The way the guilt comes in after the fear leaves.
Because the fear passes. It always passes. The body can’t sustain that level of adrenaline forever, and eventually the nervous system winds down and the tremors stop, and I’m just a man sitting on the floor in a cabin in the mountains. But the guilt is patient. It waits for the fear to finish, and then it walks through the door and sits down across from me and asks the question it always asks.
Why are you the one who gets to have mornings?
I don’t have an answer. I’ve never had an answer.
What I have, for the first time in four years, is a reason the question hits harder. Red hair. Green eyes. A voice so quiet that I have to lean in to hear it.
You’re letting yourself want something. You know what happens to things you want.
I pull myself off the floor. I make coffee. I don’t drive to town.
I don’t drive to town the next day either.
Or the next day.
I chop wood until the leg can’t take it. I sharpen every blade I own. I fix the hinge on the generator shed that’s been loose since October. I do the things that fill the hours and keep my hands busy and require no human contact, and every evening I sit on the porch with Chief and don’t look toward town and don’t think about the clinic and don’t think about her sitting on the floor of my cabin with her knees pulled up, telling me the truest thing she’s ever told anyone.
I don’t always know which one is real.
I think about it anyway.
I think about the curl I tucked behind her ear. The way her skin felt under my knuckles. The way she didn’t look away, even though looking away is what she does. What she’s always done. She didn’t look away from me.
And I ran.
Not dramatically. Not with a fight or a speech or any of the things that would give her something to push against. I just stopped showing up. Stopped driving to town. Stopped walking Chief past the clinic at the end of her shift. And I pulled back the way I’ve always pulled back, quiet and total, because I learned a long time ago that the cleanest way to leave someone is to never explain why.
My phone rings twice on Tuesday. Nora. I don’t answer.
It rings once on Wednesday, Bianca. I stare at her name on the screen until it stops, and then I set the phone face-down on the counter and stand there with my hands braced against the wood and my eyes closed.
Chief watches me from his bed. His paw is almost healed. He can put his weight on it now, and when he walks, the limp is barely noticeable. He watches me with that steady, unblinking patience of his, waiting for me to do the thing he already knows I’m going to do.
I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do. I don’t know either.
Thursday morning. I’m on the porch, drinking coffee that’s gone cold because I made it an hour ago and forgot about it. The valley is bright and sharp below the ridge. Autumn morning. The mountains look painted. Chief is lying beside me with his head on his paws.
I hear the car before I see it.
The sound of tires on gravel, slow and careful, coming up the switchback. Not a truck. Something smaller. The engine note differs from anything that drives this road, which means it’s not Colt and it’s not the propane delivery and it’s not anyone who has a reason to be coming up this mountain on a Thursday morning.
Bianca’s car comes around the last bend and pulls into the clearing beside my truck.
She doesn’t get out right away. She sits in the car with the engine off for a long moment, and even from the porch I can see her hands on the steering wheel. Gripping. Deciding.
Chief lifts his head. His tail moves.
She gets out of the car wearing scrubs. She came here from the clinic, or before the clinic, or instead of the clinic. Her red curls are pulled back; there are shadows under her eyes that weren’tthere last time, and she looks at me across the clearing, and my throat closes.
She’s scared.
Not of me. Scared the way you get when you’re doing the thing every instinct tells you not to do.
She’s showing up.
She climbs the porch steps. Chief meets her halfway, pressing his head against her thigh. She drops a hand to his ear without looking down, her eyes still on me.
