Page 7 of Rangers Mountain Rescue
Havoc
Her voice is calm. Controlled. The kind of calm you get from being the person who always has to keep it together. She’s beautiful. Dark brown hair pulled back from her beautiful face and eyes I could easily drown in, the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.
“I’m Nash Rivers, everyone calls me Havoc,” I say.
She blinks.
Then smiles a little.
“Thank you for taking care of Buddy the other day,” she says. “Dylan wouldn’t stop talking about how nice you were to him.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say.
Buddy sits on my foot.
She notices.
Her mouth twitches.
“Of course,” she says.
Dylan crouches and hugs the dog. “I tried to keep him inside,” he says. “But Grandpa forgot and left the back door open again.”
That lands.
Not hard.
Just… heavy.
Aspen sighs and looks at me. “He didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” I say.
And I do.
She hesitates, then says, “My husband's grandpa has dementia.”
“I’ve been taking care of him.”
No drama.
No fishing for sympathy.
Just a fact.
“It’s not… safe for him to be alone,” she adds quickly. “Not usually. But he forgets things. The stove. The doors. Sometimes, where he is. Lately, he’s had a hard time sleeping. I have an appointment with the doctor tomorrow. Hopefully, they can give him medicine that will slow down his progression.”
She rubs her face. “His neighbor called me a month ago. Said he hadn’t seen him outside in days, and when he did see him, he looked thin. Confused.”
Dylan stares at the ground.
“So we moved in,” she says. “I’m a nurse. I thought I could handle it.”
She lets out a quiet laugh. “Turns out knowing what to do and having time to do it are two different things.”
That… I understand.
Buddy chooses that moment to walk back to me and sit.
