“Goodnight, Bella.”
“Goodnight, Wyatt.”
I walk out, pulling the door closed until the latch clicks.
Atlas stays in the room with her, settling down with a heavy sigh against the cedar floorboards. He knows where he belongs tonight.
My bedroom is cold, the emergency lamp cast in a dull amber. I pull the wool blanket off the shelf and lie down on my bed. My boots are still on. The springs creak under my weight as I turn onto my side.
The wall is pine, thin as paper.
Through the wood, her movements reach me. The soft rustle of the quilt as she pulls it over her shoulders. The creak of the mattress springs. The slow, shallow rhythm of her breathing as she tries to sleep.
I lie in the dark, my hand finding the cold metal of Jesse’s dog whistle on my keyring, my fingers tracing the initials Jesse carved into the brass.
Nobody should have to be afraid alone in the dark.
His voice, clear and quiet in my head.
I close my eyes and listen to the steady rise and fall of her breath through the wall. I’m three feet from her. I’m a man who built a whole life out of keeping things alive, out of keeping my distance so nothing could ever finish what Jesse started in me.
And I’m already failing.
The thrum of the generator under the floorboards is the only constant, keeping time for the silence that pools in the corners. I turn on my side, the old mattress complaining under my shoulder.
Sleep is a mile away.
Through the pine planks, her shifting movements reach me. Her mattress springs sigh. She’s restless, too. Or cold. Or simply trapped in the same loop I am, running the same calculations on a Tuesday call where tired was the only tell.
I sit up. The air in the room has dropped three degrees since the light died, the draft from the window working its way through the plastic insulation Jesse stapled over the sash last autumn. He used the heavy-duty kind, double-layered, yet the wind still finds the gaps.
I stand, drag the wool blanket around my shoulders, and walk back out to the clinic hall.
The backup lights cast long, orange fingers down the corridor, reflecting off the steel tables and the glass front of the medicine cabinet.
It looks like a field hospital at night. Same low hum. Same smell of iron, wet wool, and copper. In the recovery runs, the sheepdog is asleep, her nose tucked under her flank, but Dolly—the blind collie—is standing by her gate. Her ears are up, swiveling toward the sound of my boots.
I reach a hand through the wire. She presses her muzzle flat into my palm, her cold nose checking my skin.
“Still here, girl.” My voice is a quiet rasp, meant only for the old dog’s ears.
A floorboard creaks behind me.
I turn. Bella is standing at the end of the hall, near the clinic kitchen. She’s wrapped Eleanor’s wool scarf over a borrowed sweater. My sweater. She has a chipped ceramic plate in onehand, steam rising from the mound of green chile she’s heated up.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Bella pulls Eleanor’s scarf tighter around her shoulders. “The stove is warm, but the room... it’s very quiet.”
“The generator takes some getting used to. It’s got a skip in the third cylinder. You learn to listen for it.”
She walks down the hall toward me, her steps silent. She stops three feet away, holding the plate out. “There’s plenty. Eleanor must have thought you were feeding a crew.”
“She always does.”
I take the plate from her. Our fingers brush—just a second of contact—and the heat of her skin is still there, startling and clean against the cold of my hand. I lead the way into the clinic kitchen, a small alcove off the pharmacy with a laminate counter, a two-burner stove, and two heavy oak stools we salvaged from the old Ranger station.
I set the plate between us. I find two forks in the drawer and hand one to her.
We eat in silence for a while. The green chile is hot, sharp with garlic and pork fat, the kind of heat that works its way down into your collarbone and stays there. It’s the first real food I’ve had in twelve hours, and my body takes it like fuel.
