"Alphabetically." Ben steps back to let me in. His house smells like roasted chicken and garlic bread, which means he called Mabel for the recipe again. "I didn't even know I had that many spices."
The hallway opens to the living room, which opens to the kitchen. Reid is standing at the counter with his back to me, slicing tomatoes for a salad. Knife in his right hand, left hand braced on the cutting board. Sleeves of his gray Henley pushed up past his forearms. The silver in his hair catches the overhead light.
Six foot three. Two hundred and thirty pounds. Shoulders so wide he blocks half the kitchen from view. And he's making a salad in my brother's house with a knife he probably sharpened himself because Ben's knives are always dull.
He turns when my boots hit the kitchen tile.
For one full second, his eyes drop. From my face to my bare shoulder to my hips to my boots and back up. Fast. Controlled. A scan, if you're being generous. An inventory, if you're being honest.
"Mira."
"Reid." My voice is steadier than my pulse. "Nice salad."
"Your brother's knives need work."
"Everything in this house needs work."
"Hey," Ben calls from the living room. "I can hear you."
Reid's mouth twitches. The closest he gets to a smile. Something catches in my chest at the sight of it, because I've been collecting his almost-smiles for twelve years, and they're rare enough to be valuable.
"Sit down," Ben says, carrying a dish to the table. "Food's ready. Nobody comment on the bread."
The table seats four. Ben takes the head. Reid pulls out the chair to Ben's right and sits. I take the one next to Reid. Our knees almost touch under the table. His thigh is right there, inches from mine, and the heat coming off him makes the September evening irrelevant.
He doesn't move away.
Dinner starts safe. Ben talks about the road crew, a culvert that collapsed on Highway 6, the new plow blade he ordered from a catalog that turned out to be for a different truck model. Reid listens, nods, offers one-sentence observations that prove he's paying attention even when he looks half-asleep.
Then Ben, who has the subtlety of a falling boulder, excuses himself to take a phone call that is almost certainly fake and disappears into the living room.
Reid's jaw tightens. He knows what Ben just did.
"So." My fork rests on my plate. "Are we gonna sit here in silence, or are you going to talk to me?"
He looks at me. Full on, no deflection, no studying his fork. Those brown eyes with the gold flecks. Up close, there's a scar through his left eyebrow I've never noticed before. Thin. White. Old.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything. But we can start small." My hands are calm on the table. All those years of holding steady while patients bled is finally paying off in a useful social context. "Why'd you come home?"
"My body quit."
"That's the headline. What's underneath it?"
His hand wraps around his water glass. Big hands. Scarred across the knuckles. "I was in a hospital in Germany for six weeks after the last deployment. Blew out the knee for the third time. Shrapnel in my ribs from something I can't talk about. The doc said I could keep going and be in a wheelchair by fifty, or I could stop and have a life." He pauses. "She used that word. Life. As if I'd been doing something else for twenty years."
"Had you?"
"Probably."
My chest aches. Not pity. Recognition. Six years of trauma shifts, and the day I quit, my supervising physician said, "You can keep going until you have nothing left, or you can go find out what you saved all that empathy for." Same conversation. Different uniform.
"I came back for the same reason," I say. Quiet. "Not just Dad. Denver was eating me alive, and I was letting it because the work felt important enough to justify the emptiness. Then Dad got sick, and I drove home, and the mountains were still here, and Mabel still made biscuits, and I couldn't remember why I left."
Reid is watching me. Really watching, the way he watched the perimeter on Wednesday morning. Full attention. Scanning for threats, except the threat is a woman in a cream sweater sitting close enough to touch.
"You're good at what you do," he says. "Kyle's ribs. You handled that faster than any medic I've worked with."
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