"The clinic is good. My boss is a sixty-something-year-old man who keeps emergency whiskey in his desk drawer and keeps telling me to stop apologizing."
"I already love him."
"And Nora, the woman who runs the bed-and-breakfast where I stayed when I came for my interview and again for my first couple of nights before the apartment was ready. She brings me lunch at the clinic even though I told her she doesn't have to."
"Sounds like she's already adopted you."
"She might have."
We talk for twenty more minutes about nothing important. Riley tells me about a customer at Maggie's who tried to order a steak well-done with ketchup, and I laugh harder than the story deserves because I miss her so much it sits like a stone below my ribs.
After we hang up, I sit in the quiet and stare at the ceiling, thinking about the man with the limp.
I don't know why. It’s not like I know him. But my brain keeps replaying the way he moved. The way his dog stayed so close. The scar. The set of his jaw.
The way he didn't look.
I pull a blanket over my legs and close my eyes, and I tell myself it's just the nurse in me. Noticing. Cataloguing. It's what I'm trained to do.
It's not a very convincing lie.
* * *
On Friday afternoon, the clinic is empty. Dr. Theo left an hour ago to make a house call up the mountain, muttering something about a rancher's bad knee and worse attitude. I'm restocking exam room supplies and pretending it's productive when the front door opens and the smell of cinnamon walks in.
Nora Bell is the woman who makes a room warmer just by being in it. Mid-fifties, soft and round, with curly gray hair pinned loosely at the back of her head and hazel eyes that twinkle in a way I'd call fictional if I hadn't seen it myself. She always smells of cinnamon and pine, and carries herself with the cheerful certainty that every single person she meets was put in her path for a reason.
She is, without question, the most aggressively kind person I've ever met.
"Lunch," she announces, setting a paper bag on the front desk. "Turkey and Swiss on sourdough and one of those oatmeal cookies you pretended you didn't like."
"Nora, you don't—"
"Eat it before it gets cold. The soup won't keep." There's soup, too. Of course, there's soup.
I take the bag because I've learned that arguing with Nora is a waste of energy better spent elsewhere. She settles into the chair across from the desk and folds her hands in her lap, watching me with that expression she gets. The one that says she's not just looking at me. She's seeing me.
It's terrifying. In the warmest possible way.
"How are you settling in, sweetheart?"
"Good."
"Mhm." She tilts her head. "And how are you really settling in?"
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
"It's a lot quieter than I expected," I say, which is the truest thing I can manage.
Nora smiles. "Iron Peak is good at quiet. Some people find it restful. Some people find it unbearable." She pauses. "The ones who stay are the ones who needed the quiet more than they knew."
I don't know what to say to that, so I unwrap the sandwich.
We sit together for a few minutes. Nora talks about the B&B—a couple from Denver coming this weekend, the rocking chair on the porch that needs fixing, and the guest-book she swears has predicted at least three marriages. I listen and eat and feel something I haven't felt in a long time.
Welcome.
Not the kind you perform for someone. The kind that just exists, steady and unearned.
