Chapter 1 #2
"You're doing it again," Dana says.
"Doing what?"
"That thing where you go somewhere else in your head and come back looking sad."
"I'm not sad."
"Wistful, then. Is that better?"
"I'm working," I say, which isn't an answer, and she lets it go with the particular grace of someone who's decided prying further isn't worth the effort today.
The afternoon passes in its usual blur — sick visits, a follow-up on a sprained ankle, a phone consultation with a specialist forty minutes away about a patient's test results.
By the time I finally lock up the clinic for the night, the sun's already dipping low over the harbor, and my feet ache in the specific way that means I've been on them since seven that morning without much of a break.
I've built a good life around that ache. A career that matters. A town that depends on me. Friendships that run deep enough to survive anything. I tell myself it's enough, most days, because most days it has to be.
Being close to Barrett Voss without being with him is the chronic condition I never expect to cure. I just manage it. I take my own advice, or try to. I keep moving.
Dana knocks on the door frame. "Mrs. Alvarez is up next. She thinks her cat gave her a rash again."
"It's always the cat," I say, and go back to work, because that's the thing about being needed — it doesn't leave much room for standing still in your own feelings.
Mrs. Alvarez's rash is, predictably, from the cat.
I spend twenty minutes explaining the concept of allergy testing to a woman who is convinced her tabby is being unfairly maligned, and by the time she leaves, satisfied but unconvinced, I've got four more patients stacked up and a headache building behind my left eye.
That's the rhythm of my days, mostly. Small emergencies.
Small comforts. A community that trusts me with its bodies and, more often than people realize, with the things underneath them — the fear behind a strange mole, the exhaustion behind a persistent cough, the loneliness behind an elderly patient who schedules a checkup every six weeks because it's the only conversation they'll have that week.
I love this job in the specific, exhausting way you love something that asks everything of you and gives you purpose in return.
My mother, who left Anchor Bay for a bigger practice in the city the year I finished my residency, still doesn't understand why I came back here instead of following her.
"You could make three times the money somewhere else," she told me, more than once. "You could have an actual life."
I have an actual life. It's just built around a town of four thousand people who need exactly one doctor, and around a man who's never going to know how much of my decision to stay here was really about staying close to him.
I don't regret it. That's the strange thing.
Even on the hardest days — and there are plenty, days that end with me crying in my car in the clinic parking lot after losing a patient I'd known my whole life, days when the isolation of being the only doctor for forty miles presses down harder than I know how to carry alone — I don't regret staying.
Anchor Bay is home. Barrett is home, even the unrequited, complicated version of him I've built my life around.
By early afternoon the waiting room has finally thinned out, and I take ten minutes to eat a sandwich at my desk while flipping through lab results.
My phone buzzes — a text from Piper, checking in about a prenatal appointment next week, the kind of easy, ordinary message that reminds me how many lives are quietly woven through mine in this town.
I answer her, then answer three more messages, then look up to find another hour has disappeared into the particular blur that is a Tuesday in a one-doctor practice.
By the time I lock up the clinic that night, the sun's gone down over the harbor and my phone has three missed calls from the compound — nothing urgent, just Rhett asking if I've got extra gauze for a bar fight casualty, the kind of small emergency that's just Tuesday around here.
I text back that I'll swing by in the morning and drive home along the water, past The Crow's Nest with its lights still on, past the marina where Barrett's truck is, predictably, still parked outside his office at nine p.m.
I don't stop. I know better than to stop.
Some nights the wanting is quiet enough to live with. Tonight it's louder than usual, and I don't examine why — not yet, not consciously — but some part of me already knows that something in Anchor Bay is about to shift, and that when it does, it's going to shift for both of us.
I just don't know yet how close that shift already is.
At home, I heat up leftovers I don't taste and sit at my kitchen table with a stack of medical journals I don't manage to focus on.
My apartment above the clinic is small, practical, decorated in the sparse way of someone who spends most of her waking hours somewhere else.
There's exactly one photo on my refrigerator — Barrett and me at nineteen, sunburned and grinning, arms slung around each other's shoulders at some long-forgotten summer bonfire.
I've looked at that photo probably ten thousand times over the years.
Tonight, for reasons I don't examine too hard, I look at it a little longer than usual.
My phone buzzes. Barrett.
Barrett: Bloodwork results back yet or are you making me suffer in suspense.
Me: You've been "in suspense" for four hours. I think you'll survive.
Barrett: Doubtful. My doctor told me I was stressed. I've been stressed about being stressed ever since.
I laugh out loud in my empty kitchen, the sound startling in the quiet.
Me: Results tomorrow. Try to contain yourself.
Barrett: No promises.
I set the phone down and finish my dinner slowly, letting the familiar rhythm of texting him settle the restless energy the day left behind.
It's a comfort I've relied on for years — this easy, constant thread between us, always there no matter what else is happening.
Some nights it's enough. Some nights, like tonight, it leaves an ache in its wake too, a quiet awareness of everything unsaid sitting just beneath the surface of every ordinary exchange.
I think about the way his hand felt warm under mine during the grip test. I think about the particular attentiveness in his eyes when he asked if I was quiet today. I tell myself, the way I've told myself a thousand times before, that I'm reading too much into small things.
I've been wrong about that before. I try not to hope I'm wrong about it now.
I get ready for bed early, exhausted in the specific way only a full clinic day can produce, and fall asleep with my phone on the nightstand, still half expecting — hoping, though I won't admit it even to myself — that it might buzz again before morning.
It doesn't. But somewhere across town, in an office with the lamp still burning, Barrett Voss is staring at his own phone, working up the nerve to say something he isn't ready to say yet, and neither of us has any idea how close we already are.
I lie awake a while longer than usual that night, listening to the ancient radiator clank in the corner of my bedroom, thinking about fifteen years and how strange it is that a single ordinary Tuesday can feel different from all the ordinary Tuesdays that came before it.
I can't point to anything specific. Nothing happened today that hasn't happened a hundred times before — a physical, a text exchange, an easy laugh in an exam room.
And yet something feels different, some current running just under the surface of the day that I can't quite name, and as I finally drift toward sleep, I let myself hold onto the smallest, most dangerous hope I've allowed myself in years: that maybe, after fifteen years of waiting, something in Anchor Bay is finally starting to shift in my favor.
I fall asleep before I can talk myself out of the thought entirely, and for the first time in a long time, I don't dream about anything except the ordinary, comforting sound of Barrett's laugh.
Morning comes early, the way it always does in this job, and I wake to sunlight through the crooked window and the distant sound of gulls over the harbor, already bracing myself for another day of small emergencies and quiet, unspoken hope.