2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
REGAN
“Charming,” I say.
“What?” Tyler’s voice crackles through the truck’s speakers, tinny and slightly too loud because I’ve never figured out the Bluetooth on this thing.
“Nothing. Small-town bumper sticker. Very welcoming.”
“Is it one of those hand-painted ones? Please tell me it’s hand-painted.”
“It’s peeling, does that count?”
“Absolutely it counts. You’ve moved to a postcard. An expired postcard.”
The smile gets out before I can stop it. My twin brother has been on speakerphone since the Tennessee state line, which is two hours of his voice filling the cab of a truck that smells of cheap coffee and the veterinary disinfectant that I’m starting to think lives in my skin.
“Okay, describe it to me,” he says. “I need the full picture.”
“One road. Trees. More trees.” The speed limit drops, and so do I. “A gas station. A feed store with a rocking chair out front and, Tyler, I swear to God, there’s a cat sleeping on it.”
“A cat.”
“On the rocking chair. Outside the feed store. Orange tabby, fully unconscious. Not a care in the world.”
“I was wrong about the postcard. You’ve moved to a Hallmark movie.”
“Hallmark movies have better lighting.”
He laughs. It’s a good sound. Tyler’s laugh has always been the thing that can pull me out of whatever dark corner I’ve backed myself into.
He knows it. He deploys it strategically.
Twin privilege. He got the laugh, I got the stubbornness, and between the two of us we almost make one functional adult.
A diner comes up on my left. The Briar Rose, says the sign, in cursive paint that’s been touched up more than once.
There are lace curtains in the windows and a pie case visible through the glass.
A woman inside is wiping down the counter with the rhythm of someone who’s done it ten thousand times and will do it ten thousand more.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
“There’s a diner,” I tell Tyler. “With lace curtains.”
“Lace curtains?”
“And pies. Actual pies in the window. And a woman who looks young but also like she was born behind that counter.”
“You’re going to love it there and never come back, and I’ll have to visit you in cowboy country and pretend to like barbecue.”
“You do like barbecue.”
“I like it ironically.”
“Nobody likes barbecue ironically, Ty.”
A beat of quiet on his end. The creak of his desk chair.
The ambient hum of whatever open-plan office he’s sitting in right now.
Tyler works in software in Austin. Clean desk, good coffee, a life that makes sense on paper and in person.
I used to have one of those. Clean desk, good reference letters, a practice in Virginia where the other vets remembered my coffee order, and the receptionists invited me to their kids’ birthday parties.
That was before.
“Are you okay?” he says, cutting through the small talk.
“I’m good.”
“Regan.”
“I’m good, Tyler. Seriously,” I say, taking a slow breath in. “I’m driving into the town where I’m going to live, work, and build a practice, and there’s a cat on a rocking chair, and it’s seventy-two degrees, and I haven’t cried since Kentucky.”
“Kentucky was three hours ago.”
“Exactly. Progress.”
He doesn’t laugh at that one, which means he’s deciding whether to push. Tyler is the only person who can read me through a phone line, which is annoying and also the reason I called him instead of driving in silence. Silence and I have a complicated relationship right now.
“I’m proud of you,” he says. “You know that, right?”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m your twin brother. Making it weird is literally my job.”
“Your job is software engineering.”
“That’s my side hustle. My primary occupation is making it weird.”
A bar comes up on my right. The Rusty Spur, painted in block letters on weathered wood.
A parking lot with four trucks in it at eleven in the morning, which is either a good sign or a very concerning one.
Somebody’s propped open the front door. Country music drifts out, faint, like a memory of a song.
The road curves, and between the buildings I glimpse hills beyond, rolling green, and the sky is enormous here. I grew up in Virginia with normal amounts of sky. The Tennessee sky is something else entirely.
This sky has room to breathe.
Or I have room to breathe. And I’m blaming the sky.
“Ty, I should go. I’m nearly there.”
“Okay.” A pause. “Call me when you’re in. Send photos. If there’s a porch, I need photographic evidence.”
“I will.”
“And Regan?”
“Yeah?”
“If it turns out to be a murder town, I will come get you. No questions asked.”
“Noted.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
The call ends. The truck feels bigger without his voice in it. Emptier. The radio finds static, so I turn it off again.
Main Street unspools ahead of me. A hardware store that looks like it’s been here since before the town had a name. A post office the size of a garden shed. A woman walking a dog across the road without checking for traffic, because apparently traffic isn’t a concern when you are the traffic.
I studied this route on Google Maps until I could walk it in my sleep. Preparation is something I do. Over-preparing is something I do better. Ask Tyler. He’ll show you the spreadsheet I made for this move, color-coded with tabs.
There it is.
A two-story building with white clapboard siding and a green tin roof. A sign out front that reads Wild Briar Creek Veterinary Clinic in letters that were once probably black and are now a resigned shade of gray. The parking lot is gravel. There’s a hitching post.
An actual hitching post.
This is my life now.
The building is small. The paint is peeling in the same cheerful way the rest of this town seems to peel, as if decay here is just character building.
But the windows are clean. Somebody’s been getting it ready.
There’s fresh mulch in the flower bed by the entrance and a doormat that still has its bristles.
And through the front window, a waiting room with plastic chairs and a cork noticeboard and a framed print of a horse that looks like it came from a calendar circa 1997.
Perfect.
That’s not me being sarcastic. It’s genuinely perfect. This is exactly what I wanted. A clinic small enough that you know every animal by name. Close enough to farmland and ranches that the work is real, not cosmetic teeth cleaning for Pomeranians. Big enough to build something.
Doc Henley did the prep work. I know because he called me twice last week to make sure I knew where the fuse box was and which cabinet stuck, and that the exam table in room two pulls slightly to the left.
He spent forty-one years in this building.
Forty-one years of early mornings and emergency call-outs and knowing every rancher’s name and every horse’s temperament.
He cares about this place the way a parent cares about a child they’re handing over.
The gravel crunches under the tires as I pull in. The engine ticks as it cools.
My apartment is above the clinic. Second floor, a small balcony with a railing that might hold a plant if I’m optimistic and a person if I’m reckless.
“Nothing fancy,” Doc Henley had said on the phone, in a voice that suggested fancy was a concept he found personally offensive. “But it’s clean and the water’s hot.”
Clean and the water’s hot. That’s more than enough.
Behind me, the boxes are stacked. Textbooks. Instruments. The portable ultrasound I bought secondhand from a retiring equine vet in Lexington. Clothes. A few kitchen things. Two photographs I couldn’t leave behind, face down in a box so I don’t have to look at them while I drive.
That’s a life. Or the start of one.
Fresh start. New town. No one here knows you.
No one here knows what happened. No one here knows why I left a good practice in Virginia with three weeks’ notice and a reference letter I had to fight for.
No one here knows about the complaint, the investigation, the four months of barely sleeping while I waited to find out if my career was over before it started.
Thankfully, it wasn’t. I was cleared. Fully. No restrictions, no mark on my record, no ongoing concerns. That’s the official end of it.
The unofficial end is that my hands still shake when I think about it. That I still check my phone seventeen times a day for an email that isn’t coming. That I still hear Dr. Ashworth’s voice in my head saying You should have caught it sooner like a song I can’t stop humming.
I should have caught it sooner.
Maybe.
Or maybe the colic was too far advanced before the owners even called.
Maybe the surgery had a thirty percent chance at best, and everyone in that operating room knew it.
Maybe Dr. Ashworth needed someone to blame because the alternative was admitting that sometimes horses die and nobody did anything wrong.
But I didn’t fight him on it. I sat in his office, and I took it, and I let his version of events become the official story because I was twenty-seven and terrified and he’d been practicing since before I was born.
But I didn’t. And the horse died. And everything after that is the reason I’m sitting in a truck in Tennessee with my whole life in boxes and a town full of strangers who think I’m just the new vet.
I am just the new vet.
That’s the plan. Stick to it.
My boots hit gravel, touching new ground.
The clinic in front of me. The town behind me. The hills beyond that and the sky above all of it.
Tennessee air. Tennessee sun. Tennessee dirt under my boots.
I take out the key Doc Henley posted for me and the door creaks open.
The air hits me first, warm and green and so clean it feels like drinking water.
Pine and cut grass and something floral drift through the windows from a garden somewhere.
Cicadas are already going, steady and electric.
The breeze coming through the open window is nothing like the damp press of Virginia in July.
It’s lighter. Something with actual space in it.
I step into the waiting room and find a note on the counter.
I hope the drive was good. I figured you’d be tired so there’s coffee in the kitchenette, fresh milk in the fridge and Amy from the diner has kindly provided a fresh pecan pie.
You have my number and please don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.
I’m retired, not dead, and it would be good to feel useful from time to time. Doc Henley.
The nerves in my stomach settle. If everyone in Wild Briar Creek is as thoughtful as Doc Henley and Amy from the diner, I think I’m going to enjoy the fresh start that’s been forced on me.