The first-aid kit had been moved. Not just moved—transformed.
The kit was supposed to be a plastic bin, the kind you’d pick up at a discount store, with a cracked lid and arandom assortment of medical supplies dumped inside. Half the bandages had fallen out of their packages. The antiseptic wipes had dried up years ago. The medical tape was missing its end, which meant you had to peel back layers until you found where it would tear. The whole thing had last been organized in 1983, and the person who did it had been drunk.
This version looked like it had been assembled by a different species of human. The bin was still plastic, but it now sat open on the workbench, contents arranged in neat rows by function and urgency.
Each item was labeled in a handwriting so precise it might have been printed—bandages in the front left corner, antiseptic to their right, antibiotics in the back, emergency supplies in a separate container to the side.
Someone had made small white cards for each section: “Cuts” “Burns” “Sprains” “Allergic Reactions.” The tape had been trimmed at the end, the corner folded over to create a clean tear line. A small bag of gauze pads that hadn’t been in the kit before sat next to the bandages, along with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide still in its shrink wrap.
It was the kind of system you’d find on a hospital floor or a military base—nothing wasted, nothing duplicated, everything exactly where a person in a hurry would look for it.
The kitchen door opened, and Jasper stepped through, pulling up short when he saw me. “Sorry,” he said, already backpedaling. “I didn’t realize you were in here.”
I gestured at the workbench. “You did this?”
Something flickered across his face—not quite worry, but adjacent to it. “The kit needed it,” he said, the words coming out careful, like he’d chosen them from a list of phrases that couldn’t be challenged. “I found some supplies in the cabinet when I was doing the inventory Rawley asked for. Hope that’s okay.”
I looked at the first-aid kit again, seeing the thing my hands had fumbled through a hundred times now transformed into what it was supposed to be. “It’s better than okay,” I said. “The kit needed it.”
Relief washed over his face, then was gone, replaced by the careful neutrality he’d been carrying since last night. “Good,” he said, then paused, like he wasn’t sure where the conversation was supposed to go next.
I’d seen this before—the kind of restlessness that came from being caught between one place and another, not yet settled but no longer falling. The need to stake out a function, to establish yourself as something other than a problem that needed handling.
“You’ve got a good system,” I said, nodding toward the kit. “Military?”
He shook his head. “Hospital. We had to be able to find things in the dark. In a code, seconds matter.”
I nodded, understanding the shorthand. “They do.”
The kitchen door opened again, and Carter poked his head through the gap. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, eyes moving between us. “But I’m heading over to check on the O’Reilly baby—another one with a feeding issue—and I was wondering if Jasper would be willing to come take a look.”
Jasper straightened immediately, all trace of the careful wariness gone. “Yes,” he said, the word coming out with more force than anything else he’d said all day. “Absolutely.”
Carter’s face lit up. “That’s great. I’ll drive—“
“I’ll take him,” I said, cutting him off. “My truck’s already warmed up.”
Both men turned to look at me, Carter with mild surprise, Jasper with something I couldn’t quite name.
“Even better,” Carter said, accepting the offer without questioning it. “I’ll see you there in ten.” He ducked back through the kitchen door, letting it swing shut behind him.
Jasper stood where he was, eyes on my face, something moving behind them. “You don’t have to do that,” he said, the words coming out careful again, but in a different way than before—like he was testing the weight of them before letting them go.
“I know,” I said, reaching for my keys on the hook by the door. “You ready?”
He nodded once, then again with more certainty. “Give me one minute to grab my jacket.”
The drive to the O’Reilly place took twelve minutes—the main road, then the dirt track that wound through the stand of pines at the property’s edge. The truck’s heater pushed warm air against my legs, and the windshield wipers cut a clean arc across the glass, pushing the steady rain to the edges of the frame.
Jasper sat with his hands in his lap, knees pulled up slightly, face turned toward the window. He hadn’t said anything since we’d pulled away from the ranch, but the silence between us felt different now—not empty or tense, but charged with something I didn’t have a name for yet.
The O’Reilly place appeared through the trees—a two-story farmhouse with a wide front porch and a red barn behind it, both buildings older than the Steele property, but maintained with the same careful attention. Lights glowed in the windows despite the afternoon hour, yellow and welcoming against the gray day.
Carter’s truck was already in the drive, along with a beat-up sedan I didn’t recognize. I pulled in beside them and killed the engine, the sudden absence of noise making the rain seem louder on the roof.
Jasper reached for the door handle, then stopped, hand frozen halfway to the latch. “Thanks,” he said, the word simplebut carrying more weight than its single syllable should have been able to. “For the ride. For—“ He stopped, the rest of the sentence hanging in the air between us.
I nodded once, accepting what he’d offered without demanding more. “Anytime.”
