I practiced a lot of sentences on the drive. Not this one. I never needed it. The lawyer handed me a co-owner’s name on a form, and I filed it undera problem to manage.I never looked closer.
Wyatt Calhoun.W. Calhoun, DVM,beside Jesse’s name on the deed.
W. Calhoun. Wyatt.
Doc.
All this time, I had a picture of Doc.
Jesse painted him so often I could have sworn I’d shaken his hand.
Steady. Weathered.
Some silver-templed soldier who’d seen too much of the world and built a quiet place on a mountain to set it all down.
A man my cousin’s age plus twenty, easy.
Old enough to be safe.
This man is the opposite of every word I built him from. Bent over Atlas with a jaw like a closed door, shoulders that fill the frame, a rough and unfair kind of beauty that has no business anywhere near a grief this size.
Doc was supposed to be old.
Doc was supposed to be safe. A gray man with reading glasses, a careful handshake, the kind you thank at a funeral and never think about again.
He’s neither.
He’s every late-night, lonely-apartment fantasy I’ve never said out loud and filed undernot for me,but I wish it were. The forearms. The stillness. The way he handles seventy pounds of broken war dog like it’s nothing and everything at once.
My whole body has an opinion about him, and it picked a hell of a time to share it.
I came up this mountain numb. Six weeks of numbness I had to work at, the only thing holding the rest of me upright. Thenthis stranger walks his hands down Atlas’s bad shoulder, and something in me wakes.
I’m standing in my dead cousin’s clinic, wrecked, half-frozen, and I can’t stop tracing the line of a stranger’s back.
It’s grief. Grief does strange things. Sends you reaching for warmth wherever it happens to be standing.
It’s a good lie.
I don’t believe it for a second.
I’ve got Doc.Jesse gave me a name to hang my worry on, so I’d hang up easy. He built a whole man out of one syllable and handed him to me as proof.
I took the proof. I never once tried to meet the man behind it.
The kindest thing my cousin did was let me believe he was safe. The cruelest thing I did was believe him.
“He left Atlas to me.” I deliver the line counselor-even and press Jesse’s dog tags flat through my shirt. I hate how easily the words come. “Atlas, and his half of this place. I didn’t ask for it.”
“I know what the will gave away.” The flatness in Wyatt’s voice could strip paint. He’s had six weeks and a lawyer’s letter to learn that much. “What I don’t know is why you’re so eager to destroy what Jesse built.”
I read his face instead of answering. He knew a relative inherited. The letter would have used that word.Relative.Bloodless. Kept at arm’s length.
What he didn’t know — what’s hollowing his face out now — is that the relative has a name Jesse never gave him.
“He never mentioned anyone.” His jaw works.
“He was my cousin.” Somebody has to set my name down in this room, and he can’t, because Jesse never gave it to him. “More big brother than cousin, always. His parents took me in after mine died in a crash. I was three. He was thirteen.” A breath. “Name’s Bella. Bella Coleman.”
