Chapter 11
Gemma
Ivy's departure takes the better part of an hour and involves more negotiation than a hostage situation.
The bag is technically a kid's rolling suitcase — purple, covered in glittery T-Rexes, practical — but it cannot close because of a fundamental disagreement between Ivy and physics regarding how many plastic dinosaurs constitute a reasonable travel complement.
Current count: more dinosaurs than changes of clothing, with room for zero additional items of either.
"Ivy," Beck says, for what is clearly not the first time. He's holding a folded stack of shirts while she rearranges the interior of the suitcase for the third time.
"I need them," she says, from inside the suitcase.
"You don't need that many dinosaurs."
"What if I need more and I only have these?"
Beck looks at me over her head. I press my lips together and study the ceiling with enormous interest.
"Pick six," he says.
"SIX?"
"Six."
"That's barely a herd."
"Six dinosaurs, Ivy."
She climbs out of the suitcase and sits back on her heels, holding each dinosaur up one at a time with the focus of a defense attorney presenting evidence.
The brachiosaurus cannot be left behind because he's the tallest and therefore responsible for supervision.
The stegosaurus is non-negotiable — she's had him since she was small and he was there when her first tooth fell out.
The triceratops is her emotional support dinosaur, which is a designation I didn't know existed until this moment.
The T-Rex is self-explanatory. The ankylosaurus is new and still learning the group dynamic, so abandoning him now would be socially damaging.
"That's five," Beck says.
"I know." She holds up a pterodactyl. "His name is Henry."
Henry goes in the bag.
The shirts go in around the edges. Two pairs of pants.
One dress that Ivy negotiates back out because it takes up stegosaurus space, a compromise that somehow ends with Beck folding it into a square small enough to qualify as origami.
He does it without comment, tucking it between Henry and the brachiosaurus with the same focused efficiency he applies to everything.
On the front porch, Ivy crouches down to Clarence's level and holds the stegosaurus up so he can examine it. "He's coming back," she tells him. "You're in charge while I'm gone." She waits. Clarence blinks at her, then begins cleaning his ear. Ivy nods, satisfied. "Good talk."
Then she stands up, turns to face the street, draws a breath that fills her entire small chest, and announces to everyone within a three-block radius: "I'M GOING TO DISNEYLAND AND I'LL BE BACK AND EVERYTHING BETTER BE THE SAME!"
Beck pinches the bridge of his nose. I turn away before he can catch me laughing.
Vanessa's car pulls up before I've fully recovered.
She steps out and hugs Ivy without hesitation, then looks straight at me over Ivy's head and smiles — not the careful smile people aim at the woman standing on their ex-husband's porch, just a real one.
"Thanks for being here for this. She's been excited. "
"Couldn't miss it," I say.
It's true. I don't know when that became true, but it is.
Beck loads the suitcase into the car. He crouches to Ivy's level, and whatever he says to her is too quiet to hear from where I'm standing — but Ivy wraps both arms around his neck and holds on for a long moment before she lets go and climbs into the back seat.
He closes the door, walks back to where I'm standing on the porch steps, and the window comes down immediately.
"GEMMA! MAKE SURE CLARENCE DOESN'T START ANY DRAMA WHILE I'M GONE."
"I'll do my best," I call back.
"He WILL if you don't watch him, and HE KNOWS YOU'RE SOFT ON HIM!"
The car backs down the driveway and disappears around the corner. The street settles. A dog barks once somewhere down the block and then goes quiet.
The house behind us is very still.
Quiet here sounds different without anyone to fill it.
Not bad different. Just different. Cleaner, maybe. Like a room after the furniture's been rearranged and you don't know yet whether you like it better this way.
Beck makes coffee. I bring out blankets because the evenings here have a bite that city living didn't prepare me for, and we end up on the back porch in the last of the evening light with our mugs and Clarence arranged on the railing like an ornament.
"So," I say. "You think he'll start drama?"
"He knocked a plant off Mrs. Delgado's porch last spring," Beck says. "She told me the first week we moved in. Said he looked directly at her while he did it."
"That's premeditated."
"That's Clarence."
I wrap both hands around my mug. The coffee is perfect — he figured out how I take it weeks ago without being asked, and he's never once mentioned it.
The man has no idea what that does, and I intend to keep it that way.
It's a small act of consideration — noticing how someone takes their coffee, filing it away, acting on it without fanfare — and it should not be doing what it's doing to my chest. It's coffee.
It's not a declaration. I am a grown adult with a functional nervous system and a reasonable grasp on proportion, and I am completely fine. That's what I keep telling myself.
"Okay," I say. "I have a question."
"No."
"You don't know what it is yet."
"Yes I do."
"You absolutely do not."
He holds out for about three seconds — long enough to make his point — then takes a deliberate sip of his coffee. "Fine. What's it about?"
"Coffee opinions."
He sets his mug down. "I knew what it was."
"Milk or creamer," I press on. "Your position."
"Creamer is dessert."
"Creamer is a dairy-adjacent delivery system."
"That's not a defense."
"It doesn't need a defense. It's a personal choice and I'm allowed to make it."
He goes still for a beat. "What flavor?"
"Hazelnut. Sometimes vanilla. Don't look at me like that."
He's looking at me like I've just admitted to putting ketchup on a steak — not angry, just deeply, personally disappointed.
"I'm not looking at you like anything."
He is absolutely looking at me like something. "Your coffee opinions are wrong," I say.
"I have an opinion about putting dessert in coffee, yes."
"Noted," I say, "and wrong."
The corner of his mouth does the thing — not quite a smile, more like the architectural suggestion of one. My pulse does something it has no business doing.
We end up arguing about Wyoming. It starts because I mention growing up watching Westerns with my mom.
"Which ones?" he asks.
"All of them, really. The Big Sky was her favorite. She loved the whole aesthetic."
"Wyoming isn't Big Sky country." He says it the way he says most things — like it's a fact he's surprised he has to share. "That's Montana."
"Wyoming is adjacent to Big Sky country."
"That's not how geography works."
"Wyoming has mountains," I point out.
"Wyoming is a rectangle full of wind."
"Every state west of Ohio is mostly a rectangle," I say, turning to face him, "and you don't see me calling Iowa imaginary."
"I'm not calling Wyoming imaginary."
"Then what are you calling it?"
He considers this for a moment, mug raised halfway to his mouth. "Aspirational."
I stare at him. "That's the most diplomatic dismissal of an entire state I've ever heard."
"I lived there for two years," he says, like that explains everything.
"And?"
"It was very windy."
"That's your whole review."
Beck shrugs, unbothered. "It was very flat and very windy and the coffee was terrible."
"OKAY." I point at him. "The coffee seals it. Wyoming is not a real place."
He laughs — actually laughs, not the barely-there almost-smile but a real sound, low and brief, like something that caught him off guard. It does catastrophic things to my chest and I look away before he can notice me noticing.
The light fades. Clarence moves from the railing to the back of Beck's chair, which he does sometimes when he thinks nobody is watching. The mountains go dark blue against a sky turning purple and then that particular Montana black that's different from city dark — deeper, more convinced of itself.
We talk about smaller things first. His mom, who lives in Bellingham and sends Ivy elaborate care packages with books and pressed flowers and once a full taxidermied squirrel that Ivy named Professor Nutsworth and Beck put in the attic after two days.
My mom, who worked three jobs and never once let me feel it, and fell asleep during every movie we watched together and I learned to narrate the ending for her because she'd wake up for the last five minutes and want to know how it went.
"She still does that?" he asks.
"Every time. I call her during the finale of whatever show I'm watching and tell her the whole thing. She says she could just watch it herself but then she'd have to actually stay awake."
"That's efficient."
"That's her. She found the workaround and stuck with it."
He turns his mug in his hands for a long moment. Then: "My father's version of parenting was to be present and entirely unavailable. Showed up to everything. Didn't actually see any of it."
He says it the same way he'd tell me the forecast — no lift in his voice, no invitation to respond with sympathy. I look at him sideways.
"That sounds exhausting to be around," I say quietly.
"He was very good at it. Coached my little league team for two seasons. I don't think he knew any of our names."
The porch is quiet for a moment. Clarence shifts on the back of Beck's chair, and somewhere in the dark the spruce trees move.
Beck isn't asking for anything back — he said it the same way he says everything, flat and certain — but he gave it to me anyway, and it feels like the kind of exchange that only works if it goes both ways.
"Denver," I say.
He goes still. Not a flinch — just a pause, the way he gets when something lands and he's deciding what to do with it.
"Denver," he repeats.
"I transferred from Denver Trauma. That's where I came from." I keep my voice even, because I've been practicing "even" for a long time now and I'm mostly good at it. "There was a pediatric code. Bad one. And I froze."
The word sits between us. He doesn't reach for it with reassurance or softness or any of the things people usually grab when someone hands them the difficult part.
"How old?" he asks.
"Four," I say. "Car accident. She was still in her car seat.
" I keep my voice level. "I froze. Stood there while my partner ran the code and my hands just stopped.
There was no reason I can give you that makes sense.
And I stood there and I watched and we lost her and those seconds were mine and I will never get them back. "
"And then?"
"And then I went home and I woke up the next morning and I put on my uniform and I went back in.
For most of another year." The cold has a weight to it now.
"Until the morning I sat in my car in the parking garage and couldn't get out.
Just sat there. Couldn't make myself go in.
Called in sick for the first time in the longest streak I'd kept.
Went home and slept until the sky went dark and came back again. "
He doesn't say anything.
"That was the burnout. Not dramatic. Just empty. Like I'd been running on something that ran out." I look at the mountains. "I put in my notice the next week. Copper Ridge came up and I'd never heard of it and nobody here had ever heard of me, and that felt clean."
"Nobody here knows what you lost," Beck says.
Not a question.
"Nobody here knows what I lost," I confirm. "That's why I chose it."
The silence holds us both for a moment. Then he picks up his mug again.
"Vanessa and I —" He starts, stops, recalibrates.
"The marriage didn't fail because I didn't try.
It failed because the trying I knew how to do wasn't the right kind.
I kept things in order. Showed up. Handled problems." He turns his mug in both hands, jaw working like he's sorting through words before committing to them.
"She went looking for someone who would talk to her.
Not because she's a bad person. Because I built a wall so solid even I couldn't see over it anymore, and she got tired of knocking. "
"Did you know she was unhappy?"
"Yes."
"Did you do anything about it?"
"No." He sets the mug down. "She wasn't wrong to go looking. I just wish she'd told me first."
The night air has teeth now. My breath makes small clouds. Clarence has abandoned Beck's chair for my lap with the energy of a cat who has decided we've been out here long enough and would someone please generate some warmth.
"What happens," Beck says, "when you're not 'easy'?"
The question catches me off guard because it's exactly the right question — not why did you leave or how are you now, but the thing underneath all of it that I've never said to anyone.
I press my fingers into Clarence's fur and keep them there. "People leave."
He looks at me then. Not sideways, not peripheral — straight at me, in the dark, with that particular attention that has always felt like being seen through a scope.
"That's what you learned," he says.
"My mom worked three jobs and still showed up for everything, every time, and I was never the hard one.
Never the problem. If something hurt, I fixed my face before she had to notice.
" My voice is steady. "And then in EMS, in Denver — you're supposed to be fine.
You're the person who shows up when other people aren't fine.
You're not allowed to —" I stop. "I didn't know how to be the one who needed something. So I got very good at not needing."
The swing creaks. Wind moves through the spruce trees at the back of the yard.
Then his hand finds mine in the dark.
Rough and warm, and there's no hesitation in it at all. His thumb traces one short path across my knuckles and goes still. He doesn't explain it.
I don't pull away.