“Chief.”
The dog rises immediately, shakes once, and falls into step at Rhett’s left side. They move together toward the truck with the same uneven, synchronized rhythm I watched from the window. Two creatures who’ve learned to match each other’s damage.
Rhett opens the truck door. Chief jumps in. Rhett follows, slower, and I see the way he grips the door frame to pull himself up. The way his left leg trembles when it takes weight.
He doesn’t look back.
The truck pulls out of the gravel lot and turns toward the mountain road, and I stand behind the clinic with bark dust on my forearms and the smell of pine sap on my hands, and I realize I’m shaking.
Not a lot. Just my hands. A fine tremor in my fingers I can feel when I press them together.
I know why. I just don’t have the courage to name it yet.
Inside, I wash my hands at the exam room sink and watch the water run brown with dirt, and I think about the way Chief pressed his nose into my palm. The way Rhett said he doesn’t do that with something in his voice that sounded almost like fear.
I think about the ghost of a smile.
I dry my hands on a paper towel and sit down at the desk, and they’re still shaking.
Chapter 4
Rhett
Three days since I delivered the firewood, and I still can’t get her hands out of my head.
Not her face. Not the red hair, or the green eyes, or the way she stood there in the clinic doorway looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t want to. Her hands. The way she picked up those logs without being asked. The way she carried them to the pile and set them down, careful and fitted, and didn’t make a single sound about it. No complaint. No show. She just did it.
And she shortened my trips. She took the logs from the end of the truck bed closest to the woodpile so I wouldn’t have to walk as far.
She thought I didn’t notice.
I noticed.
I’m at the splitting block, driving the maul into a round of lodgepole, and every time the steel bites wood I think about her hands and I swing harder, because if I’m going to be thinkingabout a woman I have no business thinking about, I might as well be in pain while I do it. The leg is better today. Not good. Better. There’s a difference, and after four years I’ve learned to take what I can get.
Chief is lying in his usual spot, chin on his paws, watching me work. He’s been different since the clinic. Restless in a way that has nothing to do with perimeters or threat assessment. He keeps looking toward the mountain road. Toward town.
Toward her.
I don’t say anything about it. What would I say? Stop thinking about the nurse. He’d ignore me the same way I’m ignoring myself.
The thing I can’t shake is the way he went to her. Just walked across the room and pressed his nose into her palm and stayed there. Chief doesn’t do that. He doesn’t go to anyone. Not Kellan Blackwood, the veterinarian who’s been checking him over for years. Not Colt, who served in the same unit, who smells like the same dust and gunpowder and sweat that Chief spent his first three years breathing. Chief tolerates people. He endures proximity. He does not choose it.
He chose her.
I split another round and stack the halves and tell myself it means nothing.
* * *
Nora calls at four o’clock. I’m in the kitchen, standing at the counter eating cold leftover stew.
“Rhett, honey. I’m doing a little community dinner at the Summit House on Saturday. Nothing fancy. Just some folks from town, good food, a reason to be in the same room together. You should come.”
“Nora.”
“It’ll be casual. Six o’clock. I’m making pot roast.”
Pot roast. She knows what she’s doing. My grandfather’s favorite. My mother used to make it on Sundays, and after she was gone Nora took over, showing up with the same cast iron dutch oven and the same recipe and the quiet understanding that some things need to keep going even when the person who started them can’t.
