24. Hunt
— ? —
Hunt
I was unloading feed bags at the grange when a car I didn’t recognize pulled into the lot and sat there with the engine running for a full minute before the door opened.
The kid who climbed out looked like he hadn’t slept. City clothes, wrong for Primrose, wrinkled like he’d worn them a day and a night straight. It took me a second, because he was eight hours and a whole life away from where he belonged, and then it clicked, and the feed bag went out of my hands.
Danny. The tech who’d been on the bear relocation. Twenty-three years old, the youngest hand in the unit, the kid who’d brought me coffee at four in the morning on that mountain and called me sir until I made him quit.
“Dr. Anderson.” His voice cracked on my name. “I got your address off Priya. I know I shouldn’t just show up, I drove all night, I couldn’t-” He stopped. Started over. “Can I talk to you? Please. I have to tell you what I saw, and if I don’t do it right now I’m never going to.”
I walked him away from the grange, away from the curious eyes of the volunteers, out to the edge of the lot where there was nothing but empty fields, and I said, “Tell me.”
He told me.
It came out of him in pieces, the way a thing comes out when it’s been rotting in somebody for months.
He’d been on the sedation team that morning.
He’d drawn the dose the way he always did and handed the vial to Sasha to log and push, because she was senior and he was the kid, and he’d watched her draw it short.
Watched her put less into that animal than the call sheet called for.
Watched her write down a bigger number than what she gave.
“I saw it.” He was shaking now, his whole body.
“I saw the syringe and I saw the log and they didn’t match, and I told myself she knew what she was doing, she’s senior, she handles predators, who am I to say anything.
And then the bear came up early and it went for you and I just froze.
I stood there and I let the whole crew call her a hero, and I’ve been sick every day since, and I can’t do it anymore.
She shorted the dose. On purpose. She built the thing that almost killed you and then she stood there in your blood and let them thank her for it. ”
The world went very quiet.
The memory came up the way those memories do, all at once and out of order.
The bear on its side in the tranq haze. Pine and diesel.
Me at its flank telling the crew we were good for another forty minutes, easy.
The low sound I read as sleep that was really the drug thinning out from under it.
The eye opening. The half second where my brain wouldn’t accept what my eyes were reporting, because the log said down, the numbers said down.
Then the whole weight of it coming up off the ground and the world going to claws and noise, and Sasha’s voice behind me screaming for a chopper she already knew was close, because she was the only person on that mountain who knew the clock had been a lie.
She hadn’t saved me from the bear.
She’d introduced us.
I became aware of my own heartbeat, steady and slow, and the boy in front of me coming apart, and the morning sun laying bars of gold across the gravel.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “I should’ve said it that night. I should’ve said it a hundred nights ago.”
“Look at me.” I waited until he did. “You were twenty-three and she was your senior and she counted on exactly the thing that just happened to you. That’s on her, not you.
But you’re standing here now, and that’s the part that matters.
” I made myself breathe. “Saturday’s the banquet.
They’re giving her the Medal of Valor for pulling me out of a bear she woke up.
The whole unit’s going to be in that room. ”
Danny dragged the heel of his hand across his face. “Priya told me. That’s half of why I couldn’t wait.” He swallowed. “I’ll say it. In front of all of them, however many times it takes. I’m done hiding, Dr. Anderson. If somebody asks me the question in that room, I’ll answer it.”
“Somebody’s going to ask you the question.”
I told him where to be, and I got him a room at the inn two doors down from mine, and then I stood in the parking lot for a long time, very still, feeling a slow dread settle into the spaces where the calm usually lived.
She had shorted a sedation dose on a predator call, manufactured the emergency that nearly ended my life, and collected a medal for it while my wife watched from across a hospital room.
A year ago I’d have handled this alone. Made the calls, managed it, kept it from Nora until I’d decided what she was allowed to know, and called that protection. I’d learned better since, and I’d learned it the hard way.
I got in my truck and drove to the clinic.
Nora was in the exam room, checking on a recovering barn owl, when I walked through the door. She looked up at my face and went still.
“What happened?”
I didn’t answer right away. I crossed the room and I told her.
All of it, the vial and the short dose and the number that was a lie and the twenty-three-year-old kid who’d driven eight hours through the night to say it to my face.
I didn’t soften it and I didn’t manage it.
I handed her the truth and stepped back.
Nora went very still.
I watched it move across her face. The confusion first, then the slow, terrible understanding, then the anger, rolling in like a storm front you can see coming across open country.
When she finally spoke, she was smiling, and it wasn’t a nice smile.
It was the smile of a woman handed the one thing she hadn’t known she was waiting for.
“We’re going to the banquet.”
“Nora.”
“Don’t.” She held up her hand. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it, or that we should stay home and let it play out quietly, or any of the reasonable things you’re about to say.
That woman staged a locker-room scene designed to make me leave my husband, and then took credit for saving your life while I stood in a doorway holding coffee. We are going to that banquet.”
“I wasn’t going to say any of those things.”
Her smile faltered. “You weren’t?”
“I was going to ask what you want to wear.”
She was quiet, fitting it into the picture of the man she was learning I’d become. I didn’t fill the silence. That was new too.
“Red,” she said finally. “I’m going to wear red.”
“Good choice.”
“And I want to be the one who says it out loud. In that room. To her face.”
“I was hoping you would.”
Her head tilted. “You already thought about this.”
“Danny drove eight hours through the night to tell me to my face. He’s at the inn right now.” I let that sink in. “He already said he’ll stand up in front of the whole unit and answer for it, if somebody asks him the question. He’s been waiting a long time for somebody to ask.”
Nora’s hand went to her belly, that unconscious gesture she’d developed over the past few months, protective and wondering all at once.
“You arranged for me to burn her down in front of everyone she’s ever tried to impress.”
“I arranged for you to have the match. You light it, or you don’t, or you hand it to someone else. Either way it was always going to be your call, not mine.”
“Why hand it to me at all?”
She asked it like she genuinely didn’t know the answer, and that was the part that gutted me.
“Because you’re my wife. Because she hurt you as much as she hurt me, and you deserve to be part of this. Because I spent far too long making decisions without asking you, and I’m trying to learn a different way.”
She was quiet for a long time after that.
I waited.
Outside, I could hear the sounds of Primrose going about its morning: the coffee shop opening, Mrs. Patterson calling across the street, the occasional rumble of a truck on Main Street. Normal, safe sounds. The sounds of a life I’d never expected to want and now couldn’t imagine leaving.
“You really think I should be the one to say it?” Nora asked.
“I think you should do whatever feels right.”
“It feels right to make her watch me take everything she stole.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
She set the owl’s chart down on the exam table and looked at me with a soft, startled look.
“This is different,” she said. “You’re different.”
“I’m trying to be.”
“I know.” She stepped closer, close enough that I could see the gold flecks in her green eyes. “I see you trying, Hunt. Every day, I see it.”
“Is it enough?”
“I don’t know yet.” Her hand found mine, her fingers lacing through my fingers, and I felt the warmth of her skin like a promise. “But it’s more than I expected. It’s more than you’ve ever given me before.”
“Then I’ll keep giving you more until you know.”
“You’re going to have to buy a suit,” she said, changing the subject, deft and deliberate, before either of us could go any deeper. “Your old one won’t fit anymore.”
“I’ll make it fit.”
“You won’t. You’ve been hauling hay bales and wrestling livestock for months, your shoulders are completely different now.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“I noticed.” Her cheeks went pink, and she pulled her hand back. “I’m just saying. New suit. Friday. Make it happen.”
I found myself smiling. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And for the love of God, don’t let June help you pick it out. She’ll put you in the most ridiculous thing on the rack just to see if you’ll wear it.”
“June hasn’t steered me wrong yet.”
She snorted. “June put you in a Hawaiian shirt with flamingos on it for the Grange summer social.”
“It was festive.”
“It had a matching hat.”
“Kids loved it.”
Nora was laughing now, the tension of the conversation breaking apart into laughter. I watched her and felt my chest crack open, the way it’d been cracking open for months every time she let me see her this way.
“I should finish up with this owl,” she said, gesturing toward the exam table. “Can you come by around seven? We can go over the logistics for Saturday.”
“I’ll bring dinner.”
“From where?”
“June’s been teaching me to cook.”