Chapter 3
Wren
The letter arrives on clinic letterhead paper, except I didn't write it, and that's the first sign my day is about to get worse.
I almost don't open it right away — Fridays are always slammed, a backlog of patients who put off appointments all week finally deciding to address whatever's been bothering them before the weekend, and the stack of mail on my desk has been sitting untouched since Wednesday.
But something about the return address catches my eye between patients, an unfamiliar corporate logo where I'm used to seeing insurance companies and pharmaceutical reps, and curiosity gets the better of me during my one free ten minutes before lunch.
The morning had already been a lot before the letter even arrived.
A newborn's two-week checkup that ran long because the mother, exhausted and overwhelmed in the particular way new mothers get, needed more reassurance than the appointment technically allowed for.
A diabetic patient whose numbers had crept in a direction I didn't like, requiring a longer conversation about medication adjustments than my schedule had room for.
A teenager with a sports injury who needed an X-ray I don't have the equipment to take here, meaning another referral, another forty-minute drive for a family that already struggles to make ends meet.
By the time I finally sit down at my desk with a granola bar that's supposed to be lunch, I'm already tired in the bone-deep way that comes from giving pieces of yourself away all morning without much left over for restocking.
The letter sits at the bottom of the stack, and if Dana hadn't mentioned it specifically — "there's something official-looking in today's mail, might want to look at that one first" — I probably would have left it for tomorrow.
It's from Halcyon Coastal Partners, tucked in with a stack of other correspondence Dana hands me between patients, and it takes me two read-throughs to understand what I'm looking at.
A "preliminary redevelopment concept" for the medical building.
Retail space on the ground floor. Boutique offices above.
Nothing about where, exactly, the only doctor in Anchor Bay is supposed to practice medicine once her clinic becomes a shoe store.
I read it a third time in my office with the door closed, and my hands are shaking by the end of it — not from fear, or not only from fear. From fury.
This building isn't just where I work. It's where I deliver babies.
It's where I set Old Man Pruitt's arm after his motorcycle went down on Route 9, where I sat with the Alvarez family the week their father was diagnosed, where I've built fifteen years of trust one appointment at a time in a town that doesn't hand trust out easily.
If Halcyon gets what they want, Anchor Bay doesn't get a nicer clinic somewhere else.
It gets no clinic at all, not for a long time, not until some other doctor decides a town this small is worth the trouble.
I think about every patient who's walked through that door scared and left steadier.
I think about Mrs. Delgado, who was convinced for a decade that doctors in the city wouldn't listen to her the way I do, and who drives past three other towns just to see me even now that she's moved.
I think about the newborns I've delivered in the birthing room at the back of the building, the exact one Halcyon's concept drawing shows converted into "flexible retail space.
" I think about every single reason this building is not just brick and drywall but the physical architecture of fifteen years of trust, and my hands are still shaking by the time I finish rereading the letter a third time.
I call Barrett before I've even decided to.
"They came after the clinic," I say, no preamble.
There's a pause on the line, and I can hear him sit up straighter, hear the shift in his voice from tired to sharp. "Send it to me."
"Barrett—"
"Send it to me, Wren. Now."
I forward the letter, and twenty minutes later he's walking through my clinic door, past a waiting room full of patients who all straighten up a little when they see him, because everyone in this town knows what the Voss name means even when they don't know exactly why he's there.
Mrs. Delgado, who's been waiting forty minutes for a follow-up, actually waves at him, and old Mr. Okafor tips an imaginary hat.
Barrett nods back at both of them, distracted, already halfway through composing whatever he plans to say to me before he's even reached my office door.
"You didn't have to come in person," I tell him, once Dana's closed the door behind him.
"Yes, I did."
He looks furious in the specific, controlled way he gets when something threatens someone he loves rather than something merely inconvenient — jaw tight, shoulders squared, the same expression I remember from the day a teacher unfairly gave me detention in tenth grade and Barrett spent the entire lunch period arguing my case to the vice principal until the punishment got overturned.
We end up in my office after hours, the waiting room empty, patient files stacked around us like a paper fortress. He reads the letter twice, jaw tight, and then looks up at me.
"They can't do this."
"They're trying."
"They can't," he says again, and there's something in his voice — not just anger on my behalf, something closer to the bone than that — that makes my chest ache in a way I don't have time to examine right now.
He reads it a third time, slower, highlighting phrases with a pen he pulls from his jacket pocket, muttering half to himself about proposed setback requirements and the specific language of "flexible retail space" that makes his jaw clench harder each time he says it out loud.
"They've done their homework," he says finally. "This isn't a first offer designed to get rejected. This is a plan somebody's spent months putting together."
"That's not comforting."
"It's not meant to be. It's meant to tell us how seriously we need to take this.
" He sets the letter down and looks at me directly, something fierce and protective in his expression that I've seen aimed at other people over the years — at Rhett when someone threatened him, at Dominic when the club faced a crisis — but never quite this intensely aimed at me before.
"We're not losing this building, Wren. Whatever it takes. "
"That's a big promise."
"I don't make promises I don't intend to keep. You know that."
I do know that. It's one of the things I've loved about him longest — the fact that his word has always meant something, that he's never once told me he'd handle something and then failed to follow through.
It's part of why watching him fight for the marina and now for the clinic feels less like professional obligation and more like something personal, something that matters to him beyond the business logic of it.
We spend two hours going through it. He knows zoning law better than most of the lawyers in this county.
I know exactly what losing this building would cost the town, in numbers and in human terms he doesn't have — the pregnant women who'd have to drive forty minutes for prenatal care, the elderly patients who can't drive that far at all.
We build an argument together the way we've always built things together, seamlessly, without either of us ever formally deciding to be a team.
He pulls up property records on his laptop, cross-referencing them against the original zoning covenant from when the medical building was first designated, and I pull my own files — patient volume statistics, records of every emergency this clinic has handled that would have otherwise required a forty-minute ambulance ride, a folder of testimonials I'd started collecting years ago for an entirely different grant application and never expected to need for this.
"There's a public health necessity clause," Barrett says, scrolling through a dense paragraph of county code.
"It's obscure. Nobody's invoked it in twenty years.
But if we can show the clinic qualifies as an essential service without adequate alternative access, it might be enough to slow them down, even if it's not enough to stop them outright. "
"How do we show that?"
"With exactly what you've got in that folder." He nods at my stack of testimonials. "Every one of those is evidence. We build the case that Anchor Bay doesn't have a redundant clinic. It has one clinic, one doctor, and no meaningful fallback if either disappears."
I feel something settle in my chest, watching him work — not just gratitude, though there's plenty of that, but something steadier, something that feels like being on solid ground for the first time since the letter arrived that morning.
Barrett has always had this effect on me during a crisis.
He doesn't just help. He makes the crisis feel survivable.
Somewhere past nine, the conversation drifts the way it always does with us — from strategy to something quieter.
"I've had a headache for three days," I admit, rubbing my temple without thinking. "Stress, probably."
Barrett doesn't say anything. He just reaches across the desk, the way he has since we were sixteen, and presses his thumb gently to the spot at my temple, right where the tension always sits.
It's a gesture so old, so familiar, that I barely register it happening — until I do. Until I notice, the way I haven't let myself notice in years, how his hand curves against the side of my face, how careful he is, how his thumb moves in the same slow circle it's made a hundred times before.
Normal friends don't do this. I know that. Some part of me has always known that, and some part of me has always let it happen anyway because it's Barrett, and because pretending it's normal has always been easier than naming what it actually is.
I close my eyes.