"Four," I say. "Car accident. She was still in her car seat." I keep my voice level. "I froze. Stood there while my partner ran the code and my hands just stopped. There was no reason I can give you that makes sense. And I stood there and I watched andwe lost her and those seconds were mine and I will never get them back."
"And then?"
"And then I went home and I woke up the next morning and I put on my uniform and I went back in. For most of another year." The cold has a weight to it now. "Until the morning I sat in my car in the parking garage and couldn't get out. Just sat there. Couldn't make myself go in. Called in sick for the first time in the longest streak I'd kept. Went home and slept until the sky went dark and came back again."
He doesn't say anything.
"That was the burnout. Not dramatic. Just empty. Like I'd been running on something that ran out." I look at the mountains. "I put in my notice the next week. Copper Ridge came up and I'd never heard of it and nobody here had ever heard of me, and that felt clean."
"Nobody here knows what you lost," Beck says.
Not a question.
"Nobody here knows what I lost," I confirm. "That's why I chose it."
The silence holds us both for a moment. Then he picks up his mug again.
"Vanessa and I —" He starts, stops, recalibrates. "The marriage didn't fail because I didn't try. It failed because the trying I knew how to do wasn't the right kind. I kept things in order. Showed up. Handled problems." He turns his mug in both hands, jaw working like he's sorting through words before committing to them. "She went looking for someone who would talk to her. Not because she's a bad person. Because I built a wall so solid even I couldn't see over it anymore, and she got tired of knocking."
"Did you know she was unhappy?"
"Yes."
"Did you do anything about it?"
"No." He sets the mug down. "She wasn't wrong to go looking. I just wish she'd told me first."
The night air has teeth now. My breath makes small clouds. Clarence has abandoned Beck's chair for my lap with the energy of a cat who has decided we've been out here long enough and would someone please generate some warmth.
"What happens," Beck says, "when you're not 'easy'?"
The question catches me off guard because it's exactly the right question — notwhy did you leaveorhow are you now, but the thing underneath all of it that I've never said to anyone.
I press my fingers into Clarence's fur and keep them there. "People leave."
He looks at me then. Not sideways, not peripheral — straight at me, in the dark, with that particular attention that has always felt like being seen through a scope.
"That's what you learned," he says.
"My mom worked three jobs and still showed up for everything, every time, and I was never the hard one. Never the problem. If something hurt, I fixed my face before she had to notice." My voice is steady. "And then in EMS, in Denver — you're supposed to be fine. You're the person who shows up when other people aren't fine. You're not allowed to —" I stop. "I didn't know how to be the one who needed something. So I got very good at not needing."
The swing creaks. Wind moves through the spruce trees at the back of the yard.
Then his hand finds mine in the dark.
Rough and warm, and there's no hesitation in it at all. His thumb traces one short path across my knuckles and goes still. He doesn't explain it.
I don't pull away.
Chapter 12
Beck
She didn't pull away.
That's what I keep coming back to. The porch, the dark, her hand warm in mine — and she didn't pull away. I've been turning it over since, the way you work a problem you already know the answer to and are just waiting to admit, and somewhere in the turning I arrive at a conclusion: I need to do something about this.
This is my first mistake.
