Chapter 7
Duke
Summer had settled into Hartsdale slowly, and then completely.
The bay doors stayed open from six to sundown now, and the air coming through smelled like the river and cut grass, and the particular sweetness that meant the valley had turned all the way over into the long days.
The rig was parked where it always was, backed in with the chrome catching the late-morning light.
Nine months since the wedding. I'd been counting without meaning to, which was not something a man did about a night he'd put behind him.
I was crouched at the engine compartment with the inventory sheet, running a check I didn't need to run.
Easton's habit, not mine. He was on a call with Astrid's clinic, some issue with the insurance filing, and wouldn't be in until seven-thirty.
So I was the one at the bumper with the clipboard, confirming what was already confirmed, going through motions that belonged to another man because going through motions was something my body understood better than sitting still.
Behind me, the kitchen was doing its morning. Halsey had eggs on the burner. The foil tray was out. Micah was at the island with his plate and his phone, and I could hear him trying to start a conversation that nobody was going to finish for him.
"Rhodes," he called through the bay door. "Did you know there's a word for the smell of rain on dry ground?"
"Petrichor," I said without turning around. "Eat your eggs, Micah."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I read. Some of us read."
"I wouldn't have pegged you as a guy who reads."
"That says more about you than it does about me, Micah."
I heard Halsey refill Micah's plate without being asked. I didn't go back in. The bay was mine this morning. The clipboard, the rig, the warm air coming through the doors. A room that didn't need me to be anything other than a man with an inventory sheet.
I'd been thinking about her again.
That was the honest version. I'd been thinking about Audrey Callahan for months—not constantly, not in the way that wrecked a day, but in the low, persistent way a song gets into your head and you don't notice it's playing until you catch yourself humming.
The pact was holding. I told myself this every time her name surfaced, the way you check a wound and confirm it's still closed.
We made an agreement. The agreement was sound.
She was right—Astrid and Easton were going to be in our lives for years, and a one-night stand between the maid of honor and the best man was something two adults could put behind them as long as neither one of them reached back for it.
I wasn’t reaching back. I was holding the line.
I'd held it through nine months of Easton mentioning her name in passing, through every barbecue and birthday at the bungalow I'd found reasons not to attend, through a shift in my own driving routes that I never named out loud. I stopped taking Main home from the firehouse because Main went past Hartsdale General, and Hartsdale General was where she worked, and I wasn’t going to be the man who drove past a hospital, hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman he'd agreed not to want.
I took the bypass instead. The bypass added four minutes. I made peace with the four minutes.
And I'd almost made peace with the rest of it until I saw her on Main Street.
It was a Saturday, a while back, late winter with the last of the dirty snow still banked along the curb. I was coming out of the hardware store with a box of screws for a shelf I was putting up in my place, and she was across the street, walking into the bakery.
She didn't see me. She was in a heavy coat, her hair down around her shoulders, and she looked good.
Rested. Like the months since the wedding had been kind to her.
She looked like a woman who had her life in order, and I stood on the sidewalk with a box of screws and watched her disappear through the door.
The bump registered before my mind caught up with what I was seeing.
She was pregnant. Visibly, unmistakably pregnant, the silhouette clear under the coat as she turned sideways to pull the door open. My brain processed the shape first, the meaning second, and the feeling third, and the feeling was a drop, like the floor had shifted under me by a quarter inch.
She met someone. After the wedding, after the pact, she met someone, and he was whoever he was, and things moved fast, and this was her life now.
I stood there with my box of screws and built the whole story in the time it took her to walk through a door. A man I didn't know. A relationship I didn't know about. A future that had nothing to do with the night I was still holding in a closed fist somewhere behind my ribs.
I went home. I put up the shelf. I didn't think about it for the rest of the afternoon, and then I thought about it all evening. I sat on my couch with a beer I wasn't drinking and wondered who the man was.
I didn't want to wonder. I'd no right to wonder.
I wondered anyway—what he looked like, whether he was good to her, whether she laughed with him at the end of a long day, whether he knew about the place at the side of her neck under her ear.
That last one cost me something I wasn't going to name, and I put the beer on the table and went to bed.
I hadn't seen her since. Not because Hartsdale stopped putting her in my path.
Because I stopped letting it. I took the bypass.
I kept skipping the barbecues. I kept the four extra minutes between myself and the woman who was carrying another man's baby, and I told myself the four minutes were enough.
They weren’t enough. I knew they weren’t enough. But I kept driving the bypass because the alternative was admitting that a woman I'd slept with once at a wedding and agreed to forget was the first person in a decade of casual who had made casual feel like a lie.
I checked the last line on the inventory sheet.
The wedding night came back in a flicker—her laugh in the dark by the gate, the grass under our feet, the weight of her against me in the doorway of her apartment before either of us had said a word.
I pushed it down. I put the clipboard on the running board and stood at the bumper, looking at the bay doors, holding the pact up with both hands the way I'd been holding it for months.
It was getting heavier.
Easton found me at the rig at eight.
He came through the bay from the kitchen with a coffee in his hand and the calm, unhurried posture of a man who had been married for the better part of a year and was still adjusting to the fact that his life had turned out the way he'd always wanted.
He looked good. He looked like Easton, which was to say settled, certain, the closed door open.
"Rhodes."
"Ford."
He leaned against the bumper beside me. We stood there for a beat, the two of us drinking bad coffee in the bay with the warm air coming in and the morning running itself around us.
"How's the elevation training?" he said.
"Good. Did Breakneck Ridge last weekend. Ran the scramble twice."
"Twice?"
"I wanted to see how my lungs handled the second push."
"And?"
"Lungs are fine. Knees are talking to me."
"When do you hear about the roster?"
"They're finalizing the roster this summer. My slot's been on the waitlist since last year. Should hear back any week now."
The answer came easily because I'd given it a dozen times—to my father, to the crew, to anyone who asked about Nepal.
The answer was true. The training was real.
The slot was real. The expedition was the next line on a list I'd been writing since I was old enough to understand that my father's pride ran on forward motion, and stopping was something Rhodes men didn't do.
I believed in the answer. I also noticed, standing at the bumper beside the man who had rewritten his entire life for a woman across the street, that the answer felt lighter than it used to.
The way something feels lighter when you've been carrying it so long your arms have gone numb and you can't tell anymore whether the weight is real or just familiar.
I opened my mouth to ask about Audrey.
The question was right there—casual, easy to frame, nothing that would betray what I was actually asking. How's Astrid? How's the crew? Everybody good? The way you work your way toward the name you actually want to hear without landing on it first.
"You've stopped dating," Easton said.
I closed my mouth.
He didn't look at me. He took a sip of his coffee and kept his eyes on the bay doors, and his voice had the flat calm of a man who was making an observation, not an accusation.
"You used to have somebody most weeks. Tuesday night, a Saturday. Months now, nothing."
"I've been busy."
"Mhm."
The firehouse syllable. Drawn out, unhurried, meaning I'm not arguing with you, but I'm not believing you either.
"I've been coaching," I said. "Saturday peewee hockey at the rink. Eight kids, seven of them can't stop without hitting the boards. The Delaney twins have figured out how to hold their sticks. I haven't missed a Saturday all season."
This was true. The rink on Saturday mornings was a room I'd walked into by accident and kept walking into on purpose.
Eight kids between five and seven, most of them in helmets that were too big, all of them calling me Coach D.
I liked it more than I'd expected to. I liked that the kids didn't need me to be charming or quick.
They needed me to show up, blow the whistle, and teach them how to stop without crashing.
It was the simplest version of showing up I'd ever done, and it was the only room I'd been in all year where I didn't feel like I was holding something up.
Easton let it sit.
He stood beside me at the bumper with his coffee and let the silence do what silence did between us—hold the space for the thing neither of us was going to say.
He knew. I could feel it, the way you feel someone reading a room you thought you'd locked.
Easton Ford, who had spent months pretending he wasn't in love with the woman across the street, was standing next to a man doing the same math, and he was giving me a chance to say it out loud.
I didn't take it.
"Good program," Easton said. He pushed off the bumper and clapped me on the shoulder on his way past, the same way he had on the morning of the wedding.
I watched him cross the bay toward the kitchen.
He'd given me a door. I'd looked at it, and I'd looked away, and the door had closed behind him with the quiet click of a man who would open it again whenever I was ready.
I wasn't ready.
The tones dropped at eleven-forty.
I was crossing the bay with an empty mug when the speaker cut through the morning, and my body was moving before the words finished forming.
Mug on the counter. Gloves in my back pocket.
Halsey was already at the wheel. Micah grabbed the jump bag off the wall mount.
Lou came through the office door with his radio.
Dispatch had it as a maternity emergency. Pregnant female, active labor, pulled over on the shoulder of Route 9 southbound, half a mile past the bypass exit. Conscious, alone in the vehicle, a sedan, contractions two minutes apart.
Hank came through from the office, radio already up. He pointed at the rig. We loaded.
The siren opened up as Halsey took us out of the bay. The sound stripped everything else away. No coffee, no conversation, no four-minute bypass route.
I pulled the OB kit from the compartment behind my seat and checked it on my knees.
Sterile gloves. Clamps. Sterile scissors.
Bulb syringe. Towels. Thermal blanket. I knew this kit.
I knew the procedure, knew the timeline, knew what a delivery needed from the person running it.
Every OB call I'd worked had been in a house or an apartment with a partner on scene and a hospital close.
A shoulder delivery on Route 9 was different. No partner on scene. Patient alone in the car. Contractions at two minutes meant we were close, and close meant I was going to be the only hands in the room when the room was a sedan on the side of a highway.
Halsey took the bypass. The lights cleared the intersections ahead of us. Lou was on the radio with dispatch—confirming the mile marker, vehicle description, and that the patient was still conscious. His voice was flat and even. Halsey's hands were steady on the wheel.
"Four minutes," Halsey said.
I closed the OB kit, checked my gloves, and looked out the windshield at the bypass straightening ahead of us. The trees along Route 9 were full and green, and the sky above them was the high, bright white of an afternoon that hadn't decided whether to cloud over.
We took the exit. Halsey brought the rig down to speed on the merge. Route 9 opened up southbound, two lanes, light traffic.
I saw the hazards from a hundred yards out.
A sedan on the shoulder, hazard lights flashing, pulled over at an angle that meant the stop had been fast, and the driver hadn't had time to straighten out. The car was silver. Small. The driver's door was closed. I could see a figure through the rear window, hunched in the back seat, moving.
Halsey pulled the rig onto the shoulder behind the sedan. I was out of the cab before the engine settled, OB kit in hand, walking up the driver's side.
The walk was short. Twenty feet of gravel shoulder between the rig and the sedan, the air warm against my face, the sound of Route 9 traffic passing in the far lane.
My boots crunched on the shoulder. The hazard lights clicked in their rhythm.
I registered the car as I came up on it—silver sedan, late model, a Hartsdale General parking sticker on the rear bumper.
I didn't process the sticker. I was already in the procedure.
Patient in the back seat, contractions at two minutes, alone, scared.
I was going to open the door, introduce myself, get vitals, assess dilation if she'd let me, and keep her calm until the ambulance unit arrived or until the baby decided it wasn't waiting.
I reached the rear door and looked through the window.
She looked up at me.
Gray eyes, wide with pain. Hair pulled back. A face I knew better than I'd any right to know it. She was gripping the headrest of the front seat with one hand, the other pressed flat against her belly, and her mouth was open on a breath that wasn’t a scream but was about to become one.
Audrey.