She blinks. A flush creeps up her neck. She looks down the street toward the clinic, and I expect her to turn me down.
“Okay,” she says. Quiet. “Okay. It’s my morning off. I don’t have to be in until noon.”
Shock overtakes me. I didn’t expect her to say yes, but this strange feeling of pleased pulses through my chest. I do my best to ignore it.
She says nothing for the first five minutes of the drive up the mountain. I don’t either. The gravel road switchbacks through dense pine, climbing above the valley, and the only sounds are the truck engine and Chief breathing between us.
She’s in the passenger seat, looking out the window at the mountains, her red curls loose around her face, her hands resting in her lap. Not fidgeting. Not filling the silence. Just sitting in it, the way she stood in it on the porch.
The cabin looks the way it always looks. Old logs, tin roof, the porch my grandfather rebuilt the summer I turned twelve. Smoke-stained chimney and a splitting block out back and a view of the valley that stops people mid-sentence when they see it for the first time.
Bianca sees it for the first time.
She says nothing. She stands beside the truck and looks at the cabin and the mountains behind it and the forest pressing close on both sides, and her mouth opens slightly and then closes.
Wonder.
“Rhett,” she says. Soft. “This is where you live?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s beautiful.”
I’ve never thought of it as beautiful. It’s the place I came back to because there was nowhere else. The place my grandfather built and my mother died in, and I’ve been hiding in for four years.
We get Chief settled on his bed by the woodstove. Bianca stands in the doorway, taking in the cabin. I see her eyes move over the kitchen, the percolator, the stack of split wood by the stove, the single chair at the table. She doesn’t comment on how spare it is. She doesn’t look around for the things that aren’t here—a couch, a second chair. Evidence of a life that includes other people.
I make coffee. She sits at the table and watches me move through the kitchen, and I’m aware of every step, every reach, every adjustment my body makes around the leg. I pour two mugs and bring them over and stand across from her, and for a minute we just drink coffee and listen to the fire pop.
“How long has he been with you?” she asks.
“Seven years. Since he was a pup.”
“Kellan said—” she stops. Reconsiders. “He’s lucky to have you.”
“Other way around.”
She looks at me over the rim of her mug. Patient. Steady. Not asking for more than I want to give.
I give more anyway.
“He was the unit’s dog,” I say. I don’t know why I’m saying it. I don’t talk about this. I’ve never talked about this, not to Colt, not to Nora, not to the therapist the VA assigned me, who I stopped seeing after three sessions. But Bianca is sitting at my table with her hands wrapped around a mug and her eyes on mine, and she’s not leaning forward. She’s not bracing for the story. She’s just there.
“There were eight of us. And Chief.”
I stop. The words are there, but they’re caught behind my ribs, the way they’ve been caught for four years, and I stare at the table and try to breathe.
“Seven didn’t come back,” I say.
The cabin is silent.
“Chief pulled me out. Dragged me by the vest until someone found us. I don’t remember most of it. Just his teeth in the fabric and the sound he was making.” I swallow. “He’s the reason I’m here and the reason I can’t—”
I stop again. My hand is shaking. Not the leg. The hand. And the guilt is pressing up against the inside of my ribs, trying to get out the way it always does when I let the wall thin.
They’re all dead and I’m drinking coffee.
That’s what it sounds like when it gets past the wall. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just the flat, brutal arithmetic of being alive when the people you were responsible for are not.
