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Her eyebrows lift. Surprise, maybe, that I didn't shut it down. That I didn't pivot to logistics or walk away or flatten the conversation with the authority that usually ends things before they start.

"Good." She opens her car door. Pauses with one foot inside. "Sunday dinner at Ben's. Seven o'clock. You can sit next to me or across from me, I don't care. But you're done looking past me, Reid. That part's over."

She gets in. Engine turns on the second try. Gravel pops under her tires as she pulls onto the road, and I watch the Subaru until it disappears around the bend with the broken reflector that Jasper keeps saying he'll fix.

Kyle clears his throat behind me. "So. You gonna drive me home, or we just standing here?"

Right.

The drive takes fifteen minutes. Kyle doesn't say a word about what he just witnessed, which means either the ribs hurt too much for conversation or he has better survival instincts than I gave him credit for.

After I drop him off, I sit in the truck with the engine idling and my hands on the wheel.

Twelve years. She's been carrying this for twelve years. Through nursing school, through Denver trauma rotations, through her father's cancer scare, through building a career and a life four hours from the town where a girl with braces fell for a man who was already too old for her.

Fourteen years between us. I knew her when she was in diapers. Changed her diaper once, actually, when Ben and I were sixteen and his parents left us in charge for an hour. She spit up on my shirt.

That memory used to be the one I pulled up when I needed to kill the heat in my gut. Reminder. She was a baby. You were a teenager. You watched her grow up. You don't get to want her.

But she's right about one thing, and she knows it, and knowing it is why she stood in that field this morning and delivered the speech she's probably been rehearsing since she drove back into this valley six weeks ago.

She's not a baby anymore. She's not eighteen. She's not his little sister, not to me, not in the way my body responds when she's in the same room, and pretending otherwise stopped being honest about three years ago.

Ben is going to kill me.

Sunday is four days away, and Mira Cross just told me to stop running.

The part that terrifies me, the part that keeps my hands locked on the steering wheel while the engine idles and the morning frost melts off the windshield in streaks?

Every instinct I trained into myself over twenty years of military service is telling me to hold the line. Maintain discipline. Protect the perimeter.

And every other instinct, the ones that predate the uniform and the rank and the scars, is telling me she's right.

I put the truck in drive.

Four days.

Chapter Two

MIRA

Sunday morning, and my father is trying to make pancakes with one arm.

"Dad." Standing in the doorway of his kitchen, watching him crack an egg one-handed into a bowl that's sliding across the counter. "Sit down. Let me do it."

"My kitchen, my pancakes." He traps the bowl with his hip. The left arm stays in the sling where it's been since the radiation treatments finished three months ago. The cancer is gone. The nerve damage from the port site isn't. Doc Winters says it'll improve. My father says Doc Winters is an optimist.

"You're getting shell in the batter."

"Adds texture."

This is what I came home for. Not the cancer, although that's what got me in the car. What made me stay was this: a man who'll fish eggshell out of pancake batter with a fork rather than admit he needs help. Ben got the stubbornness from somewhere.

Six years in Denver. Six years of overnight trauma shifts at a Level 1 center where the worst night of someone's life was a Tuesday for me. Gunshot wounds, car wrecks, a woman who fell three stories off a fire escape and asked me to call her cat sitter before she passed out. Good work. Necessary work. The kind that empties you out so slowly you don't notice until you're standing in your apartment at 7 AM with blood under your fingernails and nothing in the fridge and no one to call.

Bear Creek Valley wasn't a retreat. It was a correction.

The clinic took shape faster than expected. Doc Winters handed me overflow patients before my license transfer paperwork cleared. Mabel sent every person over sixty to my door with a casserole as an entry fee. By week three, folks stopped calling me "Ben's little sister" and started calling me "the nurse practitioner at the clinic on Elm." Progress.