4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
REGAN
The pony’s hoof is warm in my hands. I’m holding it at the wrong angle, and I know it because my fingers won’t stop shaking.
Caleb Callahan is standing fifteen feet behind me.
I can’t see him. I don’t need to. My skin knows exactly where he is. The way it always did. Like he throws off a heat the rest of the room doesn’t.
Fifteen feet. Every hair on my arms stands up for it.
Ten years, and my body still leans toward him before my brain catches up.
I keep my eyes on the hoof. I keep my hands on the horse. I do not turn around, because if I turn around he’ll see every bit of it on my face.
My voice stays low and steady for the animal because that’s what you do, that’s what years of veterinary school and three years of practice have trained into me, and I will not fall apart in front of this horse, this family, and definitely not in front of him.
I talk through the diagnosis and treatment with Ethan, who’s standing at the pony’s head. By some miracle my voice sounds normal. “I’ll leave anti-inflammatories at the clinic. You can pick them up in the morning.”
Ethan nods. “Appreciate it.”
The hoof goes down and I wipe my palms on my jeans. My knees are liquid. I lock them hard and smile at Ethan because smiling is the currency I trade in. “Happy to help.”
He’s gone. Caleb. When I finally let myself look at the spot where he was standing, it’s empty. Just gravel and the shadow of the stable block and the late-summer heat rising off everything.
Good.
Despite my trembling hands, I manage to pack up my kit. Stethoscope, hoof pick, the little jar of poultice I mixed this morning in a clinic that still smells of Doc Henley’s pipe tobacco. Everything goes into the bag. Zip it. Shoulder it. Walk to the truck.
I make it all the way to the driver’s seat before I fall apart.
I don’t cry. I sit there with my hands on the steering wheel and my forehead pressed against my knuckles and breathe.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
The way Tyler taught me before swim meets in high school.
The way I taught myself after Caleb left and the panic attacks started, and I had to learn how to keep my body from flying apart every time someone walked out of a room without saying goodbye.
Caleb Callahan. Here.
Ten years. I’ve had ten years to get over this, and thirty seconds of him looking at me, looking through me, looking at me like I’m a stranger he already dislikes, and my hands are shaking like I’m seventeen again.
Prom night is seared into my memory. His suit jacket around my shoulders in the parking lot.
The bass from the gym thumping through the walls.
His voice in my ear, quiet enough that only I could hear it, saying, I want to marry you, but I’m going to wait.
I’m going to let you go to school and live your life and be sure.
And then I’m going to marry you. His hands on my waist. The corsage he’d bought, white roses, already wilting.
And I believed him. I believed every word because he was Caleb, and Caleb didn’t say things he didn’t mean.
And then he was gone. Vanished. Drew said Caleb was sick, but something felt off.
When I drove to his house the next morning with two coffees and a bag of donuts from the gas station, his truck wasn’t in the driveway.
His mom’s curtains were drawn. I knocked for ten minutes.
Sat on the porch and drank both coffees.
Told myself he’d gone for a run, or to get groceries, or to help a friend.
He hadn’t.
The texts I sent that week. The calls. The voicemails that got more desperate as the days went on. Hey, where are you? Call me when you get this. Then, Caleb, I’m worried. Please just let me know you’re okay. Then, by the end, I don’t understand what I did. Please. Just tell me what I did.
Nothing. No reply. No explanation. No goodbye.
Someone told my friend Ashley two weeks later that he’d enlisted. Shipped out for basic. Gone.
My hands tighten around the steering wheel. The truck starts. The air conditioning blasts against my face, and I let it dry my eyes because I’m not crying, I’m just hot, and I need to drive.
The road back to the clinic takes twelve minutes.
I’ve driven it twice now, once yesterday to get my bearings and once to get here, and already I know the bend by the creek where the willows hang low, the stretch of fence line with the missing post, the spot where the asphalt cracks and you can see the red dirt underneath.
I notice these things. It’s what I do when my brain is trying to swallow me whole.
Count the real things. Fence posts. Mailboxes.
The number of seconds between white lines on the road.
He looked at me like I was nothing.
No. Worse. He looked at me like I was something he recognized and wished he didn’t.
I make it back to the clinic and before I’ve even turned off the engine my phone’s in my hand and I’m calling Tyler.
He answers on the second ring. “Reg. How’s day one in Hicksville?”
“Don’t call it that.”
“I’ll call it that until you give me a better reason not to. How’s the clinic? How’s the apartment? Did you meet any cowboys?”
My chest tightens. My thumb presses hard into the center of the steering wheel.
“Clinic’s great,” I say. “Apartment’s small, but it’s mine. I’ve already had a call out to a ranch.”
“Look at you. Country vet. Mom’s going to lose her mind.”
“Mom already lost her mind when I turned down the Charlotte practice.”
Tyler laughs. It’s a warm sound, easy. My brother has always been easy. He got the lightness. I got the sharp edges and the ability to compartmentalize, which turn out to be the same thing.
“So you’re good?” he says. “You sound weird.”
“I’m tired. Long drive yesterday, early start today.”
“Eat something. You always forget to eat when you’re stressed.”
“I’m not stressed.”
“You just moved your entire life to a town where you don’t know a soul. You’re stressed.”
I know one soul. I wish I didn’t.
“I’m fine, Ty. I promise.”
A pause. I can hear him chewing. If he’s eating lunch at his desk, it means he’s behind on a project. Some things don’t change. Tyler runs late on everything except the things that matter.
“You’d tell me if something was wrong, right?” he says.
“When have I ever not told you something?”
That’s a lie, and we both know it, because I didn’t tell him about the panic attacks for three months after Caleb left, and I didn’t tell him I almost dropped out of pre-vet in sophomore year, and I’m not telling him this. But Tyler doesn’t push. Tyler never pushes when I use that voice.
We talk for another minute. He tells me about his coaching side hustle, about the freshman linebacker who can’t remember the snap count, about his neighbor’s dog that keeps eating his running shoes.
I listen. I let his voice fill the cab of the truck like water filling a glass, and by the time we hang up I can breathe normally again.
I couldn’t tell him about Caleb.
Because telling Tyler means explaining that the man who gutted me at seventeen is living on the ranch where I just accepted my first call, in the town where I’ve just signed a two-year lease, and that would make Tyler want to fix it or fight it, and there’s nothing to fix.
There’s nothing to fight. There’s just a man I used to love who doesn’t want to see me, and I’m going to have to see him anyway because this is a small town and there’s one vet, so it’s inevitable.
I climb out of the truck, lock it, and cross the parking lot to the clinic. The key sticks in the lock, and I’ve got to jiggle it.
Inside, it smells of disinfectant and old wood. The exam table is clean. My diplomas are still leaning against the wall because I haven’t hung them yet. A cicada is going crazy in the tree outside the window. This morning’s coffee is sitting on the counter, cold.
I tip the coffee down the sink and make a fresh cup. The mug is one Tyler gave me when I graduated, white with black lettering: Trust me, I’m a doctor (of animals). It’s chipped on the handle but I refuse to put it in the trash.
Coffee cradled in my hands, I stand at the window that looks out onto the street and the little brick buildings, and the mountains beyond them, gold and green in the late August light.
This is my town now.
I chose this place. Applied for this job four months ago when I saw the listing on the veterinary board, drove down to meet Doc Henley, and he showed me the clinic and the apartment and the town and said, “It’s not fancy, but it’s good people,” and I shook his hand and signed the contract. I chose this.
Caleb Callahan does not get to undo that.
He left me once without explanation. Left me standing on his porch with two cold coffees and no answers and a hole in my chest that took years to close.
And I survived that. I finished school and graduated top of my class.
I built a career. Built a life. Built myself into someone who doesn’t need a man to stay in order to be whole.
I’m not seventeen anymore.
The coffee’s too hot and I let it burn because I need to feel something besides the ache behind my sternum.
He’s a mechanic. I’m a vet. Our paths will cross because that’s how small towns work, but I can be professional. I can be polite. I can look at Caleb Callahan’s face and not see the boy who held me in the parking lot and promised me a future he never delivered.
You’re staying. This is your town. He doesn’t get to take it.
I place the mug on the windowsill and pull my phone out to check tomorrow’s schedule: two farm calls, a cat needing vaccinations, an old lab with a limp.
I can do this.
I am doing this.
The light through the window shifts. The mountains turn gold. Somewhere on the Callahan ranch, a man I used to know is walking around with a decade of silence between us, and I don’t know why that silence ever existed.
I turn my back on the window and get back to work.