Chapter 1 #3
"I've got a personal stake in this," I said, before I could stop myself, and then covered it with a joke, the way I always did. "Also a gift. Mostly the personal stake."
Gemma's eyes softened in a way that told me she'd caught more of that sentence than I'd meant to give her, but she let it pass, because that's the kind of friend she already was, three weeks into knowing me.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I think this town needed you before we even knew we needed you. And I think Elias needed you before he walked through that door."
"That's a lot of pressure to put on one printer-adjacent afternoon."
"I contain multitudes." Gemma grinned. "Also I've been in this town eight years and I have never once seen that man crack a joke about office equipment. So. Multitudes."
"Let's not put that much pressure on Thursday's appointment."
"Too late. Already put it there."
I laughed, and she headed off toward the main clinic, and I turned back to my rehab wing, the paint still smelling faintly fresh, the whiteboard still declaring WELCOME in my too-enthusiastic handwriting.
I thought about Elias Vance's careful, correct sentences. I thought about the crack in his composure when I told him he didn't have to be okay, small as a hairline fracture, the kind you could miss if you weren't specifically trained to look for exactly that.
I was specifically trained to look for exactly that.
I'd been trained by the worst classroom there is: three years of watching my brother smile through Sunday dinners and family photos and every single conversation where somebody asked if he was doing all right, and every single time he said fine, functional, doing okay, right up until the week none of it was true anymore and nobody had caught it in time.
I wasn't going to let that happen twice.
I didn't know yet what that meant I was signing up for — not just the professional commitment, but the deeper one, the kind that sneaks up on you disguised as a job and turns into something you'd bleed for.
I didn't know yet that the man with the careful sentences and the almost-smile was going to become the person I measured every after against.
I just knew that Thursday, he'd come back.
And somewhere underneath the clinical part of my brain that was already planning his next assessment, a smaller, quieter part of me — the part that still visited a grave every October and still hadn't fully forgiven itself for not seeing it coming — made a promise it had no professional business making.
Not this one. Whatever it takes. Not this one too.
Before I left, I pulled his chart one more time and added a note in the margin, something I don't usually do on a first session, something that was more instinct than protocol: Monitor closely. Pattern consistent with high-functioning masking. Recommend integrating outdoor/adjunct therapy early.
I stared at that sentence for a while. It was clinically accurate. It was also, if I was honest, the sentence of someone who'd learned the hard way what happens when nobody writes it down in time.
My phone buzzed on the desk. A text from my mother, three states away, the way it always was these days: Thinking of you today. Hope the new job is good. Love you, sweet girl.
Today wasn't a hard day on the calendar — no anniversary, no birthday, nothing that should have made my mother's text land the way it did — but grief doesn't check a calendar before it visits. It just shows up, uninvited, dressed as an ordinary Thursday, and asks if you have a minute.
I texted back: Job's good. Big first day. Talk this weekend? Love you too.
I didn't tell her about Elias. I never told her much about work, not since Rory, because every hard case I described made her ask questions with an edge of panic underneath them, the specific panic of a mother who's already lost one child to a war that doesn't officially end when the fighting stops.
I locked up the rehab wing at six, turned off the lights, and drove home past the community garden, spring green pushing up along the fence line in the last of the daylight, and thought: good. He'll need that garden. He just doesn't know it yet.
Neither, if I was honest with myself, did I know exactly how much I'd need it too.
I parked in my driveway and sat there a minute before going in, the engine ticking as it cooled, the mountains going purple behind the rooftops.
Three weeks in Clover Ridge, and already this town had handed me a rehab wing, a friend in Gemma, and a patient I already suspected was going to matter to me more than any patient reasonably should.
I thought about the way Elias had said "back" — one syllable, and everything underneath it. I thought about my brother, who never once said a word that honest to anyone, not to me, not to our parents, not even, I suspected, to himself, right up until the end.
Elias had said it out loud. That was the difference. That was the whole hopeful difference, and I intended to build on it, one careful Thursday at a time, for as long as it took.