“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say.
“Thank you.” Two words, slowed down, in the voice that doesn’t perform. Then he’s gone to the station, and I stand in my apartment with a wrong-made coffee and a dog and awhiteboard doing math at me, and I say, out loud, to the room, “Okay, Sloane. Nobody panic.”
The dog sighs.
“That includes you.”
Gemma shows up at the clinic at ten with two coffees from Peak Grounds, looking like she scheduled this.
She hands me one. Black, no sugar. Micah’s intel network remains flawless. Then she leans against my exam table, takes a sip of her own, and says, “You’re leaving in two weeks.”
“That’s the plan.”
“You look like someone whose plan is making them sick.”
I’ve had Hanna’s version of this conversation. Hanna comes in through a side door with warm hands and lets you discover the point yourself, like a good diagnostician. Gemma parks the ambulance on your foot.
“The plan is fine,” I say. “The plan is professionally sound.”
“Mm.” She drinks her coffee with the energy of someone reviewing a takeout menu. “You know I used to have a plan. When I got to Copper Ridge I had a whole system. Show up, do the job, keep the walls at regulation height. I was excellent at it. Ask anyone. Ask Beck, actually, because he spent about a year on the other side of those walls, standing in the weather like a Labrador.”
“This town has told me that story in four versions.”
“Then let me give you the director’s cut.” She sets the cup down, and the takeout-menu energy stays exactly where it is, which is somehow what makes it land. “I thought the walls were protecting me. That was the whole pitch. Keep everyone far enough away and nothing can take you apart again. Here’s thething nobody tells you.” A sip, unhurried, merciless. “The walls don’t keep the grief out. It’s already in there with you. It got in before you built them. All the walls do is make sure that when you finally sit down on the floor with it, you do it alone.”
The exam room is very quiet.
“I’m not grieving,” I say, and my voice does something on the last word, a hairline thing, and Gemma hears it, because Gemma triages voices for a living.
She doesn’t pounce. She picks her coffee back up.
“Okay,” she says. “Then whatever it is you’re not doing, you’ve been not doing it alone for two years, and you’re about to drive to Colorado so you can keep not doing it in a fresh zip code. As a medical professional, I’d call that a treatment plan that isn’t working. As your friend, I’d say drink your coffee, you look terrible.”
There’s a constriction that happens in my chest when someone names the thing I’ve organized my whole life around not naming. It has a location, mid-sternum. It has a size. It’s happening now, and my hands want something to do, and there is nothing on this counter that needs doing, and I’ve already wiped it twice.
“I have a farm call,” I say.
I don’t have a farm call.
“Sure,” Gemma says, and the kindness in it is worse than an argument. She collects both cups. At the door she stops. “For the record, I like you. The town likes you. That’s not the trap you think it is.”
I make it to the truck with my keys in my hand and my professional face still mostly attached. I sit in the parking lot without turning the engine on, and I look at my hands on the wheel, and I say, out loud, “You’re fine.”
The steering wheel doesn’t respond. The steering wheel and I both know I’m lying.
I drive to the river.
Owen loved rivers.
That’s not quite accurate. Owen loved everything that made a person feel small and briefly immortal—mountains, rapids, exit doors of airplanes—but rivers were where he was quietest. He taught me to read water the summer I was eleven, standing in the Blackfoot in boots too big for me. Slick water means rocks. Seams mean food, if you’re a trout. If you’re not a trout, seams mean pay attention. My brother assessed every river like he was being introduced to it. Then he’d grin at it. Then, usually, he’d get in it.
I park where the trail comes down to the gravel bar below town, and the dog pours out of the truck ahead of me like liquid with a schedule, and I stand on the bank of a river in Montana at eleven in the morning on a workday, which is not in the plan, and I let it come up.
It comes up.
Two years of freight, surfacing in order. The Sunday calls, seven p.m., every week no matter what state he was jumping in, Sullivan-loud through the phone, telling me about fires with his mouth full. The Sunday it rang at four instead of seven and it was his superintendent’s voice, not his. The word burnover, which I already knew clinically, the way I know all the worst words, and which stopped being clinical in one sentence. The Cascades. The box. The folded flag they handed my mother while I stood there in shoes I threw away afterward, doing the math nobody asked me to do: how fast, how hot, how far from the safety zone. Whether he was talking on the radio. Whether somebody had to listen.
