Susannah.
He waited for the wave of crushing guilt to pass before he got out and hobbled slowly and painfully to the house. He refused to admit that Hank might know what he was talking about when he said the knee wasn’t ready more than a few dozen steps at a time. But his kneed begged to differ with him.
He limped to the kitchen, fetched the big, gel-filled leg wrap out of the freezer and carried it to the living room sofa. He took off the brace with a sigh of relief, wrapped his knee in the cold wrap, and propped it on the pile of pillows that lived on the sofa permanently these days.
The house was quiet. Dillon was at his vet clinic until late afternoon on Tuesdays. Dillon’s rescue mutt, a black lab named Walter whose age was undetermined other than “very old” came in through the doggie door and walked over to him with stiff dignity on his arthritic joints.
“Hey, Walter. Hope you’re feeling better than me, Man.”
The dog thumped his tail against the coffee table hard enough that Reno had to snatch his coffee cup off it to keep it from spilling.
The dog sniffed hopefully at the pastry bag still sitting on the low table.
“I dunno, Walt. I don’t think cinnamon or sugar is great for dogs.” He added, “They’re not great for humans either, but since when do we humans do what’s good for us? I’ll get you a biscuit when I’m done icing my knee.”
Another tail thump, this time banging the couch. He reached out and idly scratched the dog’s back while the cold wrap worked its magic and eased the deep ache in his knee.
After twenty minutes of icing, he hobbled back to the kitchen without his brace to put the cold wrap back in the freezer and get Walter his promised dog biscuit.
He made his way back to the living room and sat down on the rug in front of the woodstove. The stretch routine Hank had shown him how to do was the most reliable structure in his life. He’d been doing it four times a day like clockwork. That and praying his knee would heal fast and well no less than a dozen times a day. Rehabbing his knee was his sole job in life at the moment.
As for what job came next, particularly if his knee didn’t make it all the way back to one-hundred-percent, that was a topic he refused to think about at all. But the longer he put off facing it, the more pressure he felt building up in the mental drawer he’d locked the decision away in.
When he finished stretching, he showered, shaved, and put on clean dark jeans and a freshly laundered and starched charcoal-gray shirt. He sat down at the kitchen table and opened his laptop.
He’d just set up a new account at the bank in Apple Pie Creek, and he needed to start making the monthly money transfers he’d sent to Susannah every month for the past three years out of the new account. He’d been forced to have a private conversation with the president of the bank before the bank’s manager agreed to send the transfers anonymously for him.
The next check was due to be sent in eleven days. He filled out the online form to wire the money out of his account and hit send. That unpleasant, but necessary, task done, he shut down the laptop and went out to sit on the front porch. He sank into one of the deep Adirondack chairs Dillon had built recently and propped his foot up on the matching ottoman Dillon had made for him the week he got home from the hospital after his surgery.
The porch faced south, looking out on the valley’s rolling landscape. Dotted here and there with ranches, the rolling terrain rose gradually, and then steeply, into the mountains that formed the Stillwater Valley’s long south rim.
Walter lay at his feet and looked at the view with the air of an old man who’d observed it several thousand times and continued, broadly, to approve. He laid his head down on his paws and closed his eyes with an audible sigh.
“All right,” he said to the dog, after a minute. “Dillon told me to follow your lead and take it easy for the next few months. A nap it is.”
Reno laid his head back against the chair’s cushion, pulled his black baseball cap down over his eyes, and went to sleep. For once, he didn’t dream of Susannah. Instead, he dreamed of a blond angel with flour on her wings, smelling of his grandmother’s bread.
He and Walter dozed on as the afternoon passed them by.
When Dillon trudged up the porch steps a little after five, he moved with the dragging stride of a man who’d been out most of last night on an emergency call, and on his feet all day today. He stopped at the top of the steps and studied Reno, who lounged in the chair, blinking sleepily at him. At Reno’s feet, Walter did the same, blinking up at Dillon.
“How’s the knee doing?” Dillon asked.
“Hank says it’s coming along. I say it’s healing slower than I’d like.”
“Mm.” Dillon sank into the second chair beside him.
“I heard your truck pull out of the driveway around two AM. but didn’t hear it come back this morning. Everything last night go okay?”
“Rancher’s cow spooked at something and bolted through a barbed wire fence. Got tangled up in the wire and panicked. Tore up her hide something fierce. I had to set almost a thousand sutures to patch her back together. She’ll be fine as long as she doesn’t pick up an infection. By the time I was done stitching her up, I needed to head to straight to the clinic. Had a full day’s worth of appointments on the books.”
“No rest for the weary,” Reno observed dryly. “Maybe you should hire a vet tech to handle the routine clinic visits.”
“I would if I could find one. They’re in short supply nationwide, and Cobbler Cove’s pretty far off the beaten track for most folks to consider moving here.”
“Fair.” A pause. Then Reno asked, “How’s Tessa?”
Dillon’s entire face transformed, the fatigue falling away, replaced with delight. “She’s fantastic. She got the first sales numbers from the fancy New York boutique she sold Charlotte’s wedding designs to. They’re going to have to hire more seamstresses to keep up with the demand. The dresses are flying off the . . . not shelves . . . whatever dresses fly off of.”
