18. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The creek had been rising all week.
June brought the news on Tuesday morning, standing in my clinic doorway with her phone showing the county flood watch alert, and by Wednesday afternoon half the town had mobilized for sandbagging duty.
The Primrose Creek levee was a hundred years old and held together by stubbornness and prayer, and every year when the big rains came, we gathered to reinforce what time and weather kept trying to wash away.
I was supposed to be coordinating the animal evacuation protocols with Doc Hale.
That was my job. That was what I’d signed up for when June added my name to the volunteer roster.
But Doc Hale had been called away to a calving emergency at the Hollis place, and the animal evacuation protocols were essentially “move the livestock to higher ground,” which left me standing on the levee with nothing to do but watch.
Which was how I ended up watching Hunt Anderson haul sandbags.
He’d shown up at dawn with the rest of the volunteers, and someone had put him on the heavy crew, and now he was working in the noon sun with his shirt off and his gloves on, and I couldn’t make myself look away.
I’d seen him shirtless a thousand times.
Three years married. I knew every inch of that body.
But there was a difference between knowing it and standing on a levee watching him haul sixty-pound bags two at a time, water sheeting off him, the muscles in his back rolling and bunching with every lift, a bead of sweat tracking down the groove of his spine to disappear into the waistband of his jeans. My mouth went dry.
Instead I catalogued him like it was clinical.
The flex of his forearm where he cinched a bag, the tendon jumping in his throat when he tipped his head back to breathe.
The way his jaw locked when a lift pulled at the bad side and he wouldn’t let it show.
It didn’t help. Every item on the list only made it worse.
I shouldn’t want this. The man had earned my fury, and I’d spent months building walls I actually needed.
My body was not consulting the walls. There was a slow, heavy ache low between my thighs every time he bent for another bag, and when he straightened and caught me staring, when his mouth tipped into that small private curve that said he knew exactly where my eyes had been, the flush went down my neck and under my collar.
I pressed my thighs together and made myself look at the brown water instead, and hated myself for it, and kept sneaking glances anyway.
“Lord have mercy,” said a voice beside me.
I turned to find Maeve Thompson standing at my elbow, her phone raised, clearly filming.
“What are you doing?”
“Documenting for posterity.” She didn’t lower the phone. “And also for the grange group chat. Helen’s not going to believe this.”
“You’re filming my husband without his consent.”
“Honey, half the women in this county are filming your husband without his consent.” Maeve gestured down the levee, where other phones were pointed in Hunt’s direction. “That man is a public service.”
I wanted to be indignant. I wanted to march down there and tell them all to put their phones away and stop objectifying him. But Hunt chose that moment to wipe the sweat from his face with his discarded shirt, and the movement made his shoulders flex, and I lost my train of thought entirely.
From the top of the levee, Waffles screamed.
He’d been stationed on the high ground all morning, allegedly helping with morale, actually just yelling at anyone who came within ten feet of him.
But this scream was different. This scream was targeted, sustained, and aimed directly at Hunt with the intensity of a goat who had identified his nemesis and wouldn’t rest until that nemesis was driven from the land.
Hunt looked up at the goat. The goat looked down at Hunt.
The standoff continued for a solid half a minute.
“Your goat really hates him,” Maeve observed.
“He has excellent instincts.”
“Or he’s jealous.”
“Waffles isn’t jealous.”
“Waffles has been screaming at that man since he showed up in town. Either he’s the best judge of character I’ve ever seen, or he’s decided Hunt Anderson is competition for your affections and he’s not having it.” Maeve finally lowered her phone. “My money’s on door number two.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response.
The sandbagging continued through the afternoon.
I made myself useful by helping coordinate water breaks and tracking which areas had been reinforced, and I absolutely did not spend the entire time watching Hunt work.
I watched everyone work, an equal opportunity observer, and the fact that my eyes kept drifting back to the tall man with the surgeon’s hands and the tattoos was purely coincidental.
By four o’clock, the worst of the levee was secured.
I drove back to the clinic to update the emergency protocols, and I’d been there for about twenty minutes when I heard the front door open.
“Back here,” I called, assuming it was June with an update.
Footsteps in the hallway. Heavy. Familiar.
Hunt appeared in my office doorway, still damp from the creek, a clean shirt stretched across his chest but his hair wet and his forearms streaked with dried mud. He was holding a folder.
“I found your charts,” he said.
“You went through my office?”
“In the records cabinet. While I was looking for the Ferguson file.” He came into the room and set the folder on my desk. “Your herd health charts.”
I looked at the folder. Then at him. “My herd health charts.”
“And your rotational grazing maps, your parasite load tracking, your pasture recovery projections.” He was almost vibrating with energy, the kind of barely contained enthusiasm I remembered from the early days, when he’d get excited about a new research paper or a novel surgical technique. “Nora, this is brilliant.”
“It’s just record keeping.”
“It’s not just record keeping. It’s integrated multi-species management with staggered grazing intervals designed to break the parasite cycle while optimizing pasture regeneration.
You’ve accounted for soil composition, seasonal rainfall variation, and livestock density ratios.
You’ve cross-referenced your deworming schedule with pasture rotation to minimize resistance development.
” He was flipping through the charts now, pointing at columns I’d spent months developing.
“This is the kind of system they teach in graduate programs. Where did you learn this?”
“Trial and error, mostly. Reading. Talking to the old farmers.”
“You built this from scratch?”
“I built everything from scratch.”
He looked up at me then, his eyes shining with that particular light that meant his brain was fully engaged, and my chest twisted.
This was the man I’d married.
Not the director or the politician or the empty suit who came home late and left early and looked through me like furniture.
This was the Hunt Anderson who’d kept me on a tailgate until two in the morning, years ago, to explain, in passionate detail, why the current approach to wildlife disease management was fundamentally flawed and what he’d do differently if anyone would listen.
That man had been buried under titles and boardrooms and the weight of expectations I’d never asked him to carry.
But he was still in there. And now he was standing in my office, covered in levee mud, geeking out about my parasite tracking system like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
“Your pasture recovery times are aggressive,” he said, turning back to the charts. “Most systems recommend twice the interval between rotations.”
“Most systems are designed for cattle. My sheep have different grazing patterns and lighter hooves. They can handle faster rotations if you manage the supplemental feeding correctly.”
“Show me.”
I should’ve turned him away. Reminded him that this was my practice and my system and he was a guest here, not a colleague.
But he was looking at my charts with genuine respect, and his questions were intelligent, and somewhere in the past few minutes I’d stopped resenting his presence and started wanting to talk to him.
We spread the records across the desk and lost an hour to them.
“Your stocking density’s too high in the back paddock,” he said, tapping a column.
“My stocking density is fine.”
“Your parasite loads say otherwise. Look at your recheck intervals. You’re treating the same four animals on a loop.”
He was right, which I didn’t appreciate. “So I rotate the pasture.”
“So you rotate the pasture.” He flipped a chart over and started sketching on the back, his hand getting more animated as he warmed up, the way it always did when he forgot to be careful about being careful. “Two paddocks here, a rest cycle through here-”
“I know how rotational grazing works, Hunt.”
“I know you do. I’m showing off.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Is it working?”
“No,” I lied.
I gave him hell about half his assumptions and he gave it back, dry and shy and landing a beat late the way it always had, like he needed the extra second to find the right words and the words were always worth the wait.
And somewhere in that hour I forgot I was supposed to be keeping him on the other side of a locked door.
At some point during the discussion, I laughed.
It came out of me. He’d made some terrible joke about optimal manure distribution, a pun that should’ve been grounds for divorce, and I laughed. A real laugh, from my stomach, the kind I hadn’t made in months.
I caught it a beat too late.
Hunt wasn’t laughing anymore.
He was looking at me the way he used to, back before everything, raw and hopeful and terrified all at once, and the office had gone very quiet, and somewhere in the last minute the space between us had closed to almost nothing.
I could see the flecks of gray in the blue of his eyes.
I could feel the warmth coming off his skin.
His gaze dropped to my mouth and stayed there, and I leaned in.
I closed the last inch myself, and I knew exactly what I was doing.
He met me halfway. A breath apart. Close enough that I felt him exhale.
And then he stopped.
He pulled back, not far, just enough, his jaw tight with the effort of it, and I watched him choose, in real time, not to close a distance I’d all but handed him.
“Not like this,” he said, and his voice was wrecked. “When you kiss me again, Nora, if you ever kiss me again, I need it to be because you decided to. Not because I caught you tired and laughing with your guard down. I’m not going to be a mistake you have to take back in the morning.”
I sat there with my heart slamming against my ribs and my face on fire, and I hated him.
What killed me was that he was right. I hated that somewhere in these months apart he’d learned the exact kind of restraint that would undo me faster than any grand gesture ever could.
I hated that I’d leaned in at all, that I’d wanted it right there in my own clinic, that the wanting was still there under all the anger, patient and enormous and impossible to starve.
I needed to leave. Right now. Before I did the thing I couldn’t take back.
“I should go.” I stood up too fast, nearly knocked my chair over. “Early morning tomorrow.”
“Right. Of course.” He stood too, gathered the charts, set them carefully on my desk. “Thank you for showing me this. It’s really impressive work.”
“It’s just charts.”
“It’s not just charts.” His voice was soft. “It’s everything you built while I wasn’t paying attention.”
There was nothing I could say to that, so I didn’t try.
“Drive safe, Nora.”
“I know how to drive.”
I left at a pace that was absolutely not fleeing.
At home, I made myself dinner and fed Waffles and did all the normal evening things, and I absolutely did not think about the way Hunt’s eyes had lit up when he talked about pasture rotation.
I did not think about his terrible jokes or his careful questions or the way he’d looked at me when I laughed.
I did not think about any of it.
Until I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water and saw the windowsill.
The mason jar had been there for weeks. I’d started it without meaning to, back when he’d left the first wildflower on the clinic step, telling myself I was keeping it until it died and then I’d throw it out.
He’d left maybe a dozen in all, before I made him sign a page that said he had to stop, and I’d kept every stem, and the jar still stood there full of them, dry and papery and impossible to throw out.
Cornflowers and daisies and black-eyed Susans.
Wild roses and Queen Anne’s lace. A tiny spray of forget-me-nots that caught me in the throat every time I looked at it.
I kept meaning to throw them out.
Beside the jar was the cigar box.
My grandmother’s, originally. She’d used it to store buttons and scraps of ribbon and all the small things that might come in useful someday. I’d repurposed it without thinking, back when the first note appeared with the first wildflower, and now it held every single one.
I opened it.
The notes were flattened and stacked in order, earliest at the bottom, most recent on top. I’d been careful with them, pressing out the creases, keeping the paper smooth. I could’ve recited every one from memory.
I’m still here.
I’m not giving up.
You deserved better. I’m trying to be it.
I thought about you for two hours during the grange meeting and missed three votes. Worth it.
The barn looks good. So do you.
Found a song today that reminded me of the truck radio at three in the morning. Couldn’t finish it.
Still here. Still yours.
I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen, holding a cigar box full of notes from the man I’d left, and I read every one of them again, in order, the way I did more nights than I’d ever say out loud.
The notes went back in the box.
I did not throw them away.
Then I went upstairs and got into bed in his flannel, the one I’d stopped pretending I was going to give back, and I lay in the dark and, for the first time, didn’t bother pretending to myself that I was going to stop.