Chapter 7
Tori
I’m in Kai’s bed. His arm is across my waist. The river is running outside the window and the first light is coming through the screen and I’m lying in a cabin on a mountain in Montana thinking about nothing.
Actually nothing. No monitors. No dosages.
No triage protocols running in the background.
My brain is quiet for the first time in four years and the quiet feels like something I didn’t know existed and am now going to have to quit.
The last week has been the best of my life. Not just Kai. All of it.
Coffee with Jenna and Marissa at Wylde Beans, the three of us at a corner table while Jenna showed us prints from a backcountry shoot and Marissa reorganized the sugar caddy because she can’t help herself.
Hikes with Marissa where she talked about the business and I listened and my shoulders stayed down the whole time.
An afternoon at Jenna and Jasper’s cabin where Jenna cooked something ambitious and Jasper sat in the corner looking at her like she’d built the sun and said four words the entire visit.
Evenings on the porch with wine and the mountains going gold and nowhere to be. Nothing beeping. Nobody crashing. My body remembering how to exist without adrenaline as a baseline.
I came here to rest. I got rest and a river and two of my best friends within driving distance and a man who reads me like I read everyone else. I got more than I planned for. I got everything.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Heather (Charge Nurse): Hey T. Shift schedule for next week is up. You’re on for Mon/Tue/Thurs nights. We’re short-staffed. Julie quit. They haven’t filled her position. We need you back. Hope you’re getting rest. You’re going to need it.
I read it twice. The first time as information. The second time as the sound of a door closing on whatever I’ve been building in this cabin for the past five days.
Julie quit. They haven’t filled her position. We need you.
Three sentences. The entire weight of my professional life in a text message sent before dawn because Heather works nights and 6am is her end of shift and she’s thinking about the schedule because the schedule holds the ER together and the ER holds the patients together and the patients are why any of us do this.
I close my eyes. Kai’s breathing is steady beside me. Fourteen breaths per minute. His baseline. The man sleeps the way he does everything: calm, measured, certain.
I am none of those things right now.
I slide out of bed without waking him. I pull on his t-shirt (gray, soft, too big, smells like him and river air) and take my phone to the deck.
The morning is cool. The river is flat and silver. I sit in the chair where Kai sits every evening and look at the water and feel the thing I’ve been refusing to feel settle onto my shoulders like a lead apron in the X-ray suite.
I have to go back.
Not because I want to. Not because the ER is calling me with a passion I can’t resist. Because I’m on the schedule.
Because Julie quit and they’re short. Heather is running nights with a skeleton crew.
Over a hundred patients come through the door each day, and some of them live or don’t based on who’s in that room at 3am.
I’m supposed to be in that room. I’m supposed to be the one with the steady hands and clear thinking. That’s my job. That’s who I am.
My flight is in three days.
I open the group chat.
Me: Got a text from my charge nurse. Short-staffed. Julie quit. They need me back ASAP.
The responses come fast for 6am.
Jules: Do NOT let the hospital guilt you into cutting this short.
Claire: Is your flight still Saturday?
Me: Saturday. I’m not cutting it short. The text just reminded me that I have a life I’m going back to.
Jules: You have a JOB you’re going back to. Your life is wherever you decide it is.
Paige: How are you feeling about everything?? With the mountain and with Kai??
I look at that question for a long time.
Me: I don’t know.
Jules: SCREENSHOTTED. Tori Lane said “I don’t know.” In nine years of friendship she has never once not had a diagnosis.
Claire: Jules. Read the room.
Jules: I’m reading the room. The room says she’s in love with a man on a mountain and she has a flight in three days and she doesn’t know what to do about it. This mountain is undefeated.
Paige: Whatever you decide, we love you. You deserve to be happy. You’ve been taking care of everyone else for so long.
Marissa: Whatever you need. I’m here.
I close the app. Paige is right. Jules is right. Claire is right just by asking the simple question. My flight is Saturday. That is a fact. What I do after Saturday is a decision.
I’ve been making decisions for other people for four years. In the ER, the decisions are clear because the protocols exist and the training exists and the answer is always “what does the patient need.” There is no protocol for this. There is no one else’s need to organize my answer around.
There is just me. And what I want. And I have spent so long being the person who manages what other people need that I have no idea how to manage what I need.
The screen door opens behind me. Kai steps onto the deck in gray sweatpants and nothing else.
His hair is pushed back. His eyes are soft from sleep.
He looks at me in his shirt on his chair looking at his river and something crosses his face that I would describe, if I were charting, as “acute awareness of impending loss.”
He doesn’t say anything. He sits on the railing. Looks at the river. Looks at me. He reads the situation.
“Work?” he says.
“Heather. My charge nurse. They’re short-staffed.”
He nods.
“I fly out Saturday.”
He nods again. His jaw is set but it’s not tension. It’s something quieter. The face of a man who knew this was coming because he’s been counting the same days I have. Precisely. Inevitably. Numbers don’t negotiate.
“Three days,” he says.
“Three days.”
The river runs below us. The morning light is turning the water gold. Everything about this view, this cabin, this man, is exactly what I came to this mountain looking for. Rest. Quiet. The absence of the thing that’s been grinding me to dust.
And I’m supposed to fly back to it Saturday.
“I’m not asking you to stay,” he says.
This catches me. Not because I expected him to ask.
Because the way he says it tells me he wants to.
The words are measured and deliberate and they cost him something.
I can hear the cost in the drop of his register, the way the sentence comes out slower than his usual pace.
He’s controlling this the way he controls everything. With precision. At personal expense.
“I know,” I say.
“You have a job. People depend on you.”
“They do.”
“You’re good at it.”
“I am.”
“And you’re burning out.” He says it simply. Not an accusation. A reading. “You know you are. You’ve known since before you came here.”
I don’t answer. Because he’s right. I’ve known since March.
Since the nineteen-hour shift after which I sat in my car in the parking garage and couldn’t remember how to start the engine.
Since the morning with the keys in the refrigerator.
Since the night I woke at 2am with my heart hammering because I thought I heard a monitor alarm and there was no monitor and there was no alarm and there was no patient.
Just me in a dark apartment with a heart rate of a hundred and twenty and no emergency to justify it.
“The mountain isn’t going anywhere,” he says. “The river isn’t going anywhere.” A pause. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I look at him. This quiet, funny, steady man who reads water and reads me and who dove into a river fully clothed because sixteen years ago his sister went under and his body never stopped protecting the people near the current.
“I know,” I say.
“But.”
“But I’m the person who shows up. That’s who I am. I don’t leave when people need me.”
“Who do you leave for?”
The question lands like a defibrillator. Clean and direct. The kind of shock that restarts things.
I don’t have an answer. I have never had an answer.
I have never been the person who leaves for herself because leaving for yourself is what irresponsible people do and I am not irresponsible.
I am reliable. I am steady. I am the one who stays in the room when the code is going badly and holds the family’s hand when the news is the worst and goes back to work the next night because the ER doesn’t staff itself and someone has to be there.
Who do I leave for?
“I don’t know,” I say. For the second time today. Jules would screenshot this too.
He nods. He doesn’t push. He drinks his coffee and looks at the river and lets the question sit between us.
I have spent my entire adult life defining myself by what other people need. I’m sitting on a deck in Montana next to a man who just asked me the one question nobody has ever asked.
Who do you leave for?
I don’t know the answer yet. But asking the question might be the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me.
I know what the friends would say. Jules would call it the mountain’s track record. Claire would ask what I actually want. Paige would tell me I deserve to be happy.
Marissa would say nothing. Because Marissa made this choice. She brought her whole career with her and built a second one on top of it. She didn’t give anything up. She just rearranged.
But Marissa is Marissa. And I’m me. Marissa’s career didn’t involve people’s lives at 3am.
Kai reaches over. His hand finds mine on the armrest. His grip is warm and firm and he holds my hand like someone who has learned that the things worth keeping need room to move.
I hold his hand back.
Three days.