24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
REGAN
It’s Monday morning. Charlie Briggs’s mare won’t put weight on her left foreleg, and I’ve been crouched in his barn for forty minutes trying to figure out why.
“She came in fine from the pasture Saturday,” Charlie says. He’s hovering behind me, hat in his hands, turning it like a steering wheel. “Sunday morning she wouldn’t stand.”
My fingers follow the tendon. No heat. No swelling. The digital pulse is normal.
“Walk her for me again?”
Charlie clicks his tongue and leads her forward. I watch the gait. She loads the leg, but short. Pulls off it fast. The flinch is subtle, more a hesitation than a hitch. Something a less careful owner might miss for weeks.
“I want to flex-test the fetlock,” I say. “Then we’ll get films.”
Charlie nods. He trusts me. He didn’t at first, not because I’m a woman but because I’m new. Doc Henley had been his vet for years. I’m the stranger who replaced a man everyone loved.
That’s changing. Two months of showing up on time, getting the diagnosis right, charging fairly. Two months of being the person who answers when the phone rings at two a.m.
Earning it.
I flex the joint, hold it, and set it down. She trots off short on the turn.
“Fetlock,” I say. “Could be early arthritis, could be a chip. Let’s get those films before we guess.”
Charlie exhales. “Is it bad?”
“I don’t know yet. But we’re going to find out.”
He nods again. Relief, this time. Not because the news is good. Because someone is in charge of it.
The portable X-ray comes out of the truck. I get to work.
The films show a small osteochondral fragment in the fetlock joint. Not catastrophic. Surgical if it doesn’t resolve with rest and controlled exercise, but I want to try the conservative route first. I explain the options, and Charlie listens, asks two smart questions, then agrees to the plan.
By the time I’m loading the X-ray unit back into my truck, it’s past noon and I haven’t eaten. The diner is three minutes away. I could go home and make a sandwich in my apartment. I could eat a protein bar in the cab and move on to my afternoon calls.
I go to the diner.
The Briar Rose is half-full, the morning rush winding down and the lunch rush not yet in full force. The smell hits me when I walk in: coffee, bacon grease, something baking that I can’t name but want immediately. Lace curtains in the windows. A pie case by the register, three deep.
Amy is behind the counter, wiping it down with a rag. She looks up when the bell chimes.
“Regan. Sit anywhere.”
The counter stool is open. She pours coffee without asking, slides it across, and goes back to her rag.
This is what I like about Amy. She’s warm, but it’s practical warmth. I see you. I’ll feed you. I won’t make you talk about it.
The turkey club comes fast. I eat it looking at the specials board. Someone has written the soup of the day in green chalk: butternut squash. Underneath, in a different hand, someone has added “Luke says it needs more butter. Luke is wrong.”
I almost smile.
Almost.
Before I leave, we agree to catch up properly over a drink next weekend, and I’m already looking forward to it.
The afternoon is routine. Vaccination run at the Henderson farm. A dog with an ear infection at the clinic. Inventory restock that I’ve been putting off for a week. I work through it steady and methodical, grateful for the structure.
This is the part of my life that makes sense. The animals. The diagnosis. The clean logic of symptoms and treatment plans and outcomes I can control. Nobody vanishes in the middle of the night when you’re doing a lameness exam. Nobody goes quiet when you let them get too close.
That’s not fair.
It’s completely fair.
Caleb’s been gone for a week. Not gone. He’s here. He’s on the ranch, in his workshop, in his clearing. He’s just not anywhere I am. He canceled Bear’s appointment. Texted me to say Bear was doing fine, and he’d be in touch about rescheduling.
He won’t be in touch about rescheduling.
I know this because I know him. Or I knew him. I knew the boy who planned a future with me the night of prom and then vanished before sunrise. I knew the version of him that could look at me like I was the entire world and then disappear so completely it was like he’d never existed.
He’s doing it again. Different decade, same move.
And the worst part is, I let it happen. I let him in. I let him touch me. I stood in his workshop with sawdust in my hair and his hands on my skin, and I told myself this time, this time, this time, as if repeating it could make it true.
You know better. You’ve always known better.
The clinic locks at six and I head upstairs to my apartment. I shower, then stand in the kitchen in a towel and stare at the fridge without opening it.
The apartment is quiet. Fairy lights strung along the bookshelf. My grandmother’s quilt on the couch. Romance novels and vet journals stacked on the coffee table. This place is mine. I built it from nothing in two months. New town, new job, new life.
It should be enough.
On Tuesday, Amy calls me.
I end up back at the Briar Rose at seven in the evening, after my last appointment, sitting in the same counter stool with a slice of pecan pie I didn’t order.
“You looked like you needed pie yesterday,” Amy says.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.” She refills my coffee. “Today you look like you need coffee.”
“I had two cups this morning.”
“And now you’re having a third.”
She leans against the back counter, arms folded, a dish towel over her shoulder. The diner is empty except for two teenagers sharing a milkshake in the corner booth.
“So,” she says.
“So.”
“You want to tell me what’s going on, or do you want me to pretend I haven’t noticed?”
The first bite is perfect. Butter crust, pecans that shatter, filling that’s sweet without being cloying. I focus on it because focusing on pie is easier than focusing on the question.
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Regan.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated.” She picks up a glass, holds it to the light, puts it back in the rack. “I live with a Callahan. I know complicated.”
I look at her, standing there, steady, like she’s got all day. Like the diner will wait.
“Someone is avoiding me,” I say. Careful. “Someone I have history with.”
“History as in you used to know each other, or history as in it’s not over?”
I don’t answer. Which is an answer.
Amy nods. She pulls a stool from behind the counter and sits down across from me, elbows on the Formica.
“I’m not going to ask who,” she says. “I can probably guess, and it’s not my business until you want it to be.
But I’ll tell you this much.” She pauses.
“Callahan men are spectacularly bad at saying what they mean. They’re worse at sitting with something they feel.
They work, they build, they mend things that are broken, play guitar until their fingers bleed, and they call it handling it. ”
I stare at the pie.
“And if you let them hide from it, they will. They’ll disappear into the workshop and the barn and the rehearsal space, and they’ll convince themselves the distance is for your protection when it’s for theirs.”
“What am I supposed to do about that?”
“Don’t let him hide from this.”
The words sit between us. Simple. Direct. Easy advice to give. Brutal to take.
“What if he doesn’t want to be found?” I ask.
Amy smiles. Small, knowing. “Luke hid from me. I found him anyway.”
She stands up, takes my empty plate, and pours more coffee.
“Pie’s on the house,” she says. “Don’t tell Luke. He thinks I charge everyone.”
The drive home is dark. The clinic parking lot is empty. The apartment windows are lit because I left the fairy lights on, and for a second, pulling in, it looks like someone’s home waiting for me.
Nobody’s home. Nobody’s waiting.
I sit in the truck with the engine off. The air smells like rain coming. Down the road, the Rusty Spur’s neon sign blinks red through the trees.
Caleb is somewhere on that ranch right now. In his Airstream. In his clearing. Lying on a mat on the floor with Bear at his feet, convincing himself that silence is the same as safety.
He did this to me at seventeen. Left without a word. Let me spend a decade wondering what I did wrong, what I missed, what part of me wasn’t enough.
I’m not seventeen anymore.
The question isn’t whether I still feel it.
I do. That part hasn’t changed since I was seventeen and he looked at me across the gym at prom and I forgot how to breathe.
What I felt on that workbench, his hands and his mouth and the desperate, wrecked way he said my name, that’s the same thing, grown up, grown teeth.
The question is what I do with it.
I can protect myself. I’m good at that. A decade of practice. I can close the door, keep my distance, be his vet, and nothing else. I can be professional and polite and never once let him see that his absence is something I carry around like a stone in my chest.
Or I can fight for this.
The two options sit in my chest, equal weight, pulling in opposite directions.
I turn off the fairy lights. Get into bed. Stare at the ceiling.
Make a decision, Regan.
Not tonight. Tonight I’m just tired.
I close my eyes and pretend I can’t still feel his hands on me.