22. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The rental car was parked outside my clinic.
Sleek, black, city plates. The kind of vehicle that cost more than most Primrose residents made in a year. I’d noticed it from two blocks away, and by the time I pulled into my parking spot, every nerve in my body was screaming.
I knew who it was before I even saw her.
Sasha Reed was standing on the sidewalk in front of the clinic, her sunglasses pushed up on her head, her smile turned toward a cluster of locals who’d gathered to see what all the fuss was about.
She was wearing white linen and impractical shoes, and she looked like a magazine spread that had wandered into the wrong zip code.
“Oh, Nora.” Her voice carried across the street. “There you are. I’ve been so worried about you.”
I got out of my truck slowly.
The crowd was watching: Mrs. Patterson, Earl Thompson, two of the grange ladies with their phones already in hand, because of course they were.
Sasha crossed the street toward me, her arms opening for a hug I had no intention of accepting. “Running off like that, pregnant and upset, and Hunt too noble to fight for custody. I told him someone should check on you. Make sure you’re taking care of yourself.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine, sweetheart. You look tired.” She said it with concern dripping from every syllable, loud enough for the gathering audience to hear. “Small-town life must be so exhausting for someone used to real medicine.”
The crowd stirred. Arms crossed.
“What do you want, Sasha?”
“I just wanted to see how you were doing. As a friend.”
“We’re not friends.”
“We could be.” Her smile never wavered. “If you’d give me a chance. I’ve always admired how you handled the stress of being married to a man like Hunt. The travel, the pressure, the demands on his time. It must’ve been so lonely.”
I felt the old familiar ice spreading through my veins, the survival mechanism I’d developed over weeks of watching her circle my husband at charity events and foundation galas. But I wasn’t that woman anymore. I wasn’t the director’s wife, isolated and uncertain.
I was Nora Smith. I had a town behind me.
“I’d love to catch up,” I said, my voice carrying just as clearly as hers had. “Why don’t you come into the clinic? We can talk in the feed room.”
Sasha hesitated. She’d wanted an audience. She’d planned this confrontation for the sidewalk, where she could perform her concern while subtly positioning herself as the reasonable one.
But refusing to follow me inside would look strange.
“Of course,” she said finally. “Lead the way.”
The feed room was small, dim, and smelled like molasses and hay. I closed the door behind us, and the mask fell away.
“I wanted to see it with my own eyes.” Sasha’s voice dropped the performance, gone flat and hard. “Hunt Anderson, slumming in flannel and delivering groceries like a hired hand.”
“He’s not slumming. He’s helping.”
“He’s bored.” She laughed, that bright, brittle sound I remembered from too many cocktail parties. “He’ll be bored of mud and swollen ankles inside three months, you know. Billionaires always are. The novelty wears off and they remember what they gave up.”
I didn’t flinch.
“And when that happens,” Sasha continued, moving closer, “when he wakes up one morning and realizes he’s trapped in a nothing town with a nothing wife and a baby he never wanted, what do you think happens then?”
“I think that’s his choice to make.”
“Oh, honey.” She shook her head. “You really believe that, don’t you. That this is real. That he’s going to stay.”
“What I believe is my business.”
“What you believe is going to get you hurt.” Her eyes were cold now, the warmth stripped away to reveal the calculation underneath.
“He’s been calling me. Did you know that?
Late at night. Telling me how hard this is, how much he misses real work, real people.
How suffocating it feels to be stuck here watching you play farmer. ”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“How would you know? You’re not the one he talks to anymore.”
I smiled.
It was a smile she’d earned over hard months, putting herself back together, building a practice and a life and a home without anyone’s help, who knew exactly what she was worth and exactly what this woman was trying to do.
“This feed room is for paying customers, Sasha. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Her face flickered. She hadn’t expected dismissal. She’d expected me to crumble, to cry, to give her the satisfaction of a breakdown she could describe later with concerned sympathy.
“You think you’ve won,” she said. “You think because he’s here, because he’s playing house, that means anything. But I know him. I know what he needs. And you’re never going to be enough to give it to him.”
“The door is behind you.”
“When you file for divorce, if you file for anything, the unit will remember who saved his life.” Her voice had gone sharp, a blade she’d been keeping sheathed. “Everyone will hear the story of the hysterical wife who abandoned a man in a hospital bed. I’ll make sure of it.”
“File,” I said pleasantly. “F-i-l-e. That’s a big word for someone who doesn’t read anything longer than a hashtag.”
“You think this is funny?”
“I think you drove eight hours to threaten a pregnant woman in a feed room, and that’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.” I gestured toward the door. “Out.”
She followed me.
I walked out of the feed room and into the afternoon sunlight, and the crowd was still there, larger now, because word had spread and Primrose had nothing better to do than watch a show. Maeve Thompson was openly filming. The grange ladies had multiplied.
Sasha was a step behind me, and I felt the moment she made her decision.
“You should know,” she said, loud enough to carry, “that the foundation is very concerned about Hunt’s mental state. The stress of his wife’s instability has been difficult for everyone who cares about him.”
I turned around.
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I’m sorry you think running away solved anything.” Her smile was back, the performance smile, and she stepped closer. “You’ll always be the woman who left him when he needed you most. Nothing you do here changes that.”
I saw her hand move.
The iced coffee hit my face before I could react.
It was cold and wet, dripping down my cheeks and soaking into my shirt. The crowd gasped. Someone dropped their phone.
Sasha stood there with an empty cup, her expression arranged into the ghost of shock, there and gone if you weren’t looking closely. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, the cup just slipped.”
I wiped coffee from one eye with my thumb.
The whole sidewalk was watching. Phones raised everywhere, recording, waiting to see what the pregnant woman covered in coffee would do. This was the moment. This was the moment I was supposed to cry, supposed to retreat, supposed to give Sasha the victory she’d driven eight hours to claim.
I looked at her.
“Shame,” I said, my voice carrying clearly across the silent street. “That’s the most work that woman’s done all year.”
The sidewalk detonated.
Laughter erupted from every direction. The grange ladies were howling. Maeve Thompson had her phone in both hands, cackling. Even Earl Thompson, who hadn’t cracked a smile in fifteen years, was grinning into his coffee.
Sasha’s face went white.
She’d come for a scene, a meltdown she could spin into a story about the unstable wife who couldn’t handle confrontation.
She hadn’t expected Primrose to laugh with me.
I turned my back on her and started walking toward the clinic.
“You’re going to regret this,” she called after me. “When he leaves, and he will, you’ll remember this conversation.”
I kept walking.
I heard the crowd shift behind me, heard the murmur of voices turning against her, heard Maeve announce loudly that this video was going to get a million views. And then I heard the sound of expensive shoes clicking toward a rental car.
Hunt’s truck pulled up at the corner.
He got out slowly, taking in the scene: me dripping with iced coffee, Sasha retreating toward her car, the crowd of Primrose residents with their phones raised and their sympathies clearly declared.
His eyes met mine across the street.
I shook my head, a tiny no. Don’t.
He stayed where he was.
Sasha spotted him. Changed direction. Crossed the street with her hand already reaching for his chest, that familiar gesture I’d watched her make a hundred times at a hundred events.
“Hunt. Thank God you’re here.” Her voice had gone sweet again, concerned, the mask back in place. “I was trying to talk to her, to make peace, and she completely overreacted.”
Hunt stepped back.
Her hand hit empty air.
“I was just worried about you,” she continued, adjusting her approach. “Stuck here in this place, giving up everything you worked for. You know I’ve always supported you. You know I’ve always been there when you needed me.”
“You saved my life on that mountain,” Hunt said. His voice was flat, empty, nothing in it at all. “I’d have done the same for any responder in that unit, and so would my wife, who I should never have left behind.”
“Hunt, you can’t mean that. After everything we’ve been through.”
“There’s nothing for you here.” He removed her hand from where it’d found his arm, lifting it away like a stranger’s touch, like it might leave a stain. “There never was. And you knew that when you performed that little scene in the locker room for her.”
Sasha went very still.
Her face shifted, the mask cracking, and for a moment I saw genuine shock underneath. She’d thought that conversation was buried. She’d thought he’d forgotten it under everything that came after.
“You told me yourself,” Hunt said quietly. “In your office, the week after she left, like you were proud of it. The unit filled in the rest, exactly how you planned it. I’ve known for months.”
“Hunt, I was only trying to help you.”
“Get in your car. Go back to wherever you came from. Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Don’t mention my name or my wife’s name to anyone. We’re done, Sasha. We were never anything, and now we’re done.”
She stood frozen, caught between the husband who didn’t want her and the crowd that was still watching.
Then she turned and walked to her car.
The engine started. She pulled away from the curb. And just before she turned the corner, she rolled down her window and called back across the street.
“Ask him about the state directorship, sweetheart. Ask what he turned down for you.” Her voice was a knife, sharp and aimed. “Men like him don’t stay small forever.”
The car disappeared around the corner.
The crowd dispersed, chattering excitedly about what they’d witnessed.
And I stood there in the afternoon sun, coffee drying on my face, feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach.
Ask him about the state directorship.
Ask what he turned down for you.
I looked at Hunt, and he looked back at me, and I saw it in his face. The thing he hadn’t told me. The thing he’d been hiding.
Again.
“Inside,” I said. “Now.”