“So have you.Working at this deck, that is.”
She went back to her columns of numbers.He pulled out the chair across from her and went to work annotating patient files.She’d made him promise to catch up on all his paperwork at the end of every single week.No exceptions.It was the only way to avoid the return of the shoebox apocalypse.
For a while the only sounds were the scratch of her pencil and the old house creaking now and then.
Sunny studied one of the blueprints intently and commented, “Whoever drew this knew his stuff,” she said, half to herself.“Every measurement is precise, and the house matches it exactly.I can trust every single bit of it to be accurate.I love things I can trust.”
So did he.The problem with that was he’d found precious few things, or people, in this world that he could trust not to let him down.
He gathered that something in her life had gone badly wrong, based on the careful blank way she went when certain subjects came up.There’d been a husband, past tense, and not a gentle past tense.She’d clearly had money once, and then not.And the disappearance of the money was tied to something uglier that she refused to talk about.
He didn’t ask.
He’d endured the prying, well-meantso what happened, exactlyenough times to know it was the asker’s own curiosity wearing a costume of concern.Whatever had happened to her was hers.She would tell him about it when she was ready to, or she never would.Either way it was not a thing she owed him.
“The town’s books are worse than yours,” she said eventually.“I didn’t think anything could be worse than yours.”
“Thank you,” he replied dryly.
The corner of her mouth turned up.“Yours was just a mess.This,” she laid her hand on the town ledger, “is intentionally deceptive.Somebody made it confusing on purpose.A mess is innocent.This isn’t.”
“You can tell the confusion is intentional?”
“Absolutely.”Something crossed her face that almost looked like regret.“For a long time I told myself I just hadn’t looked hard enough.That if I’d only ...”She stopped.“I’m good at this now because I was very bad at it once when it counted.”
He understood it for what it was.A door opened an inch, to see whether he would try to crash through.
He didn’t.
Instead, he said, “Funny thing about being bad at something when it counts.Folks act like you chose to be bad in that moment.Mostly, a thing just happened that you didn’t know how to stop.I’ve got a mistake or two like that in my past.The voice in my head keeps telling me I should’ve known better.I keep telling it I didn’t know enough back then to know better.”
She was quiet a moment.“Does telling it you did your best at the time work?”
“Not even a little,” Hank said.“But I keep telling it that anyway.That’s all I can do.”
Her expression was surprised and held something careful in it that was coming unbraced.
Outside, past the new porch and the old aluminum chair, the lawn had gone silver under a half moon.
Sunny gathered the town’s lies into a neat stack and squared the blueprints of his honest old house on top of them, and neither of them said anything at all.It was the good kind of quiet, though.The comfortable, companionable kind he hadn’t known he was starved for until Madi and then Sunny came and filled the house with it.
8
The strangers showed up on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday the whole valley had taken sides about them.
There were three.Two investigators from the state fire marshal’s office and a sheriff’s detective down from Helena.They had come, the better part of five years late, to take a second look at the barn that had burned and killed the all town’s volunteer firefighters.
Hank heard the whole of it the way he heard most of the town’s gossip: in pieces, on his exam table and across his desk.
One patient told him the widows of the fire had undoubtedly stirred the pot and they ought to let it lie.That Lucas Shoemacher was a sick old man being hounded into his grave by a bunch of whiny women who needed somebody to blame.
An hour later a woman in for her blood pressure told him that the Shoemachers had buried the truth under money and a smile, and it was high time somebody looked into it.
The town had begun to rub itself raw along the line between the two sides.
Hank said the same thing to all of them, in the same unhurried tone.Let the investigators do their work.And then the matter would be put to rest once and for all.He’d learned a long time ago that a doctor’s steadiness was contagious.If he was calm, frightened patients would borrow the calm they couldn’t manufacture on their own.
Personally, Hank didn’t think the widows were stirring the pot.They were the only people in the valley who had truly had a right to ask questions about the fire.But he also knew what the asking was going to cost the town.And, as the town’s doctor, he dreaded the pain to come even if he knew it was necessary.He braced himself for what the investigation was going to do to the normally tight knit community.
