Chapter 11
Nina
The guest room ceiling at the clubhouse needs paint. I know this because I've spent two days memorizing every chip and bubble in it.
Two days. Two days in this twin bed with sheets that smell like industrial detergent and a pillow so flat I folded it in half and it still didn't help.
Jess brought me coffee this morning. Black, no sugar, the way I take it at the clinic, she set it on the nightstand without a word and closed the door behind her.
Yesterday she brought toast. The day before, when I showed up on the clubhouse steps with my coat still on and my face wrecked and my voice shredded from the phone call I'd made from his driveway, she opened the door, pulled me inside, and walked me to this room.
She hasn't asked a single question.
Sarah comes by in the afternoons. She sits in the rocking chair someone hauled from the common room and nurses Reeve while she talks about the school fundraiser and the new reading curriculum and the pine beetle infestation threatening the Douglas firs east of town.
She doesn't mention Garrett. She bounces Reeve on her knee, wincing when he grabs fistfuls of her hair, never breaking stride—and I lie on the bed staring at the ceiling while the woman whose mate runs this club pretends we're having a normal visit.
I'm not heartbroken.
I need to be clear about that, because there's a version of this where I curl up in this twin bed and cry for a week and wait for him to come get me, and that version can go to hell.
I'm furious. The anger sits low in my gut, hot and specific, the kind that doesn't dissolve into sadness because sadness would require me to believe he's right.
He packed my bags. He folded my scrubs. He used the silence the pit handlers trained into him—the weapon they built—to push me out of his home, and he did it with a face I've never seen on him before, blank, flat and borrowed from a version of himself he swore he'd buried.
I don't miss that face. I miss the one underneath it. The one that cracks open when a four-year-old grabbed his horn. The one that surfaces at the stove when he thinks I'm not watching and the purr leaks out before he can catch it.
Mami would tell me to come home. Tomás would send a GIF of a man on fire. Lucia would FaceTime me from the couch in her pajamas and make me walk her through every detail until she'd assembled enough ammunition to hate him on my behalf.
I don't call any of them. Not yet.
Monday morning. The clinic opens at eight and I'm there at seven-thirty because the alternative is laying in bed thinking about my life choices.
Jess hands me the patient roster without commentary.
We work. Mrs. Duncan at nine, the seventy-two-year-old who drives an hour from the next town because Nightfall Cove's clinic doesn't turn her away for bringing her orc neighbor's prescriptions along with her own.
A kid with an ear infection at ten. A minotaur teenager at eleven whose horn caps need adjusting—growing pains, the keratin plates shifting as his rack widens—and Jess talks him through the discomfort while I take his vitals and pretend the shape of his horns doesn't gut me.
I draw Mrs. Duncan's blood at noon. Routine panel, the quarterly check she never misses.
She sits in the vinyl chair with her sleeve rolled past her elbow and her purse clutched in her lap, and she tells me about the drive.
An hour each way on the coast highway. Her daughter offered to find her a doctor closer to home, but Mrs. Duncan said no.
"The clinic in Brookings won't see Earl," she says. Earl, the orc neighbor. "His wife does all the translating at appointments because they make her sit in the lobby. I told my daughter, any clinic that treats people like that doesn't get my business either."
The needle slides in. I fill the first vial and switch to the second, and Mrs. Duncan adjusts her glasses and watches me work.
"You're good at this, dear. Steady hands."
My hands are steady. The rest of me, less so.
She leaves at twelve-fifteen. I label the vials, file the chart, and stand at the counter staring at the parking lot through the window.
Nightfall Cove doesn't have an aesthetics provider.
The thought lands sideways, the way realizations do when you're not looking for them.
The nearest dermatologist is in Portland, three hours away.
The nearest cosmetic clinic is farther. And the monster community—minotaurs with horn scarring, orcs whose tusk damage goes untreated because human dermatologists won't touch it, species with skin conditions that don't exist in any human medical textbook—has nothing.
My business plan sits in a folder on my laptop. The spreadsheets, the lease options, the two neighborhoods in Houston I've been comparing for a year. A clinic in a city where I don't know anyone, serving clients I haven't met, in a building I've never stood inside.
I built a plan to land somewhere. I just never picked a reason to stay.
Jess finds me in the break room twenty minutes later. I'm sitting on the counter with a granola bar I haven't opened and my feet dangling above the floor. She leans against the doorframe with her arms crossed over the curve of her belly and reads me in a single look.
"I had a plan too." She stays in the doorframe like she might need to leave.
"Follow Sarah to Nightfall Cove, make sure she's settled, get out before the small-town thing stuck.
Two years, tops." She tilts her head. "Then an orc kissed me behind the clubhouse at a wedding, and I spent weeks pretending I didn't care. A hurricane fixed that."
"You adapted."
"I fought my attraction for him for months.
Dodged every cookout, every Sunday dinner.
Reorganised my sock drawer twice to avoid him but he caught me anyway.
" She uncrosses her arms. "The clinic could use a permanent nurse.
I could use a partner who doesn't flinch when a seven-foot minotaur walks in for a checkup. "
Jess pushes off the doorframe. She crosses the break room and stands in front of me, close enough that I can see the thin scar above her collarbone where Finn's claiming bite sits, the mark she told me about over whiskey the first week I arrived.
Her face is steady, the combat-medic expression she uses when a patient needs information they don't want to hear.
"He's not pushing you away because he doesn't love you.
He's pushing you away because he doesn't know how to love someone and keep them safe at the same time.
" She lets that land. "Knox did the same thing.
Hid threat letters from Sarah for weeks.
Finn shut me out when the clan scouts showed up.
These men fight wars but they can't fight the idea that they're the danger. "
My throat tightens. I look at the floor.
"So the question isn't whether he loves you." Jess's voice drops, quieter now. "The question is whether you're willing to walk back into that cabin and show a pit fighter who's spent years building walls that love isn't a thing you survive. It's a thing you choose." She pauses. "Every day."
The break room door swings shut behind her.
I sit on the counter with the granola bar in my lap and think about Phoenix.
Not the hospital. Not the shifts. Mr. King.
Room 4B. The soil under his fingernails and the way he described his tomato plants like they were his children.
I visited him on my days off because I liked him.
Because he reminded me of Abuelo. Because the café de olla I brought him tasted like home and sitting in that vinyl chair made me feel like I belonged to someone in a city where I didn't belong to anyone.
Then he died at three in the morning on my night off. I showed up for my shift and his bed sat stripped and his name had already been wiped from the whiteboard.
I left Phoenix the next week. I told myself it burned me out. I filled out the next contract application before the ink dried on my transfer paperwork, and I haven't stayed anywhere longer than twelve weeks since—not because I'm saving for a clinic.
Because Mr. King died and I couldn't take it. Because attachment has a cost, and the cost is a man with soil under his nails and a flatline at three a.m., and I decided—standing in the hallway outside 4B with blood still on my scrubs—that I'd never let anyone matter enough to hurt like that again.
Garrett matters. Jess matters. Sarah, Reeve, Betty, Mrs. Duncan, the teenager whose horn caps I adjusted this morning—all of them matter.
And Garrett just proved the exact thing I've been doing for years—pushing away the people who get too close—except he did it with packed bags and silence and a dead-eyed stare he learned from the men who put a muzzle on him.
I've been running from attachment and calling it ambition. He shoved me out the door and called it protection. Same wound, different bandage.
I eat the granola bar. I wash my hands, then I go back to work.
The call to Mami happens in the parking lot at five, leaning against the hood of my car with my jacket zipped to my chin and my breath fogging in the December air.
She picks up on the second ring. Kitchen noise behind her—oil popping, Lucia arguing with Marco about whose turn it is to set the table. The sound of home so sharp it splits me open.
"Mija. We miss you."
"I miss you too, Mamá."
"Then come home."
I press my back against the cold metal of the hood. The parking lot is empty. The clinic sign glows behind me, the letters catching the last of the winter light.
"I am home, Mamá." My voice catches. I clear it. "I need you to come visit so you can see why."
She goes quiet. The kind of quiet Mami uses when she's deciding whether to push or wait.
"Tell me about him."