When we do talk, it’s small. He asks how the clinic was. I tell him about the logger who came in with a fishhook in his thumband refused anesthesia because, in his words, he’d had worse. Rhett almost smiles at that. Almost. The corner of his mouth moves and then stops; he catches himself.
I’m learning to read those almosts. They’re where he lives.
On Tuesday he shows up at the clinic with a bag of apples from a tree behind his cabin. Sets them on the desk without explanation. “They’ll go bad,” he says, and leaves. Dr. Theo watches the entire exchange from the exam room doorway, his reading glasses pushed up into his white hair, and says nothing. His silence is louder than most people’s commentary.
On Thursday I drive up to the cabin after work to check Chief’s paw. That’s the reason I give myself. The paw. The medical justification. That Kellan said to monitor the swelling, and I’m a nurse, monitoring swelling is literally my job.
It’s not about the paw.
Rhett makes coffee while I sit on the floor with Chief and palpate the joint. The swelling is down. His range of motion is better. He licks my wrist when I’m done, which I’m choosing to interpret as gratitude.
“He’s healing well,” I say.
Rhett sets a mug in front of me. Sits in his chair. The single chair. I’m on the floor and he’s at the table, and there’s a distance between us that feels calculated — exactly how close he can sit without it meaning something.
It already means something. We both know it.
“You don’t have to drive up here,” he says. Not unkind. Just careful.
“I know.”
I take the mug and drink. The coffee is strong and burnt and made in a percolator that belongs in a museum, and it’s the best coffee I’ve ever had because he made it and handed it to me and sat down three feet away and didn’t ask me to leave.
I decide to keep driving up there.
The town notices.
Of course, the town notices. Iron Peak has maybe eight hundred people and one actual street, and a collective attention span that can track a stranger’s grocery list within forty-eight hours of arrival. A reclusive mountain man and the new nurse walking a limping German Shepherd at sunset is not the thing that goes unremarked.
Mrs. Garcia stops me outside the post office and asks if Rhett’s cabin is as cold as people say, then winks in a way that makes my ears burn. The teenager with the sprained ankle comes into the clinic and asks if the “scary firewood guy” is my boyfriend, which I handle with the composure and professionalism of a woman who turns crimson from the collarbones up and says “no” in a voice that convinces no one.
Sheriff Lawson tips his Stetson to me on Main Street and says, “Glad to see him coming to town more,” and the way he says it makes me understand that this is a man who has been worried about Rhett for a long time.
And Nora.
Nora is incandescent.
She comes into the clinic with lunch on Friday, and she’s glowing. Not subtly. Not with any attempt at restraint. She is beaming in a way that makes her entire face look ten years younger, and she sets the paper bag on the desk and takes both of my hands in hers and just holds them for a second, and her eyes are wet.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing, sweetheart.” She squeezes my hands. “You just make me very happy.”
“Nora—”
“He came to town three times this week.” She says it the way someone else might say the war is over. “Three times, Bianca. In four years he’s never come to town three times in one week.”
I don’t know what to do with that. With the weight of it. A man who has spent four years avoiding the world is walking into it, and a woman who loves him the way a mother would, is standing in front of me with tears in her eyes because she can see what’s happening even if we can’t.
“I’m not—” I start, and I don’t know how to finish. I’m not doing anything. I’m not special. I’m just there.
Nora cups my face. Gentle. The way I imagine a mother would, if I’d had the mother who cupped faces.
“Honey,” she says. “That’s exactly what he needs.”
She leaves. I eat the sandwich she brought and blink at the wall for a while.
Saturday evening, I’m at his cabin. Unable to stay away. Chief is asleep on his bed with his paw tucked under him, and the woodstove is putting out enough heat to make the small room glow. I’m sitting on the floor again, back against the wall, and Rhett is in his chair, and we’ve been quiet for a long time in a way that used to make me nervous and now feels like breathing.
