Main Street at eight-thirty in the morning. I park in front of the clinic and get out of the truck and walk around to her side and open the door, and the entire act is so normal and so foreign that my hands feel strange doing it. I’ve opened truck doors for equipment. For Chief. For bags of chain oil. Never for a woman wearing my shirt.
Bianca steps out. Her scrubs are wrinkled. She’s wearing my flannel shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. Her hair is loose and wild, and she hasn’t tried to tame it, and she looks like she spent the night exactly the way she spent the night, and she’s not hiding it.
I put my hand on her back. Between her shoulder blades. A point of contact that says I’m here and I’m not pretending otherwise. She glances up at me, and the look on her face is happy that I feel it land somewhere behind my ribs. Warm. Unfamiliar. Good.
Iron Peak notices.
Mrs. Garcia is sweeping the sidewalk outside the post office, and she stops mid-sweep, and her face breaks into a grin so wide it could light the valley. She doesn’t say a word. Just grins and starts sweeping again, humming something that sounds suspiciously like a love song.
Hank is leaning against his cruiser with a coffee cup in his hand. He sees us. He sees my hand on her back. He looks at me for a long second, and his expression isn’t surprise. Isn’t amusement.
Relief.
He tips his Stetson. I nod back. And this time, for the first time in four years, the nod isn’t a dismissal. It’s an acknowledgment.
Colt is outside the feed store. Of course he is. Same fence, same crossed arms, same dark eyes that miss nothing. He watches me walk down the sidewalk with my hand on Bianca’s back, and his expression doesn’t change.
He gives me a nod.
One nod. No words. But I can read Colt, and what the nod says is about damn time. And under that, quieter: I’m glad you’re still here.
My throat tightens. I nod back.
At the clinic door, Bianca turns to face me. She’s standing in the morning light with her wild red hair and my flannel and the green eyes that saw through me from the very beginning, and she rises on her toes and presses a kiss to my jaw. Quick and certain.
“Pick me up at four?” she says.
“Yeah.”
She smiles. Full. Unguarded. Bright. It hits me in the chest with the force of something I’ve been bracing against my entire life.
She walks inside. The door closes.
I stand on the sidewalk in Iron Peak with the mountains rising above me and the sun on my face, and I don’t put my head down.
Nora finds me before I make it back to the truck.
She comes out of the bakery next to the clinic, and I know she was waiting because Nora Bell doesn’t go to the bakery. Nora Bell is the bakery. She bakes everything herself and has no reason to be in this building at eight forty-five on a Friday morning except the reason that’s walking toward her in a flannel and boots with an expression on his face that he can’t quite control.
She stops in front of me on the sidewalk, wearing her usual cardigan and smelling of cinnamon. Her hazel eyes are already filling.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I’m not doing anything.” Her voice is thick. “I’m standing on a sidewalk.”
“You’re crying.”
“I have allergies.” She swipes at her eyes. “Rhett.”
“Nora.”
“Your mother would be so proud of you.”
The words land somewhere I’ve kept locked since I was a kid. Her voice. The way she smelled. The sound of her laughter in the kitchen. The last time she called me sweetheart, which was the morning before she didn’t come home.
I don’t flinch.
For the first time since I lost her, the words land, and they hurt the way true things hurt, and they don’t destroy me. They fill something instead.
