There's a scar on the left side of his face. Long, deliberate, like something tried very hard to break him and didn't quite finish the job.
A German Shepherd walks beside him. Close. Pressed to his left leg, moving in perfect sync with the uneven gait. Not on a leash. The dog doesn't need one. It watches the street with a calm, sweeping vigilance that doesn't belong to a pet.
The man doesn't look at the clinic. Doesn't look at anything. His eyes stay forward, fixed on the middle distance, and my chest tightens.
Not pity. I know the difference.
Recognition.
I know what it looks like when someone tries to move through the world without being seen. I've been doing it my whole life.
He passes the front door, which is all window. The dog's ears flick once in my direction, but the man doesn't turn.
My pen hovers over the chart. I haven't written a word.
I set the pen down carefully, as if I've been caught doing something I shouldn't, and go back to my notes.
My handwriting is terrible for the next three lines.
* * *
Riley picks up on the second ring, which means she’s on break at Maggie's Diner in Evergreen Lakes or she's ignoring a customer. Knowing Riley, both.
"You're alive," she says. "I was planning the search party."
"You spoke to me yesterday."
"Twenty-four hours is a long time when my baby sister is living in a town with one road and no cell signal."
"I have cell signal."
"Barely," she huffs.
I tuck my legs under me on the couch—my couch, in my apartment, a thing I'm still getting used to—and press the phone to my ear. Riley's voice is the most familiar sound in my world. Louder than mine, always. Faster. She talks the way she moves through life, with the certainty that whatever's on the other side of the door will be glad to see her.
I have never once felt that certainty. But hearing it in her voice is almost enough.
"So," she says. "How's the hermit life?"
"I'm not hermit-ing."
"Bianca, you moved to a town that's literally inside a canyon. That is the geographic equivalent of crawling into a blanket fort."
I smile. She's not wrong. "It's beautiful here. And quiet."
"Of course it's quiet. There's like forty people."
"More than forty."
"Fifty?"
"Riley."
She laughs, and something loosens in my chest. This is what she does. She reaches through the phone and unknots me, one joke at a time. She's been doing it since I was ten years old, sitting on the floor of whatever apartment we'd landed in that month, waiting for parents who were never going to come through the door the way parents are supposed to.
Riley came through the door instead. Every time.
"Tell me something good," she says, and her voice is softer now. The real Riley, the one underneath the noise. The one who worries about me and pretends she doesn't.
