CHAPTER 5 #2
"Last night. After you went upstairs." Cole pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped the screen. "There's also one on Saturdays at the Methodist church, and a morning group at the VA that doesn't require you to be a veteran. They're flexible about who they let in."
"You were a firefighter, not a social worker."
"I was a firefighter who watched too many people burn because they didn't have anywhere else to go." Cole's voice dropped. "I'm not watching you burn, Marcus. I've been doing that for ten years, and I'm done."
The words landed hard. Marcus flinched, and for a moment I saw the boy he must have been—seventeen years old, parents dead, older brother running into burning buildings because he couldn't save the people he'd already lost. No wonder he'd numbed himself with bourbon and bad bets.
No wonder he kept showing up at Cole's door.
"I don't deserve this," Marcus said quietly.
"No. You don't." Cole pushed off from the back bar and crossed to where his brother sat. "But I'm giving it to you anyway. So don't waste it."
Silence settled over the bar. The espresso machine dripped. Outside, a delivery truck rumbled past the alley, its diesel engine rattling the bottles on the back bar. Marcus stared into his empty cup like it might hold the answer to a question he hadn't figured out how to ask.
I broke the silence. "I have to work at noon."
Both brothers looked at me.
"ER shift," I continued. "Twelve hours. I'll be back around midnight."
"I'll walk you to your car," Cole said.
"You don't have to—"
"I know."
Marcus cleared his throat. "I can—I mean, if you want me to start on the drywall, I'll need supplies. Mud, tape, sandpaper. Maybe a trip to the hardware store."
Cole considered this. "There's a Home Depot on Lancaster. Take my truck. Keys are in the office."
"You're letting me drive your truck?"
"You're a grown man, Marcus. You can drive a truck."
"I totaled my last vehicle."
"That was a Camry. The truck's a Ford. Tougher than you." Cole tossed him the keys—underhand, easy, the way you'd toss a baseball to someone you trusted to catch it. "Be back by noon. The bar opens at four, and I want you sober and working before the first customer walks in."
Marcus caught the keys one-handed. He stared at them, then at his brother, then at me. "I won't let you down."
"You've let me down a hundred times. You'll probably let me down a hundred more." Cole's mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "But today, right now, you're going to do something different. Right?"
"Right."
"Then go."
Marcus slid off the stool. He paused at the alley door, his hand on the handle, and looked back at us—Cole behind the bar, me perched on the customer side, the space between us charged with everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
"Thank you," he said. "Both of you. For not giving up."
Then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him, and the bar was quiet again.
Cole exhaled. "That might be the first time he's thanked me for anything in five years."
"Five years?"
"Since the divorce. Lisa left him, and he blamed me for not fixing it. For not convincing her to stay." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I tried. She'd made up her mind. But Marcus has never been good at accepting things he can't change."
I crossed behind the bar and wrapped my arms around him from behind, pressing my cheek to the broad plane of his back. "You're a good man, Cole Mercer."
"I'm a tired man."
"That too." I kissed the spot between his shoulder blades. "But mostly good."
He turned in my arms, drawing me against his chest. "You're going to be late for your shift if we keep doing this."
"Doing what?"
"Standing here. Holding each other. Pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist."
"Maybe I want to be late."
His laugh rumbled through his chest. "You've never been late for a shift in your life. The hospital would send a search party."
"Probably." I pulled back reluctantly. "Walk me to my car?"
"Always."
The morning had brightened while we were inside.
The alley behind Tincture was still in shadow, but the rooftops above glowed gold with early sunlight, and the air smelled of baking bread from the bakery two blocks over.
My Honda sat where I'd left it, wedged between Cole's parking spot and the dumpster.
"You're okay?" Cole asked, his hand resting on the driver's side door. "After last night? What you saw in the panic room?"
The question had been waiting there all morning, unspoken but present—a patient guest who'd been content to sit in the corner while we dealt with Marcus and coffee and the logistics of the day. Now it stepped forward, demanding attention.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "She seemed real. She talked like a real person. She knew things she shouldn't have known."
"Like the accident."
"Like the accident. Like you pulling me from the car." I shivered despite the warmth of the morning. "But when you came in, she was gone. Just—gone. Like she'd never been there."
"Could it have been a dream? Sleepwalking?"
"I wasn't asleep. I'd just gotten out of the shower." I ran my fingers through my hair, still damp from the quick rinse I'd taken before we'd come upstairs. "I know what I saw, Cole. But I also know it doesn't make sense."
He was quiet for a moment, his thumb tracing circles on my hip through my sweater.
"The human brain does strange things under stress.
You've been through more in the last month than most people deal with in a year.
Losing your apartment, moving into a basement, my brother showing up, everything with us—"
"You think I hallucinated."
"I think you experienced something your brain can't explain yet." He tilted my chin up, meeting my eyes. "That doesn't mean you're crazy. It means you're human."
"Fine. But if she shows up again, I'm not ignoring her."
"If she shows up again, you call me. Immediately." His voice had the same tone he'd used when he'd told me about the gun in the panic room—calm, authoritative, leaving no room for argument. "Promise me."
"I promise."
He kissed me then—a proper kiss, deep and thorough, the kind that made my toes curl in my sneakers and my fingers grip the front of his shirt. When he pulled back, we were both breathing harder.
"Come home safe," he said.
"I will."
"Text me when you get to the hospital."
"Yes, sir."
His eyes darkened. "Don't start something you can't finish, sweetheart."
"Who says I can't finish it?" I slid into the driver's seat and pulled the door shut. Through the open window, I added, "I'll be back at midnight. Maybe earlier, if the ER is slow."
"It's never slow."
"A girl can dream."
He stepped back from the car, and I pulled out of the alley, watching him in the rearview mirror until I turned onto Lancaster and he disappeared from view.
The hospital was chaotic before noon. A multi-car pileup on I-95 had sent six patients to our trauma bay within an hour of each other. The charge nurse, Denise, looked like she hadn't slept in a week.
"Bennett," she said when she saw me. "I need you in Bay Three. Fractured tibia, possible internal bleeding, patient's combative."
"Got it."
I pulled on gloves and got to work.
For twelve hours, I didn't think about Marcus, or the bar, or the woman with my face who'd vanished from the panic room.
I didn't think about Cole and the way his voice had cracked when he'd told me he loved me, or the taste of him on my tongue that morning, or the weight of his hand on my hip as I'd knelt between his thighs.
I thought about IV lines and vitals monitoring and the precise amount of pressure needed to staunch a bleeding wound.
I thought about the fractured tibia in Bay Three—a twenty-two-year-old construction worker who'd been thrown from his truck and was fighting the sedatives because he was terrified he'd never walk again.
I held his hand while the orthopedic surgeon set the bone and told him about my own car accident five years ago, how I'd spent six weeks in a wheelchair, how the body could heal from things that seemed impossible.
"Really?" His voice was slurred with painkillers. "You were in a car accident?"
"Really." I adjusted his IV. "The doctors said I might not walk again either. They were wrong."
"What happened?"
"Someone pulled me from the wreck. Sometimes that's all it takes—one person who refuses to give up on you."
The words echoed in my head long after my shift ended. One person who refuses to give up on you. Wasn't that what Cole was doing for Marcus? What Cole had done for me? What I was learning, slowly, to do for myself?
I clocked out at eleven-forty-five. The night shift had taken over an hour earlier, and the ER had finally quieted. I texted Cole from the parking garage: Leaving now. See you soon.
He replied immediately: Everything okay?
Fine. Long shift. Exhausted. Can't wait to see you.
The drive back to Tincture was quiet. The city's night traffic had thinned to delivery trucks and ride-shares, their headlights sweeping across my windshield in regular intervals.
I rolled down the window and let the cool air keep me awake.
The scent of baking bread was gone, replaced by the metallic tang of autumn—dead leaves and impending frost and the distant promise of rain.
The bar's lights were still on when I pulled into the alley. Cole had left the exterior sconces burning, warm pools of amber that spilled across the cobblestones and the dumpster and the back of the Honda. I parked in my usual spot and sat for a moment, listening to the engine tick and cool.
Through the alley door, I could hear music.
Not the bar's usual playlist—something older, something with a piano and a saxophone and a woman's voice crooning about lost love and second chances.
Cole's doing, probably. He had a weakness for jazz standards and a vinyl collection that took up half the back office.
I pushed open the door.