Chapter 1
Bianca
That's the thing about starting over. You think it'll feel heavy—new town, new job, new everything—but it turns out your whole life fits into six cardboard boxes and a duffel bag that smells of airport carpet. I set the last box on the kitchen counter and look around my apartment. My apartment. One bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen the size of a generous closet, and a window that looks out onto a street I don't know the name of yet. It's perfect.
I've been in Iron Peak for five days. Long enough to learn that the grocery store closes at eight, that the woman at the post office calls everyone "honey," and that the mountains here don't just surround the town—they hold it. Box canyon, Dr. Theo called it when he gave me the nickel tour on my first morning. Sheer cliffs on three sides, one road in, one road out. He said it with the pride people usually reserve for their children.
I unpack the kitchen box first because it's the most practical, and because being practical is the thing I'm best at. Two mugs.A set of mismatched plates I bought at a thrift store in Montrose on the drive up. A cast-iron skillet my sister Riley insisted I take, even though I told her I'd just burn everything in it.
"You'll learn," she'd said, as if she were sending me off to war instead of a mountain town with one stoplight.
I set the skillet on the stove and stand there for a moment, hands on the counter, breathing.
Quiet.
Not the manufactured quiet of noise-canceling headphones on a break room couch. Not the exhausted quiet of falling asleep in scrubs on a hospital cot with fluorescent lights still buzzing above me. This is real quiet. Wind against the building. A truck engine somewhere down the block. The creak of old wood settling in the cold air.
I close my eyes and let it sit in my chest.
This is why I came here.
* * *
The Iron Peak Clinic smells like pine cleaner and antiseptic, which is somehow the most comforting combination I've encountered in years. It's a one-story cabin that someone converted decades ago, with fading green paint on the outside and a wooden sign by the door that just says CLINIC. No hours listed. No doctor's name. Just CLINIC, like the building itself, is enough of an explanation.
Inside, the waiting room doubles as the town's bulletin board. There's a flyer for a pancake breakfast at the fire station, a handwritten notice about a missing cat named Sergeant Whiskers, and a sign-up sheet for firewood delivery that's already full. One exam room. One supply closet that also serves as a break room if you don't mind eating lunch next to boxes of gauze. A generator out back that Dr. Theo warned me sputters "every other storm."
And there’s my boss. Dr. Theo Merritt is the man who makes gruffness feel like a warm blanket. White hair, tanned skin, green eyes that miss nothing. He wears flannel shirts and worn jeans and carries a medical bag that looks older than I am. He's been the only doctor in Iron Peak for over thirty years, and he talks about the town the way other people talk about a spouse—with deep, exasperated love.
"You'll get used to the pace," he tells me on my third morning, watching me reorganize the supply closet for the second time. "Or you won't, and you'll leave. Either way, stop alphabetizing the bandages."
I stop alphabetizing the bandages.
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize." He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Just settle in. The town'll tell you what it needs soon enough."
I nod and close the supply closet. That's the other thing about Iron Peak. Everyone says things that sound simple but feel enormous. The town'll tell you what it needs. As if the mountains themselves have opinions.
Maybe they do.
The patients come in a slow trickle. A logger with a gash on his forearm from a chainsaw chain that jumped. A woman in her seventies with a persistent cough and a refusal to slow down. A teenager who sprained his ankle on the trail behind the high school and insists, very seriously, that he was not doing anything stupid. Dr. Theo stitches, listens, prescribes, and sends them on their way with the same parting line every time: "Stay out of trouble."
Nobody stays out of trouble. I can already tell.
By Thursday, I've learned the rhythms. Morning is quiet. Afternoons bring walk-ins. Dr. Theo takes lunch at his desk with a sandwich and a medical journal that's at least six months outof date. I eat in the supply closet, which is fine since I've eaten in worse places.
I'm writing notes at the front desk when I hear it.
Maybe not hear it. But feel it. A shift in the air outside the window. The cadence of something uneven.
I look up.
A man walks past the clinic. Tall. Broad shoulders, a heavy-buff build, the frame suggesting he uses his body for work, not vanity. Dark hair, almost black, and a jaw shadowed with stubble. He's wearing a flannel with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, and even from behind the glass I can see the ink on his left arm—tattoos that climb from his wrist and disappear under the fabric, trailing up toward his neck.
He limps.
Not slightly. Not the kind you can ignore or explain away with a twisted ankle. His left leg drags just enough to throw his whole stride off-center, and there's a tightness in his shoulders that tells me it hurts more than he's showing. I know that tightness. I've watched patients carry it through hospital corridors for months. Those who won't ask for help. The ones who set their teeth and keep walking because stopping means admitting something they're not ready to admit.
