comes in twice a day whether or not anyone's watching. I love him. He doesn't see me that way. Those two things sit next to each other in my chest like old furniture, worn into shapes I've stopped noticing.
The clinic smells like antiseptic and the coffee I burned an hour ago.
I've got four charts open on my desk and a waiting room that hasn't emptied since seven a.m. Being the only doctor in a town this size means I don't get sick days.
I don't really get days, period. I get patients, and I get the particular exhaustion of caring about every single one of them.
My nurse, Dana, pokes her head in. "Barrett Voss is here for his physical."
I look at the clock. "He's three months late."
"I told him that. He said, and I quote, 'Tell her I know.'"
I snort and stand up, smoothing down my white coat like it's armor, which some days it is. "Send him back."
Barrett walks into the exam room like he owns it, which he sort of does — the Voss name is on half the buildings in this town, including, technically, the ground this clinic sits on.
He's got dark circles under his eyes and a five o'clock shadow that's closer to a five-day shadow, and he's wearing a T-shirt that fits him in a way that should be illegal for a man I'm supposed to be examining clinically.
"Dr. Calloway," he says, dropping onto the exam table with the ease of someone who's done this a hundred times. He has. I've been checking his blood pressure since we were seventeen and he snuck a fifth of whiskey into a compound bonfire and needed someone to make sure he didn't die of stupidity.
"You're late," I say, pulling on gloves.
"I've been told."
"By me. Repeatedly. For three months."
"I was going to come sooner." He rubs the back of his neck. "Then the marina paperwork happened. Then the licensing renewal happened. Then I forgot what day it was for about six weeks."
I press the stethoscope to his chest and try very hard to think about heart rate and not about how warm his skin is under the cold metal, how steady the sound is, how I could probably identify this exact rhythm blind, from memory, at this point in my life.
"Breathe normal," I say, mostly for my own benefit.
He breathes normal. His heart does not.
I write down numbers. Blood pressure, higher than I like. Resting heart rate, elevated. I don't need a lab to tell me what's causing it — I've watched this man run himself into the ground for his family's legacy since he was old enough to carry a clipboard.
"Your blood pressure's up," I tell him, sitting on my rolling stool so I'm eye level with him. "Not emergency-room up. But not okay, either."
"I'll sleep more."
"You'll say that and then not do it."
He grins, and it's the same grin he's had since he was eight years old and talked me into jumping off the pier even though I couldn't swim yet. "You know me too well."
"Unfortunately."
"Any chest pain? Shortness of breath?" I ask, running through the standard questions, clipboard balanced on my knee.
"No."
"Headaches?"
"Occasionally. Nothing unusual."
"Sleep?"
He hesitates just long enough that I look up from the clipboard. "Define unusual."
"How many hours are you averaging?"
"Five. Maybe six on a good night."
I write that down with more force than the pen requires. "That's not sustainable, Barrett."
"Neither is running a marina, apparently, but here we are."
I finish the exam in silence, mostly, taking his pulse, checking his reflexes, doing all the small rituals of a physical while carefully not thinking about the fact that his hand is warm in mine when I check his grip strength, or the way he watches my face while I work like he's trying to read something in it.
I check his ears, his throat, the glands along his neck, close enough that I can smell the same soap he's used since college, something clean and unremarkable that I could probably identify blindfolded at this point in my life.
He sits patient and still under my hands the way he always does, the same trust he's extended to me since we were teenagers and I first started practicing blood pressure cuffs on him for a high school anatomy class.
"You're quiet today," he says, while I'm making notes.
"I'm working."
"You're usually working and talking at the same time."
I glance up. "Am I not allowed to focus?"
"You're allowed. I'm just noting it for the record.
" There's something almost teasing in his voice, but underneath it, when I meet his eyes, there's a flicker of something else — an attentiveness that feels different than his usual easy friendliness, though I don't let myself examine it too closely.
I've learned not to read too much into small things with Barrett.
Reading too much into small things is how a person ends up loving someone for fifteen years without ever saying so.
When I'm done, I flip open his chart and write in the margin, the way I have for years. Take better care of yourself, idiot.
He leans over to read it upside down and laughs — a real laugh, low and easy, the one that used to make me weak in the knees at sixteen and, if I'm honest, still does at thirty.
"You've written some version of that in every chart since I was nineteen."
"And you've ignored it every time since I was nineteen."
"I'm listening this time."
"You said that at twenty. And twenty-two. And twenty-six."
"This time I mean it," he says, and something in his voice is quieter than the joke deserves.
I look up at him. There's a beat where neither of us says anything, where the exam room feels smaller than it did thirty seconds ago, and I do what I always do — I look away first.
"Rest," I tell him, standing up and putting the desk back between us like a wall I built on purpose. "Actual rest. Not 'I worked six hours instead of ten' rest."
"Yes, Doctor."
"I mean it, Barrett."
"I know you do." He hops off the table, and for a second his hand brushes my shoulder on his way past — nothing, a nothing touch, the kind we've traded a thousand times over twenty-five years — and my whole body still lights up like it's the first time.
I hate that about myself. I hate it and I've made a full peace with it, both at once, the way you can hate the tide and still build your whole life around its schedule.
"Same time next year?" he asks at the door, teasing.
"If you're lucky, I'll only make you wait six months."
He laughs again and leaves, and I stand in the empty exam room for a moment longer than I need to, listening to the sound of his truck starting outside, feeling the particular ache that comes from loving someone who will never look at you and see anything but always.
Dana finds me a minute later, leaning against the doorframe with a knowing look I've grown used to over the years. "You okay?"
"Fine."
"You've got the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have the face. The Barrett face. You've had it since I started working here.
" Dana's been my nurse for six years, long enough to have witnessed the full, tedious history of my unrequited feelings without me ever having to say a word about them out loud.
"One of these days you two are going to figure it out. "
"There's nothing to figure out. We're friends."
"Sure." She doesn't push it further, just gives me a look that says she doesn't believe me for a second, and goes back to prepping the next room.
I busy myself restocking supplies, mostly to have something to do with my hands, and think about how many people in this town seem to have a clearer read on my feelings for Barrett than I've ever let myself have out loud.
It's a strange kind of open secret — everyone assumes, nobody says it directly, and I've spent fifteen years letting the ambiguity protect me from ever having to hear the answer I'm afraid of.
The rest of the morning moves fast. A toddler with an ear infection. An elderly patient managing his diabetes who needs his medication adjusted. A teenager who came in nervous about a sports physical and left relieved once I cleared her for the season, grinning the whole way out the door.
By the time the lunch rush of appointments finally clears, I've almost managed to push Barrett's physical out of my mind entirely. Almost.
I eat lunch standing at the break room counter, half-listening to Dana talk about her weekend plans, half-replaying the exam room from earlier — the warmth of his hand, the particular quiet he'd had, the way he'd watched my face like he was looking for something he hadn't found before.
I tell myself, again, that I'm imagining things.
Fifteen years of practice at telling myself that hasn't made it any more convincing, but it's become such a reflex that I barely notice myself doing it anymore.