I push back from the counter I was leaning against. Move too fast. The left leg buckles.
It doesn’t give out the way it does on bad mornings, slow and grinding. It goes out from under me all at once, the femoral nerve firing a white blank where the muscle should be, and I catch the edge of the counter with one hand and go down on one knee, hard, on the cabin floor.
The pain is a bright, clean thing. It clears my head.
Chief lifts his head from his bed, ears forward.
Bianca is beside me. Not in front of me. Beside me. She’s on the floor, her hand on my arm, and she didn’t gasp, didn’t flinch. She moved the way emergency nurses move. Fast and already working.
“Don’t stand yet,” she says. Her voice is steady and quiet, and without fear. “Just breathe.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re on the floor, Rhett.”
“I’m fine.”
She doesn’t argue. Or let go of my arm, either. She stays beside me on the floor and waits. Her hand is warm through my sleeve. Not gripping. Just there.
I breathe.
The nerve fires again, weaker this time, and the muscle engages. I can feel the quadricep coming back online. Slowly. I press my hand against the floor and push up, and Bianca shiftsher weight to support my right side without being asked, and between the two of us I get back to standing.
We’re close. Closer than we’ve ever been. Her hand is still on my arm and I can smell her. Something clean. Something warm under it. Her head comes to my shoulder, and her eyes are looking up at me, and her expression is the one I’ve been afraid of since the porch.
She’s not afraid of me, or the leg. Or the scars.
Not the dead men I carry everywhere. She stood in this cabin and heard me say seven men didn’t come back, and she didn’t try to fix it. She didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. Didn’t offer the words people offer when they don’t know what else to do.
She just stayed.
“I should get back to the clinic,” she says. Quiet. Not pulling away.
“Yeah.”
Neither of us moves.
Chief shifts on his bed, lets out a long breath, and settles his chin back on his paws.
I drive her back to town. We don’t talk much. She thanks me for the coffee. I tell her thank you for helping with Chief, and the words aren’t enough for what she did, but I don’t have better ones.
She gets out of the truck at the clinic and gives me a small wave and walks inside, and I sit in the idling truck and watch the door close behind her.
The cabin is going to be quiet when I get back. It’s always quiet. I’ve spent four years making sure of it. Cutting away every connection, every voice, every presence that might remind me I’m alive in a world where seven better men are not.
I drive up the mountain. The quiet in the cabin when I walk through the door is the same quiet it’s always been.
It doesn’t feel the same.
Chapter 7
Bianca
It happens without a conversation. Without a decision, or a date, or any of the things that are supposed to mark the beginning of something. One afternoon I’m helping him carry Chief to the truck, and the next week he’s walking Chief past the clinic at the end of my shift and waiting by the tailgate saying nothing, and I’m locking the door and falling into step beside him, and that’s it. That’s how it starts.
Not dates. Proximity.
We walk Chief in the evenings after his paw heals. Slow loops around the edge of town where the sidewalk gives way to gravel, and the gravel gives way to pine needles. Chief favors the paw between us, and Rhett adjusts his pace for the dog, and I adjust mine for Rhett, and nobody says anything about it. The mountains turn gold and then purple and then black, and the air smells like cold sap and wood-smoke, and we don’t talk much.
