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“Definitely the responsible adult answer I was hoping for,” Harry said. He planted his hand between his significantly bigger little brother’s shoulder blades to usher him out of the vineyard.
They were quiet in the truck for most of the drive, untilDuncan said, “Harry. I know you’ve had a hard time. I can’t pretend to know what you’ve gone through. But there comes a point where you gotta shit or get out of the kitchen, you know?”
“You just managed to mess up two idioms.” Harry glanced over at him.
“You know I don’t give a fuck, right?”
They laughed.
Harry helped Duncan check into the emergency department at the little hospital in Linden. The scent and sound and bustle of the place hit him like a baseball bat in the mouth. This time, though, a part of him reveled in the pain. He stood up to it, bared his teeth at it, and fed on it.
When Duncan proudly told the silver-haired triage nurse that Harry was a doctor, she smiled and commented on how well her job had already been done. “Almost as good a job as I’d have done,” she’d said with an indulgent wink. “We’ll get you in with a doctor as soon as we can.”
In the waiting room, Harry looked down at his callused hands. Some of Duncan’s dried blood was smeared across the underside of his wrist. For the first time in over a year, the notion of being a practicing physician again didn’t fill him with existential dread. His heartbeat had already returned to normal, but his blood sugar had plummeted in the wake of the adrenaline rush. Soon, his hands would start to shake. But rather than feeling like he needed to throw up, he felt like he really needed a sandwich and a beer.
Progress.
Harry’s phone buzzed in his back pocket. Heat rushed to his head as he pulled it out, anticipating a reply—finally—from Rowan.
Instead, Sinclair’s cheerful face smiled back at him from their text conversation, her brown cheeks rosy and deeply dimpled. In her profile photo, she wore a hospital scrub cap covered in colorful cartoon doughnuts.
Annie Moorhouse is expecting triplets. Remember her?
Harry smiled despite his disappointment that the text wasn’t from Rowan. Annie Moorhouse had been one of his first patients. He’d delivered her first son just shy of sixteen months ago. He kept his reply noncommittal:
That’s going to mean a lot of diapers.
Sinclair replied:
Great patient to add to your case list, HB.
Harry texted back:
No point in building a case list if I can’t pass the qualifying exam
Sinclair replied with a single thumbs-down emoji.
Harry swiped over to the open text message with Rowan. In the photo he’d saved with her number, her freckles had deepened with summer sunshine, and she wore a white V-neck T-shirt with a prickly little cartoon cactus on it. The cactus saidFREE HUGS. What a perfect metaphor forher.
There were three animated dots next to Rowan’s name in the text conversation, indicating she was typing something. They’d been there for two days. Harry sighed and returned the phone to his back pocket.
“What happened to not trying to influence my decision?”
“You did this on purpose to get out of work, didn’t you?” Harry said to Duncan.
Duncan looked at him sideways. “Fuck, man. I’d never intentionally compromise the integrity of my wank hand.”
Harry shook his head and laughed. Something shifted in him then, a solid shove against a rusted-shut hinge.
It felt good.
He knew what he had to do, though. That part hurt like hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Rowan
It was late afternoon when Rowan got back to the valley. She’d taken a cab from the airport, so nobody knew yet she’d returned. Anxiety crackled in her brain like a poorly tuned radio, and the center of her chest felt heavy, inflexible. She sat on the edge of the bed in her bright little bedroom with her overstuffed laptop bag still strapped to her back, staring at the wall. For most of her week away, she’d barely slept—the hotel rooms were too quiet, too sterile. Lying in those huge, faintly bleach-scented beds without Harry’s body to anchor her felt like being adrift in a cold ocean, or free-falling through space.
