Chapter Ten #2
Her hair was loose. Full loose, same as it got when she’d slept on it wet, chestnut brown falling past her shoulders in waves that the braid had been holding back for days.
She held her coffee mug in both hands -- the blue one she’d claimed on day three without announcing it -- and looked at the poster and the plate of fruit.
Then she looked at me. Her mouth curved into a small smile.
I held her gaze over Ellie’s head. The child between us, bent over her steak drawing, completely absorbed in the work of a morning that she had decided was worth taking seriously.
Katy’s eyes were warm. Tired in the good way -- the fatigue that comes from sleeping flat on your back for the first time in years instead of curled on your side listening for sounds that don’t belong.
She didn’t smile. Didn’t need to. The look was enough -- acknowledgment, quiet and complete, the gravity of two people who had stopped pretending that the thing growing between them was temporary or accidental or anything other than exactly what it appeared to be.
I went back to the apples. Ellie’s crayon scratched. The coffee steamed. The knife on the cutting board caught the light through the window, and the morning continued around us, ordinary and mine in a way that mornings hadn’t been mine for longer than I wanted to measure.
* * *
The waiting room had emptied by three-fifteen.
I could hear the front desk through my open door -- keyboards clicking, the low murmur of the receptionist on the phone with a pharmacy, the sounds of a clinic settling into its end-of-day rhythm.
I had three charts left. Hip replacement follow-up.
Well-child check that had run long because the mother had questions about ear infections and I’d taken the time to answer them.
A medication refill that required a call to the specialist in Columbia, which I’d put off until tomorrow because the specialist’s office closed at four.
My desk was clean. It had been clean for years.
Patient files in the center, aligned with the edge of the blotter.
Pen to the right. Coffee mug to the left, empty, the ring it had left on the wood darkened to a permanent stain.
The computer monitor showed the EMR, the patient list scrolled to the bottom where the afternoon appointments lived, all of them checked out, all of them documented, the work of the day nearly done.
The phone rang.
The landline, not my cell. The clinic line, the one on my desk that patients rarely used because everyone had cell phones now and the younger staff regarded the landline the same way they regarded fax machines -- with polite confusion, as if it were a relic that had been left behind by accident. The display read BLOCKED.
I picked up. “Dr. Thomas.”
Silence on the other end. Not dead air -- the pressurized silence of an open line where someone was breathing but not speaking.
I waited. Three seconds. Four. The receptionist’s voice carried from the front desk, distant and muffled through the wall, and the HVAC kicked on with its usual metallic sigh.
A click. The line went dead.
I set the receiver down. A few minutes ago, I’d been thinking about Ellie’s poster and the way Katy had looked at me from the kitchen doorway.
That part of the day was over.
Second blocked call this week. The first had come a few days back, same time of day, same silence, same click.
I’d logged it. Made a note in the clinic security file, which was a spreadsheet on the shared drive that nobody but me ever looked at.
Called it an anomaly because anomalies existed and most of them were nothing.
This wasn’t nothing.
I pulled up the clinic’s exterior camera feed on my desktop.
Four angles, covering the parking lot, the front entrance, the side delivery door, and the street view from the second-floor window that the previous owner had rigged before selling me the building.
The feed was grayscale, timestamped in the corner, refreshing every thirty seconds. I scrolled back two hours.
The parking lot showed nothing unusual. My truck in its usual spot.
The receptionist’s Honda. The delivery door camera caught a UPS driver at eleven-forty-three, package left at the door, driver gone before the timestamp rolled over.
The front entrance was quiet -- an elderly patient leaving at twelve-seventeen, moving slowly toward a sedan parked at the far end of the lot.
The street view was the one that mattered.
The camera mounted above the second-floor window looked directly across Main Street at the angled parking in front of the hardware store.
Empty spaces mostly. A county maintenance truck at eleven-fifty, gone by twelve-thirty.
A sedan I didn’t recognize parked at the far end for twenty minutes around one o’clock, driver never visible.
And there, at twelve-oh-three, timestamp clear in the corner: a dark blue Chevy Silverado.
Parked directly across from the clinic’s front entrance, engine running based on the faint plume from the exhaust pipe, driver’s window partially down.
The resolution wasn’t good enough to make out a face.
Just a shape behind the wheel, dark clothing, the particular silhouette of a man sitting in a vehicle with nowhere particular to be.
The truck was gone by twelve-twenty. Replaced by an empty parking space that looked exactly like every other empty parking space on Main Street except that I knew, with the certainty that comes from years of reading threat patterns, that it wasn’t.
I closed the patient files. Stacked them neatly on the corner of the desk.
Locked the bottom drawer -- the one that held the clinic’s controlled substance log, though that wasn’t what I was thinking about when I turned the key.
The deadbolt on the back entrance was already thrown.
I checked it anyway. Palm against the metal, feeling the solid engagement of the bolt in the strike plate, and the habit was so old it felt autonomic, like checking a pulse.
My phone from my pocket. Fox’s contact, which lived in my favorites not because I called him often but because in fifteen years of brotherhood, the times I’d needed him had been the times when scrolling through a contact list would have cost seconds I didn’t have.
Blocked call at the clinic. Second time. Blue Silverado still a factor.
I sent it. Didn’t wait for a reply. Put the phone face-down on the desk and reached for my jacket on the hook behind the door.
The leather was cool, worn soft at the elbows, and I pulled it on without hurrying.
My keys from the desk drawer. My clinic bag from the floor beside the filing cabinet, already packed because I packed it the same way every afternoon -- stethoscope coiled, penlight, the flat aluminum case from my back pocket transferred to the bag’s side pouch where it lived during clinic hours.
Past the front desk. The receptionist looked up. “Heading out, Doc?”
“Yep. Lock up when you’re done. Deadbolt on the delivery door.”
She nodded. Didn’t ask why. The deadbolt on the delivery door was always locked at closing. Reminding her was redundant, which meant I was performing a routine for my own benefit rather than hers, and the fact that I recognized this didn’t stop me from doing it.
The parking lot was empty. Afternoon sun hitting the asphalt at a low angle, turning the potholes near the curb into shallow pools of amber light.
I scanned the street while I walked to my truck.
Main Street was quiet -- a few storefronts still open, no blue Silverado in any of the spaces I could see from here.
That didn’t mean anything. Empty spaces were data, not reassurance.
My phone buzzed against my thigh as I reached the truck. Fox.
Brothers have eyes on last known location. Truck spotted near county line 30 min ago. Moving east. Hornet and Cotton rotating gate tonight. Keep your phone on.
I read it twice. Got in the truck. Started the engine. Let it idle while I sat with my hands on the wheel and ran through the list like I ran through pre-op checks -- methodical, thorough, no item skipped because skipping items got people killed.
Camera angles at the house. The Ring doorbell pointed at the driveway.
The motion light on the east side of the porch that would catch anyone approaching from the tree line.
The deadbolt on the front door, which I’d checked this morning and would check again when I got home.
Katy’s phone. Charged or not? She’d been on it at breakfast, scrolling through her feed while Ellie talked about food groups, which meant the battery was probably above fifty.
The landline in the kitchen worked. I’d tested it yesterday, dialing my own cell from the handset, watching the caller ID pop up on my screen.
Which brothers were on compound tonight?
Hornet and Cotton, according to Fox. Hornet was loud but capable.
Cotton was something else entirely -- the stillness of a man who had spent years in places where stillness was a survival skill rather than a personality trait.
Between the two of them, the gate would be covered.
The perimeter would be walked. The cameras would be watched.
I put the truck in gear. Pulled out of the lot.
Main Street slid past the driver’s window -- storefronts, the post office, the diner where the club sometimes gathered for breakfast on Sundays -- and I didn’t speed.
Didn’t run the yellow light at the intersection.
Drove the speed limit because drawing attention was its own kind of risk, and the man in the blue Silverado had already drawn enough for both of us.