Chapter 17
Gemma
The problem with Tommy is that he notices everything and has absolutely no filter between his observations and his mouth.
That was then.
"Good morning, Captain Grumpy Sunshine," he says, the moment our rig pulls out of the bay.
"His name is Beck." I check the side mirror. The road is clear.
"I'm aware of his name." Tommy adjusts his seatbelt with the composure of a man who has clearly already decided he is in the right.
"Captain Grumpy Sunshine is a descriptor.
An honorific. A title earned through consistent and well-documented grumpiness that has, against all available evidence and basic probability, resulted in—"
"Tommy."
"—someone relentlessly optimistic and objectively delightful taking up—"
"Tommy."
"—permanent residence in his emotional radius." He settles back. "Good morning, Captain Grumpy Sunshine."
"I need you to stop doing that."
"Make me," he says pleasantly.
There it is. The same two words, every time, in exactly the same tone, like a callback in a bit that he has decided will never end.
I've tried appealing to his professionalism.
His basic sense of mercy. Once, in a genuinely low moment, his fear of what I'm capable of doing to his end-of-shift inventory paperwork.
None of it has made the slightest dent, because the thing about Tommy is that he is genuinely happy for me, and that's what makes it completely insufferable.
There's no meanness in it. When he grins at me over that nickname, it's the grin of someone watching a friend stumble headlong into something real and being flat-out delighted by the chaos of it.
He thinks Beck is exactly what I need. He thought so before I did, probably before Beck did, and he is now engaged in the sustained and constitutionally protected exercise of letting me know it every single day, because that is how Tommy shows love.
It is loud, specific, and he will not stop.
"If you say that to his face," I tell him, "I will reorganize this entire rig and not tell you where I've put anything."
Tommy pulls a thermos from the cupholder.
"That's a genuinely terrifying threat and I'm choosing to ignore it.
You could start leaving your hair ties in his truck instead.
Or put a mug that's yours in his cabinet.
The man catalogs deviation from baseline the way other people breathe.
He'd notice inside of a day and try to hand it back to you and fail. "
"I'm not going to use haircare products as a psychological experiment."
"You're already conducting a psychological experiment, Lockhart. You've been running it since you moved in next door. I'm just suggesting you lean in."
I stare at the road and decide not to acknowledge it, which Tommy accepts with the tolerant patience of someone who has won and knows it.
The call comes in mid-shift: rollover on Route 10, two-vehicle collision, injuries unconfirmed.
We get there before the engine does. I'm out of the rig and at the first vehicle while dispatch is still catching up on details, which is standard, which is fine, which is how it goes.
Both drivers are conscious. The impact was hard but contained — the first vehicle absorbed most of it on the driver's side, the second slid and stopped clean.
The woman in car one has a laceration above her eyebrow and a wrist that's going to need imaging, and she is processing the whole event by narrating it at volume, which I find genuinely helpful.
People who are talking are people who are breathing.
The man in car two is mostly furious about a travel mug that took the full impact against the dash and has now distributed itself, with impressive thoroughness, across his interior surfaces, his lap, and his dignity.
I know how to do this. I have always known how to do this.
But there's a moment — one beat, just a flicker — when I crouch beside the first vehicle and my hands hover over my kit for a half-second before they move.
One beat where some part of me is not in Copper Ridge, not on Route 10, not in the cold morning air with the engine finally pulling in behind us.
Some part of me is on a street in Denver with my hands on a chest that wasn't moving and the knowledge settling through me, patient and heavy, that nothing I did was going to change the outcome.
And then I'm back. My hands move. The laceration gets pressure, the wrist gets stabilized, and the woman squeezes my fingers harder than strictly necessary while I talk her through it.
By the time the engine crew arrives, the scene is managed, the patients are packaged, and the man with the coffee situation has been assessed and cleared with nothing more serious than bruised ego and a dry-cleaning concern.
Tommy doesn't say anything.
He doesn't need to. He was watching — the way he always watches since I told him about Denver, quiet and consistent, without making it a thing — and when we're back in the rig with the scene cleared and the radio gone quiet, he reaches over without a word and turns the heat up, because the temperature has dropped and I'm running about two degrees colder than usual today.
That's also his love language.
I pick up an extra shift.
I don't mean to, except that I do. My brain constructs a fully plausible case for it — someone needed the coverage, the overtime is useful, it's one shift and it's fine — and I believe every word of it right up until I'm standing in the supply closet past the end of my original hours, reorganizing a shelf of airway supplies that were, by any honest assessment, already organized, and my own reflection is looking back at me from the glass cabinet door. Oh.
Oh. There she is. The version of Gemma Lockhart who retreats.
The one who keeps moving fast enough that nothing gets the chance to settle.
Who converts bad calls into extra shifts and extra shifts into reorganized supply closets and reorganized supply closets into the comfortable fiction that staying busy is indistinguishable from being okay.
Who has been running this particular play since Denver without ever quite calling it what it is, because calling it what it is means sitting down in the middle of it, and she has never been good at sitting still.
I know this pattern. I know it the way you know an old song — before you've consciously registered that it's playing, your body is already moving to it.
Here's the thing, though. The thing I stand with in the supply closet, looking at my own reflection in the cabinet glass, is this: I know.
That's new. That's actually genuinely new.
The Gemma who drove into Copper Ridge with a half-packed bag and a very good reason not to stop did not have a reliable relationship with this kind of noticing.
That version would have organized this cabinet, picked up two more shifts, convinced herself she was being practical, and been across the state line before she ever named what she was doing.
This version is standing in a supply closet at an unreasonable hour, watching herself do the thing, and naming it clearly.
Progress is not always photogenic. That's fine.
I put the gauze back where it was, turn off the light, and drive home.
Beck is in the kitchen when I come through the shared door.
He's doing the thing he does at this hour — standing at the counter with a mug that's gone past warm, not really drinking it, looking at the middle distance.
He doesn't do it because he's unhappy. He does it the way other people sit with a book: just to be somewhere quiet inside his own head for a minute.
I've learned the catalog of his habits the way you learn the sounds of a house you've decided to stay in — the jaw, the mug, the particular stillness that looks like nothing from the outside and is, actually, as close as he gets to at ease.
He looks up when I come in. Doesn't ask where I've been. He doesn't need to — he clocked my car in the lot, which means he already knows I picked up the extra shift, which means he has been standing in this kitchen, mug cooling, doing his version of waiting that he would absolutely deny if pressed.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey," he says.
I drop my bag on the chair. Pull up the stool at the counter. He pours a second mug without asking — too strong, not quite the right temperature, perfect — and sets it in front of me. Outside the window, the pine trees are moving in the dark.
"I picked up a shift," I say.
"I know."
"Didn't need to."
He looks at me. Just that. Patient and specific.
"I caught myself reorganizing the supply closet," I say. "Things that were already organized. At length." I wrap both hands around the mug. "It was the third shelf. There is no reason in the world to reorganize a third shelf."
Beck sets his mug down. His hands fold around it the way they do when he's listening all the way — not managing the moment, not preparing his response, just present and still.
"I've been thinking," I say, and my voice stays even, not performing okay but actually okay, which is its own small thing, "that it might be worth talking to someone.
About Denver. About what happens in my hands on bad calls, and why I'm standing in supply closets at unreasonable hours reorganizing gauze.
" I look at him. "I made an appointment. "
The refrigerator hums. Somewhere outside, something moves through the yard — Clarence, probably, doing his late-night rounds.
Beck looks at me for a long moment. No managed neutrality, no careful expression calibrated for the gravity of the moment. Just Beck, watching me, his jaw doing the thing it does when something is landing somewhere real.
He sets his mug down. Crosses to me. His arms come around me from behind, not tight, just present — his chest against my back, his chin dropping to the top of my head — and he holds me there for a moment before he speaks.
"What do you need?" he asks.
"I already called," I say. "I have the appointment."
He nods. Picks up his mug. Picks up mine and holds it out to me.
That's it. That is the whole thing.
He asked what I needed. Found out I had it handled. Handed me back my coffee.
The muscle in his jaw is working, which means he feels something large about this, and he's just not going to make me carry the weight of it tonight.
He's going to file it in the internal cabinet where Beck Delano keeps all the things he cares about too much to say out loud, and he's going to hand me my coffee and stand at his counter and let me have the thing without turning it into a production.
His complete lack of fuss is the most romantic thing he has ever done.
It is more romantic than the Perseids. It is more romantic than the peanut butter sandwich.
Beck Delano, grumpy and specific and constitutionally unable to perform an emotion he isn't actually feeling, has just looked at me and asked the only question that matters and accepted the answer without needing anything from it, and I am going to think about that for a long time.
I take the mug. My fingers find his on the handle for a moment before he lets go.
"Tommy called you Captain Grumpy Sunshine this morning," I say.
Beck closes his eyes for one precise second. "I know. He texted me separately."
"He's going to keep doing it."
"Also aware." He picks up his own mug. "I'm considering strategic reassignment of his reporting structure."
"He'll love that," I say. "He'll consider it an act of affection."
"Tommy should reconsider his definitions of affection."
"He's consistent," I say. "You have to respect the consistency."
Something shifts in his face then — not quite a smile, never quite a smile, but the thing that lives right next to one.
He leans against the counter and we don't talk for a while after that, and the kitchen holds us in its particular quiet, and the coffee is warm in my hands, and nothing requires anything from either of us.
This is staying. The intentional kind. The version where I'm not holding one hand on the door behind me just in case.
I'm on this stool, in this kitchen, with this man who handed me my coffee back and made no fuss about the rest, and some part of me that has been holding itself ready for the crash for a very long time is slowly, carefully, setting down the weight.
I'm not falling apart. I'm putting things together.
There's a difference, and I'm only now learning to feel it.