1. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The roster went up at six, and by six-fifteen the whole unit knew before I did.
I felt it the second I walked into the break room for coffee.
The conversation didn’t stop, exactly. It changed key, dropped half a register, the way a room does when the person being talked about walks into it.
Rodriguez remembered an urgent errand in the supply closet.
Mel, who gossiped the way other people breathed, found the bottom of her mug fascinating.
Nobody looked at me, and in a unit this size, nobody looking at you is the loudest thing a room can do.
Coffee in hand, I told myself I wasn’t going to look at the board.
I made it almost to the door.
Then I turned around, because I’ve never once in my life been able to leave a wound unpoked, and I read the day’s assignments in my husband’s blocky all-caps, the same handwriting I’d read off a thousand charts at two in the morning with my arms slick to the elbow.
The black bear relocation sat at the top. The biggest call of the season, the one we’d been prepping for a month, the one that used to have Hunt and me fighting over the truck radio about who got to run point. The kind of call we’d built a marriage on the back of.
Anderson/Reed.
I read it twice. The letters didn’t rearrange themselves the second time.
My chest went very still, the stillness you learn to respect in a barn right before a thousand pounds of animal decides to hurt you. I set the coffee down so I wouldn’t drop it, and I heard my own voice come out level and pleasant, the one I used on spooked horses.
“Huh. Flea meds again for me, then.”
Nobody laughed. That was how I knew it was as bad as it felt.
Hunt’s office door was open. He was bent over a budget with a pen in his hand, and I stood in the doorway until he looked up, and for one second his whole face did the thing it used to do the instant he saw me, softened like sun through a barn slat, like I was still the best part of his day.
Then the shutter came down. The careful, neutral, director’s face.
The one that had started showing up in my own kitchen.
“Hey.” He set the pen down. “You’re in early.”
“The bear relocation’s this week.”
“It is.”
“It’s Reed.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. He looked back down at the budget like the numbers might save him. “It’s just scheduling, Nora. Don’t read into it.”
Scheduling. Six years ago this man had promised me back to back, always, in the mud beside a half-dead Percheron with my blood still on his mouth. Now he was calling it scheduling and couldn’t hold my eyes long enough to finish the word.
“Right,” I said. “Scheduling.”
I went and did my rounds. Flea meds. A cat’s abscess.
Two puppy vaccines and a limping Lab whose owner wanted to talk for twenty minutes about his knee.
Routine, safe, the exact caliber of work you assign the vet you’ve quietly decided is a liability.
And every hour, on the hour, I did not walk back to that board to check whether the letters had changed.
The reservation was for eight.
I’d picked the restaurant on purpose, the kind that didn’t put prices on the menu and called appetizers “small plates,” the kind Hunt hated, because three years ago today, in a courthouse with hay still in our hair, he’d promised to spend the rest of his life making me happy, and I’d decided forcing him into one fancy dinner a year was a fair price for forever.
I ordered a merlot that cost more than my first stethoscope and I watched the door.
The waiter circled twice, refilling my water with that particular tilt of the head that meant are you sure someone’s coming? I gave him the tight smile that meant yes, stop looking at me like that. By eight-forty he’d stopped asking.
At eight-forty-seven my phone buzzed and my whole stupid heart lurched.
Hi Nora, this is Jessica from Mr. Anderson’s office. Hunt wanted me to let you know he’s stuck in a late meeting and won’t make dinner tonight. He sends his apologies and says he’ll make it up to you soon. - J
His assistant. He’d sent his assistant to apologize for our anniversary. Not a call, not even the six seconds it would’ve taken to type it himself. His assistant, sending “his apologies,” like I was a vendor he’d double-booked.
The worst part was that I wasn’t surprised.
I ordered the most expensive steak on the menu and ate every bite of it on Hunt’s credit card without tasting a single one.
The house was dark when I got home. I didn’t turn on the lights.
I knew the path by heart, around the couch with his flannel over the arm, past the wedding photos in the frames I’d picked, through the doorway that still had the dent from the night he carried me over the threshold and misjudged the clearance.
The scanner sat on the counter where it always sat.
I turned it on without deciding to, and the static resolved into the rhythm I’d built a life around.
Unit 3, Anderson, status on the Mueller call?
Anderson here. Wrapping up. Patient’s stable, owner’s calm. Reed and I are heading back to base.
Reed and I.
I poured another glass and sat at the kitchen table and listened to my husband’s voice come out of a speaker, because it was the only place I heard it anymore.
I’d been holding onto one thing through all eighteen months of it, through the director job that ate him alive and the midnight budgets and the texts that had replaced conversations.
However cold it got at home, we still had the work.
We were still partners on every call, still back to back in every barn and flooded ditch at three in the morning, still the two people who could read each other’s hands without a word.
The marriage was starving, but the partnership was alive, and as long as I had that, I told myself we weren’t really gone.
The last month, he’d taken that too. Rivera barn collapse, Anderson/Reed.
The silo rescue, Anderson/Reed. The flooded creek that ran from 3 a.m. to noon, Anderson/Reed.
And now the bear. I hadn’t even caught it myself at first, which was the part that burned; a tech’s wife I’d met once at a Christmas party had texted me a screenshot with a single line, you okay?
The whole unit had watched Hunt Anderson bench his own wife, and every one of them had known before me.
I finished the wine and left the bottle on the counter and climbed the stairs in the dark and got into bed on my side, the cold side, the side that used to feel temporary because I always ended up in the middle by morning with him wrapped around me.
Hunt came home at 1:47. I know because I was still awake.
He slid in behind me, warm, already half gone to sleep. He didn’t reach for me, or press happy anniversary into my hair, or do a single one of the things the man in the mud had sworn he’d always do.
“Night,” he mumbled, and he was asleep before I decided not to answer.
I lay on the cold side of a bed that used to not have sides and listened to the scanner cycle through the dark downstairs, one call after another, none of them his, none of them mine.
Somewhere north of here a black bear was sleeping in a live trap on a mountain, dead to the world, with no idea what it was going to do to my whole life.
Neither did I.