16. Nora
— ? —
Nora
Watching Hunt Anderson fail at farm chores was becoming the highlight of my week.
I hadn’t planned it that way. I hadn’t planned any of this, really, the way he’d slotted himself into my mornings and my emergencies and the edges of my life like he belonged there.
But he’d been in Primrose a few weeks now, and he’d been scrupulously following every rule I’d laid out, and somehow that meant I kept finding myself in proximity to his various humiliations.
Today’s entertainment was the Brewster farm.
I’d been called out to check on a colicky mare, nothing serious but requiring a follow-up, and Hunt had been there when I arrived.
He’d been there because Margaret Brewster had requested him specifically, which should’ve been flattering except for the fact that Margaret was eighty-three years old, sharp as a tack, and had clearly decided that tormenting my husband was her new favorite hobby.
“The gate latch sticks,” she was saying as I pulled up. “You have to lift and push at the same time. Didn’t anybody teach you how to work a farm gate?”
Hunt was standing at the pasture entrance, his hands on a gate that stubbornly refused to open, his jaw set in the particular way that meant he was counting to ten in his head.
He’d been at this for a while, I realized.
His shirt was damp with sweat and there was a smear of rust on his forearm and the gate hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’ve tried lifting and pushing.”
“Well, try harder.”
I parked my truck and took my time gathering my kit. The mare could wait another minute. This was too good to miss.
“Maybe if I use more force on the upper hinge?”
“More force?” Margaret’s voice was scandalized. “That’s a 1940s latch, young man. It’s older than your parents. You don’t force it, you finesse it.”
“I’m trying to finesse it.”
“You’re trying to muscle it. There’s a difference.”
Hunt’s hands dropped to his sides. He took a breath. Then he turned to face Margaret with the weary patience of someone outsmarted by inanimate objects one too many times this week.
“Mrs. Brewster, with respect, I’ve been working this latch for fifteen minutes. I’ve lifted, pushed, and finessed. I’ve done everything you’ve suggested and several things you haven’t, and the gate won’t open.”
“That’s because you’re standing on the wrong side.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry?”
“You have to be inside the pasture to work it. The mechanism only releases from the interior.” Margaret’s smile was serene. “Didn’t anybody tell you that?”
“No,” Hunt said, his voice very carefully controlled. “Nobody told me that.”
“Well, now you know.” She patted his arm. “Climb over and try again, dear. You’re young. Your knees can handle it.”
I was biting the inside of my cheek so hard I was surprised I wasn’t drawing blood.
Hunt climbed the fence with more dignity than the situation warranted. He landed on the other side, approached the latch, and opened it on the first try. The gate swung wide with a cheerful creak.
“See?” Margaret beamed at him. “Finesse.”
I made it all the way to the barn before I let myself laugh.
The mare’s colic had resolved overnight, but I did a full examination anyway, checking vitals and gut sounds and hydration levels while Hunt stood at a respectful distance and watched.
This part, he was good at. Better than good.
He observed without interfering, handed me instruments before I asked for them, and asked intelligent questions at appropriate intervals.
There was a rhythm to it I didn’t want to notice and noticed anyway.
Not the adrenaline kind, not the drag-a-body-out-of-a-fire kind.
The quiet kind. He handed me the thermometer a beat before I reached for it.
He held the mare’s halter at the exact slack she needed and otherwise stayed out of my way.
We’d been good at each other in a crisis for years.
What undid me, standing in Margaret Brewster’s dim barn with a bored horse and nothing on fire, was finding out we were still good at each other in the quiet too, in the ordinary Tuesday-morning nothing of a routine call, and that I’d forgotten that part on purpose because it was the part I missed most.
He caught me watching and didn’t make it a thing. Just handed me the next thing I needed and asked, low, whether the mare had always favored the left hind or if that was new.
“New,” I said. “Since spring.”
“I’ll flag it for Doc Hale.”
That was all. No speech, no reaching for more than I’d offered. Just a man doing the work beside me like he’d never had anywhere better to be, and me, pretending my chest hadn’t gone tight about it.
The disconnect was jarring every time.
Hunt the veterinarian was everything I remembered and more.
His hands were steady and sure on animals who should’ve been terrified of his size.
His voice dropped to a low murmur when he talked to nervous horses, a tone I’d never heard him use on humans, and they responded to it immediately.
He’d spent the past week reading through Doc Hale’s case files, learning the quirks and histories of every animal in the practice, and the depth of his attention was almost unsettling.
Doc Hale had mentioned it yesterday, grudging and surprised. “The man’s hands are the best I’ve seen in forty years. Pity about everything else.”
Everything else was the farmhand portion of Hunt’s new existence.
The delivery route alone had produced a week’s worth of stories.
He’d been sent to three different farms hunting for a left-handed fence stretcher, a tool that didn’t exist, before finally calling me in defeat and asking if I knew where one might be purchased.
The grange ladies had convinced him that chicken tractors were pulled by actual chickens, and he’d spent an entire morning trying to figure out the harness system before Maeve Thompson took pity on him and explained the joke.
And then there was the milking incident.
I hadn’t witnessed it personally, but the story had reached me within hours, as all stories in Primrose did.
Hunt had been helping at the Okonkwo dairy, trying to learn the basics of farm operation, and a milking line had let go at the exact moment he’d been leaning in to adjust a fitting.
The resulting spray had covered him head to boots in warm milk while the cow in question, according to multiple witnesses, had looked personally satisfied by the outcome.
He hadn’t complained.
Not once, not even when he’d had to drive back to the inn covered in dairy products while the entire town laughed behind his back. He’d just showered, changed, and shown up for his afternoon clinic shift exactly on time, ready to assist with whatever I needed.
The discipline of it was infuriating.
I finished my examination and gave Margaret instructions for the mare’s continued care. Hunt helped me pack up my kit, moving with the easy, practiced efficiency of long habit.
We were walking back to our trucks when the words came out before I could stop them.
“Eighteen months.” I heard the edge in my own voice but couldn’t soften it. “Eighteen months I couldn’t get you off that director’s chair. And now you’ve got all the time in the world. Funny how that works.”
Hunt stopped walking.
I expected defensiveness. Expected justification or explanation or the smooth corporate response that redirected criticism without actually addressing it. I’d heard all of those before, back when I was still fighting for us, back when I thought the right words might be enough to reach him.
Instead, he turned to face me with an expression that stopped me cold.
“I told myself the chair was for us.” His voice was quiet, stripped of everything but truth.
“I said I was providing. Building the future. Whatever lie fit that week.” He swallowed.
“The truth is that our job scared me once you weren’t beside me on it.
Every call, every emergency, every time I went into the field without you, I felt like I was missing half of myself.
So I buried myself where nothing could go wrong, behind a desk, behind a title, and I sent you away from the one place we were always us. ”
I didn’t move.
“I knew the marriage was dying.” He held my gaze, unflinching.
“Every time you stopped telling me about your day, or came home and went straight to bed instead of talking to me, or looked at me from somewhere I couldn’t reach.
I knew, Nora. I knew and I didn’t do anything, because I didn’t know how to come back from it.
So I worked harder. Because working is the only thing I’ve never failed at. ”
The words hung between us.
I wanted to argue. To point out the flaws in his logic, the gaps in his self-awareness, the hundred times I’d tried to tell him exactly this and he hadn’t listened. But the look on his face was tortured. Not performed, not calculated. Genuinely anguished in a way I felt in my own ribs.
“Pretty words,” I said, and turned to walk away.
I made it three steps.
Then I stopped.
Because he was still standing exactly where I’d left him, not following, not pushing, just waiting with that same patient devastation I remembered from the hospital room. From the rain. From every moment since he’d arrived in Primrose and started trying to prove he could be different.
I heard myself speak before I’d decided to.
“You can drive me Thursday.” I didn’t turn around. “If you’re on time.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Early counts as on time.”
“Then I’ll be early.”
I got in my truck and drove away without looking back.
Thursday morning, I was standing on my porch at 9:15 when Hunt’s truck pulled into the driveway.
He was forty-five minutes early.
I watched him park and get out and walk toward the house, stopping at the edge of the porch because the terms said he couldn’t come any closer without invitation.
He was wearing a clean button-down shirt and jeans that actually fit and his hair was still damp from the shower. He looked like he’d been up for hours.
“You’re early.”
“I’m aware.”
“By a lot.”
“I know.” He shifted his weight. “I couldn’t sleep. Kept thinking about traffic or road closures or some kind of emergency that might make me late. I know it’s ridiculous. I know there’s no traffic between the inn and here. I just couldn’t be late. Not for this.”
I should’ve sent him away. Should’ve told him to drive around for forty-five minutes and come back at a reasonable time. Should’ve enforced some kind of boundary to remind him that his anxiety wasn’t my problem.
“Come inside,” I said instead. “I’ll make tea.”
He climbed the porch steps like a man approaching a church altar. Waffles, who had been napping in the mudroom, raised his head and emitted a low warning bleat.
“Waffles,” I said firmly. “Behave.”
The goat did not behave.
He positioned himself directly in Hunt’s path and refused to move, forcing my husband to shuffle sideways through the kitchen door while the goat glared at him with unblinking eyes.
“June’s pool is up to eighteen entries,” I said, putting the kettle on. “Mrs. Alvarez bet twenty dollars on Christmas. She thinks the holiday spirit might soften him.”
“Your goat has a betting pool.”
“My goat is the town’s official judgment meter for your redemption arc. Didn’t anyone tell you?”
Hunt looked at Waffles, who looked back at him with pure disdain.
“I think I preferred not knowing.”
We drank tea in careful silence while Waffles maintained his vigil from the doorway. I watched Hunt over the rim of my cup, watching the way his hands wrapped around the mug, watching the tension in his shoulders that he was clearly trying to hide.
He was nervous.
Not about the tea or the goat or even me. He was nervous about the appointment, about the ultrasound, about seeing our baby for the first time. The realization settled into my chest with uncomfortable warmth.
“We should go,” I said finally. “It’s a thirty-minute drive and Dr. Reyes gets backed up if you’re not early.”
“Right.” He stood up immediately. “Right, of course. I’m ready.”
He drove carefully, ten miles under the speed limit, both hands on the wheel.
I watched the familiar landscape scroll past the window and tried not to think about the last time we’d sat in a car together with nothing on fire, driving to some work event I couldn’t remember, existing in the same space without actually connecting.
This was different.
This was new.
I didn’t know if that made it better or worse.