My throat tightens. I look at the floor.
"So the question isn't whether he loves you." Jess's voice drops, quieter now. "The question is whether you're willing to walk back into that cabin and show a pit fighter who's spent years building walls that love isn't a thing you survive. It's a thing you choose." She pauses. "Every day."
The break room door swings shut behind her.
I sit on the counter with the granola bar in my lap and think about Phoenix.
Not the hospital. Not the shifts. Mr. King. Room 4B. The soil under his fingernails and the way he described his tomato plants like they were his children. I visited him on my days off because I liked him. Because he reminded me of Abuelo. Because the café de olla I brought him tasted like home and sitting in that vinyl chair made me feel like I belonged to someone in a city where I didn't belong to anyone.
Then he died at three in the morning on my night off. I showed up for my shift and his bed sat stripped and his name had already been wiped from the whiteboard.
I left Phoenix the next week. I told myself it burned me out. I filled out the next contract application before the ink dried on my transfer paperwork, and I haven't stayed anywhere longer than twelve weeks since—not because I'm saving for a clinic.
Because Mr. King died and I couldn't take it. Because attachment has a cost, and the cost is a man with soil under his nails and a flatline at three a.m., and I decided—standing in the hallway outside 4B with blood still on my scrubs—that I'd never let anyone matter enough to hurt like that again.
Garrett matters. Jess matters. Sarah, Reeve, Betty, Mrs. Duncan, the teenager whose horn caps I adjusted this morning—all of them matter. And Garrett just proved the exact thing I've been doing for years—pushing away the people who get too close—except he did it with packed bags and silence and a dead-eyed stare he learned from the men who put a muzzle on him.
I've been running from attachment and calling it ambition. He shoved me out the door and called it protection. Same wound, different bandage.
I eat the granola bar. I wash my hands, then I go back to work.
The call to Mami happens in the parking lot at five, leaning against the hood of my car with my jacket zipped to my chin and my breath fogging in the December air.
She picks up on the second ring. Kitchen noise behind her—oil popping, Lucia arguing with Marco about whose turn it is to set the table. The sound of home so sharp it splits me open.
"Mija. We miss you."
"I miss you too, Mamá."
"Then come home."
I press my back against the cold metal of the hood. The parking lot is empty. The clinic sign glows behind me, the letters catching the last of the winter light.
"I am home, Mamá." My voice catches. I clear it. "I need you to come visit so you can see why."
She goes quiet. The kind of quiet Mami uses when she's deciding whether to push or wait.
"Tell me about him."
I laugh. The sound comes out wet and jagged and I wipe my face with the back of my hand. I tell her about the man who cooked me breakfast I didn't ask for and carved a hummingbird from black walnut because I mentioned my Abuela’s feeder once. The man who purrs when I touch the spot between his horns and who hasn't spoken more than six sentences in a row to anyone except me and Knox in fifteen years. The man who pushed me away because he thought love and safety were opposites, because the world taught him that everything he touches gets broken.
"He sounds like your father," Mami says. "Papi didn't talk to me for a week after our first fight. Sat in the garage sandinga bookshelf until I went out there and told him the silent treatment only works if I'm willing to leave, and I'm not."
"I'm not willing to leave either."
"Then stop sitting in a parking lot and go tell him, Mija."
Sarah catches me at the clubhouse door twenty minutes later. Reeve asleep against her shoulder, his fist curled around the collar of her shirt, his mouth open in a little snore.
"I came to Nightfall Cove to disappear," she says. "But I stayed because I found the place where I could finally be seen." She shifts Reeve's weight. "Go get your man, Nina. He hasn't eaten since you left."
I grab my keys.
The drive to the cabin takes eight minutes. I know because I've counted it before—eight minutes from the clubhouse lot to the bend in the forest road where the clearing opens and the cabin appears.
I don't make it to the bend.
The headlights catch the SUV at the four-minute mark, parked sideways across the narrow road where the Douglas firs crowd close enough to scrape both mirrors. Black. Tinted windows. Engine running, exhaust fogging in the cold.
