6. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The discharge paperwork took three days.
Three days of Hunt in that hospital bed, three days of me driving back and forth between our house and his room, three days of the same conversation, circling the same drain without ever going down it.
“Just trust me,” he’d say. “Please.”
“Tell me why you benched me.”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
“Then it isn’t trust you’re short on, Hunt. It’s the guts to say the true thing out loud.”
And he’d have no answer to that, and we’d stare at each other across the wreckage of everything we used to be, and I’d get in my truck and drive home and come back the next morning and do it all over again.
I packed the truck on the third morning.
Not everything. Just the things that were mine before they were ours, the things I could carry, the things I’d need wherever I was going.
Clothes. Books. The quilt my grandmother made me when I turned eighteen.
My veterinary kit, the good one, the one I’d bought with my own money before Hunt Anderson ever knew my name.
I moved through the house like a ghost, touching walls I’d painted and furniture we’d chosen together and photographs that showed two people who looked so happy it made my chest hurt to see them.
I left the photographs.
The drive in was quiet. I kept the radio off, the windows up, my hands steady on the wheel. I’d rehearsed this conversation so many times in my head that the words felt worn smooth, like river stones, and I wasn’t sure anymore if I meant them or if I was just saying them because I’d practiced.
The unit parking lot was full when I pulled in.
Day shift. I’d forgotten about day shift.
All those trucks lined up in neat rows, all those people inside the building doing their jobs, all those witnesses to whatever was about to happen.
I thought about waiting, about coming back later when the lot was empty and no one would see.
But I’d been waiting for months. I’d been patient and understanding and accommodating for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like to take up space.
I parked next to Hunt’s truck and waited.
He came out twenty minutes later. Sasha was beside him, of course, holding his discharge folder and talking about follow-up appointments, but she peeled off when she saw me standing by my truck.
Satisfaction flickered across her face, or anticipation, before she headed inside with a wave over her shoulder.
Hunt walked toward me slowly.
He looked better. The color was back in his face, and he was moving more easily, though I could tell the bandages under his shirt were still pulling. Three days of rest had smoothed out some of the exhaustion, but his eyes were wary, watching me like I was an animal he wasn’t sure about.
“Hey.” He stopped a few feet away, his hands in his pockets. “You’re early.”
“I wanted to catch you before you got back in that truck.”
His eyes moved past me, to the truck. To the boxes visible through the back window. To the quilt my grandmother made, folded on top of everything else like a flag.
“What is that?”
“My things.”
“You packed.” He said it slowly, like the words didn’t make sense. “You packed your things.”
“I need time, Hunt.”
“Time for what? Nora, what are you doing?”
“I need time to think. Time alone. Time to figure out if there’s a marriage left to save, and I can’t do that here.” My voice was steady. I’d practiced this part the most. “I can’t do it while I’m watching you choose her every single day.”
“Choose her? I’m not choosing anyone, I’m trying to tell you, if you’d just listen to me for one second instead of deciding you already know what’s happening here, you’d understand that this isn’t what you think it is.”
“So what is it, Hunt?”
His jaw worked. His hands came out of his pockets, balled into fists at his sides, and I watched him struggle with the same wall he’d been hitting for months. The truth was right there, I could see it in his eyes, and he couldn’t make himself say it.
“I can’t explain yet.”
“You said that three days ago. You said it a month ago, when I asked you why I wasn’t on the roster. You’ve been saying it since you took that chair, every time I try to have a real conversation with you about what’s happening to us.”
“Because it’s complicated, Nora, because there are things you don’t know, things I’m trying to protect you from, and if you’d just give me a little more time I could figure out how to tell you in a way that makes sense.”
“I’ve given you time.” I heard my voice rise and didn’t try to stop it. “I’ve given you months. Years. I’ve given you every chance to be honest with me, and you keep asking for more, and I keep giving it, and nothing changes.”
“You’re overreacting.”
The words hit me like cold water.
“I’m overreacting.” I repeated it back to him, flat and quiet. “My husband benches me for a month. Takes another woman on every dangerous call. Holds her in his arms in front of the entire unit while I stand in the doorway like a stranger. And I’m overreacting.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?” My voice came out thin. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’ve already made your choice, and it wasn’t me.”
He took a step toward me. I took one back, and the space between us said everything the last few months had.
“I haven’t made any choice about anyone, why won’t you believe me, why won’t you just trust that I love you and that there’s a reason for all of this and that I’m going to explain it as soon as I can?”
“Because you won’t even look at me when you say it.”
He looked at me then. Really looked, his blue eyes desperate and wild, and I saw the man I’d married in there somewhere, buried under all the silence and the secrets and the distance he’d put between us.
“I love you.” His voice cracked. “Nora, I love you, please don’t do this.”
“Then tell me why.”
“I can’t.” The word came out of him strangled.
“You mean you won’t.”
“I mean I can’t.” His hands opened and closed at his sides.
“Not yet, not until I figure out how to explain it without making everything worse, and I need you to believe me when I say that I had a good reason, that everything I did was because I was trying to protect you, and if you’d just stay and let me work through this we could figure it out together. ”
“Stay and watch you hug another woman.” I laughed, and it sounded bitter even to my own ears. “Watch you schedule your life around someone who isn’t me. Keep smiling at people who already know how this ends.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“Fair stopped applying a long time ago, Hunt. You made sure of that.”
Across the lot, the building door opened.
“Hunt?” Sasha’s voice carried across the asphalt, bright and cheerful. “I forgot to give you the referral form for the specialist, can you come sign it before you leave?”
I watched his head turn.
It was involuntary, I knew that. A reflex, the same way you turn toward any voice that calls your name. But I watched it happen in slow motion, watched his attention shift away from me and toward her, watched the muscle memory of a month of partnership override everything else.
The whole marriage was in that one motion. His head, turning.
“I thought you loved me.”
The words broke out of me, raw and ragged and nothing like the calm speech I’d rehearsed. My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated myself for it, hated that I was falling apart in this parking lot in front of everyone, hated that I couldn’t hold it together for five more minutes.
Hunt’s head snapped back toward me. “I did.”
Past tense.
The silence after those words was so loud I could hear my own heartbeat.
I waited for him to correct it. For him to say no, that’s not what I meant, I do love you, present tense, I love you right now and I’ll love you tomorrow and I’ll love you until we’re old and gray and none of this matters anymore.
I waited for him to hear what he’d said and fix it, the way you fix a typo, the way you catch yourself mid-sentence and start over.
He didn’t say anything.
He was staring at me with his mouth open, his face gone pale, and I could see that he’d heard it now, that he understood what had just come out of his mouth, but the correction wasn’t coming.
The words that would make it okay weren’t coming.
He was just standing there, frozen, while the past tense of his love settled over both of us like ash.
I went very calm.
It was strange, how calm I felt. Like a bone had finally broken clean and now the pressure was gone, the tension released, the answer to every question I’d been asking delivered in two syllables.
I did. Past tense. Whatever else was happening here, whatever secrets he was keeping, whatever complicated explanation he was trying to protect me from, the fundamental truth had just fallen out of his mouth without permission.
He had loved me. He wasn’t sure he still did.
I reached for my left hand.
The ring had been there for three years.
Three years of surgeries and foalings and emergency calls, three years of scrubbing in and scrubbing out, three years of Texas heat and hard work and a marriage I’d thought was solid.
The metal had settled into my skin, left a groove, become part of my hand’s geography.
I had to work it over my knuckle, twisting and pulling, and it hurt more than I expected it to.
Hunt watched me do it.
“Nora.” His voice was hoarse. “Nora, what are you doing?”
“Giving you what you need.”
“I don’t need that, I need you to stop, I need you to listen to me, I didn’t mean it like that, I love you, I love you, please stop.”
The ring came free.
I looked at it in my palm. Small and gold and lighter than I remembered. Three years of my life, reduced to a circle of metal that had worn a groove in my finger that would take weeks to fade.
I took Hunt’s hand.
He let me, too shocked to pull away, and I felt his fingers tremble as I pressed the ring into his palm.
His hand was warm and familiar and I knew every line of it, every callus, every scar.
I’d held this hand through seven years of friendship and partnership and marriage. I’d trusted it to catch me when I fell.
I folded his fingers closed over the ring.
Then I held his fist shut with both of mine, kept it there, made him feel the weight of what he was holding. His breath was ragged and his eyes were wet and I could see him trying to find words, trying to figure out how to undo the last five minutes, trying to give the ring back.
“I’ve known you for seven years, Hunt.” My voice was quiet now. Steady. “I’ve loved you for six of them. And I can’t wear this while I figure out whether you ever knew me at all.”
“Nora, please.” He was crying. I’d never seen him cry before, not once in seven years, and the tears were running down his face and his voice was breaking and he was trying to open his hand, trying to push the ring back at me.
“Please don’t do this, please don’t leave, I’ll tell you everything, I’ll explain it all, just please don’t go. ”
“You had three days.” I let go of his hands and stepped back. “You had three days to explain, and you didn’t, and now I’m going to take the time you wouldn’t give me.”
“Where are you going? Tell me where you’re going, let me come with you, let me fix this.”
“I don’t know if it can be fixed.”
“It can.” He was desperate now, grabbing for my arm, his ring still clutched in his closed fist. “It can be fixed, I know it can, just tell me what to do and I’ll do it, anything you want, just don’t leave.”
I pulled my arm free.
“Learn how to say I love you in the present tense.”
I got in the truck.
He was at my window before I could start the engine, his hands on the glass, his face pressed close, still crying, still begging.
I could hear him through the door, saying my name, saying please, saying all the things he should’ve said three days ago or three months ago or three years ago when the distance first started growing between us.
I started the engine.
“Nora, don’t do this, please, I’m begging you, please don’t drive away, I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Present tense, finally. Too late.
I put the truck in reverse.
He stumbled back, his hands falling away from the window, and I saw him standing there in my rearview mirror as I pulled out of the space.
His face was wrecked. His hand was still closed around the ring.
And behind him, in the doorway of the building, Sasha Reed was watching with a look I couldn’t read from that distance.
I didn’t look back again.
The highway stretched out ahead of me, flat and endless, and I drove west into the afternoon sun with my hands steady on the wheel and my left ring finger throbbing where the metal used to be.
The rearview mirror showed me nothing but empty road.
I’d adjusted it before I left the parking lot, tilted it up so I couldn’t see what I was leaving behind.
The farmhouse was dark when I got there.
My grandmother’s place. My place now, the only thing she’d left me, the only thing that had ever been unconditionally mine.
It sat at the end of a long dirt road outside Primrose, Texas, with a wraparound porch and a sagging roof and windows that needed new glass.
I hadn’t been here in two years. I’d been too busy building a life with Hunt, too busy being someone’s wife, too busy forgetting that I’d been someone before I was his.
I parked the truck and got out.
The porch steps creaked under my feet. The boards were warped from years of weather, and the railing wobbled when I touched it, and the whole place smelled like dust and age and underneath it, my grandmother’s perfume, still lingering after all this time.
I sat down on the top step.
The sun was setting behind the treeline, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink, and the cicadas were starting their evening chorus, and I was alone.
Completely alone. For the first time in seven years, there was no one waiting for me, no one expecting me, no one whose schedule I had to check before making plans.
I put my head in my hands.
And finally, with no one to see and no one to hear and no one to tell me I was overreacting, I let myself sob.