"Better?" he asked.
"Better." She managed a shaky smile. "Sorry. I feel ridiculous."
"Don't." He sat back down, but this time he pulled his chair closer to hers. Close enough that their knees almost touched. "You spent seven years running toward emergencies while everyone else ran away. Your nervous system doesn't just forget that overnight."
The rain continued to pound the windows, but the thunder was moving away now, the rumbles growing fainter. Tessa felt her heart rate slowly return to normal, helped by the candlelight and Brian's steady presence beside her.
"What helps?" he asked. "When it gets bad like this?"
"Distraction, mostly. Something to focus on besides the noise." She looked around the dim cottage. "Games, maybe? Do you have any cards?"
He smiled, and even in the candlelight, she could see his dimples appear. "I can do better than cards."
He disappeared down the hall and returned a moment later with a worn cardboard box. Scrabble, the letters proclaimed in faded print.
"You play?" he asked.
"I used to. With my dad." She touched the edge of the box, a wave of nostalgia washing over her. "He was ruthless. Used to save his Z's and Q's for triple word scores."
"Sounds like my kind of player." Brian cleared their lunch dishes and set up the board on the table. "Fair warning, I don't go easy on anyone."
"Good." She drew her first seven tiles. "Neither do I."
They played through the storm, the thunder fading to distant rumbles and then to silence, the rain softening from a downpour to a gentle patter. The power came back on halfway through their second game, but they left the candles burning anyway.
Tessa won the first game by twelve points. Brian won the second by three.
"Tiebreaker?" he asked, already reaching for the tile bag.
"Tomorrow. I'm exhausted." She leaned back in her chair, feeling the pleasant looseness of muscles that had been clenched for too long. "Thank you. For this. For knowing what I needed without me having to say it."
"You asked for games."
"I asked for distraction. You gave me something better." She met his eyes across the candlelit table. "You gave me a good memory to replace the bad ones."
Something shifted in his expression, softening the lines around his eyes. "That's what you needed? Good memories?"
"It's what I've been missing." She traced the edge of a Scrabble tile with her fingertip. "For so long, all I had were the hard ones. The patients I couldn't save, the families I had to tell. They piled up until I couldn't see anything else."
"And now?"
She thought about the past ten days. Coffee on the deck. Walks through town. Lila's lemon bars and Ruth's knowing smile. Dinner with Hank and Bree and Colby and Sabrina, feeling for the first time in years like she belonged somewhere.
And Brian. Always Brian, steady and solid at the center of it all.
"Now I'm starting to remember what it feels like to be happy," she said.
The words hung in the air between them, heavier than she'd intended. Brian was looking at her with an intensity that made her heart skip.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The last of the clouds was breaking apart, letting through shafts of golden light that painted the wet world in shades of amber and rose.
"Come on," Brian said, pushing back from the table. "There's something I want to show you."
She followed him outside, the air washed clean and smelling of rain and salt and the sweet decay of fallen leaves. He led her down to the dock, where the water was still choppy but calming, reflecting the broken sky in shattered fragments of color.
"Look," he said, pointing toward the horizon.
A rainbow arced across the bay, its colors vivid against the retreating storm clouds. It stretched from somewhere beyond the town to a point in the water that seemed impossibly close, as if they could paddle out and touch it.
