He came back on Saturday.
I'd told myself he wouldn't. I'd told myself I didn't care whether he did. I'd told myself so many things in the two days since the coffeepot that I'd started to lose track of which ones I believed.
But at 12:15 on Saturday, the bell rang, and there he was in the doorway in the same navy work shirt, a little cleaner this time, no grease on his jaw. He looked down the counter. He found me. He smiled that slow, lopsided smile.
"Eva," he said. "You armed?"
"Only with pie," I said, before I could stop myself.
His eyebrows went up. Sari, behind me, made a noise like a teakettle.
"Then I surrender," Kade said, and sat down on the same stool as before.
* * *
It was easy. That was the strange thing. It was so easy to talk to him that it frightened me.
He ordered the patty melt again, and the huckleberry pie, and he asked me questions while he ate. Not hard ones. Small ones. How long had I been in Kalispell?
("About a month." "What do you think?" "I think there are too many kinds of cereal." He laughed so hard he choked on a fry.) Did I like working at the Antler? ("I love it. Clay is the kindest man I've ever met." "Clay's a softie. Don't tell him I said that.") What did I do for fun?
That one stopped me.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "I haven't really had any. Before."
He looked at me over his coffee. That careful look again. "That's a crime," he said. "Somebody should fix that."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I refilled his water, even though it was full.
He was reading the same battered paperback. I finally got a look at the cover when he set it face-down on the counter: something old, the title in faded gold letters. Meditations. A Roman emperor's private notes to himself, written almost two thousand years ago.
"You're reading Marcus Aurelius," I said. "At a diner counter."
He looked surprised. "You know it?"
I'd known Marcus Aurelius. Not personally. But I'd been around for his whole life, and I'd watched a Healer I knew mend a plague-sore on his arm, once, by order of the Writ. "A little," I said.
"Most people think I'm reading a car manual." He tapped the cover. "He's got this idea. That everything's connected. That whatever happens to you was always going to happen, because of everything else that happened before. And the only thing you actually get to choose is what you do next." He shrugged, a little self-conscious. "It's a good book to read when your dad dies and you inherit a garage you never wanted."
"I'm sorry," I said quietly. "About your dad."
"Yeah." He turned his mug in a slow circle on the counter. "Me too."
I wanted to touch his hand. I didn't. I kept my hands folded under my apron, where they couldn't do anything.
* * *
That was when the bell rang again, sharp, and a woman pushed in out of breath.
She was maybe forty, in yoga pants and a fleece jacket, her car keys in one hand and her phone in the other. "I'm so sorry," she said to the room in general. "Does anybody know anything about cars? Mine won't start, it's right out front, and my kid's got a game in twenty minutes in Whitefish, and I've called my husband three times—"
Kade was already off his stool.
"What's it doing?" he asked.
"Nothing! It's not doing anything! It just makes this sound, like—" She made a sound like a sick bird.
"Clicking?" he asked.
"Yes!" she said.
"Probably your battery." He was already heading for the door. He grabbed a heavy red toolbox out of the bed of his truck, parked across the street. "Pop the hood. Let's take a look." This story is hosted at novelping . com.
The bell rang behind him. Through the big front window, I watched him cross back to her car, a silver SUV parked right at the curb in front of the diner. She fumbled under the dash, and the hood released, and he propped it up and leaned in.
A source detail worth noting: the chapter on NovelPhoenix.com was copied without the author's consent.
"Told you," Sari breathed beside me. "Told you he's a good one."
I didn't answer. I couldn't stop watching.
He worked quickly and calmly, with an economy of movement that I recognized, somehow, from the Hall. It was the way Ithra worked when she was mending something. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Just a quiet certainty that everything had a place where it was supposed to be. He pulled a wire brush out of the toolbox and scrubbed at something in the engine, white powder flaking off. He tightened something with a wrench. He said something to the woman, and she laughed, nervously, and climbed into the driver's seat, and turned the key.
The engine caught on the first try.
Through the glass, I watched her throw her arms up. I watched her lean out the window and try to hand him money, and him wave it away. I watched him close the hood and slap it twice, gently, like you'd pat a horse.
She pulled away from the curb, waving.
Kade crouched down on the pavement where her car had been, his back to the street, packing his tools into the red box. Brush. Wrench. A rag he'd wiped his hands on.
And a big dark pickup came around the corner off Main too fast, its driver's head bent over something in his lap, and swung into the empty parking space at the curb without slowing down.
I think I screamed. Sari told me later that I did. I don't remember. I remember the sound. A short screech of brakes, too late and not nearly hard enough, and then a thud, heavy and wet.
And Kade wasn't by the curb anymore.
* * *
I was out the door before anyone else in the diner had moved. I don't remember opening it. I remember the bell, jangling wildly, and then I was on my knees on the wet pavement.
The pickup's driver was stumbling out of the cab, white-faced, his phone still in his hand. He was saying "Oh God oh God oh God" over and over. Someone across the street was shouting. A car horn was blaring.
Kade was lying on his side on the pavement a few feet past the pickup's bumper, the red toolbox overturned, wrenches scattered. His eyes were half open. There was blood coming from his mouth.
I got my arms under his shoulders and pulled him into my lap, the way the mother had held her son in that beige room. His head fell back against my arm. He was heavy and warm and wrong. His legs lay at angles legs should never lie at.
And I could feel it. All of it.
Every Healer's sense I had came roaring back at once, like a light switched on in a dark room. His pelvis, shattered. Something deep inside torn open, the big vessel that runs down through the center of a body, bleeding fast into places blood should never go. His spleen. A lung collapsing. His heart racing, racing, trying to keep up with all the blood it was losing and failing.
Minutes. He had minutes. The ambulance was somewhere across town, sirens just beginning to rise in the distance. It would never make it in time.
"Hey," he said.
His voice was barely there. A breath. His eyes had found mine. Gray, with green caught in it. A river under clouds.
"Hey," he whispered again. "Coffee girl."
The corner of his mouth tilted up.
I'm done, I'd told Aurelle. I swear. I won't heal anyone again.
I thought about Gary Pell, driving home with the windows down. I thought about the woman in the minivan, and her children. I thought about Ray in the alley, and Christine Harlan's red geraniums.
I thought about the beige room. The mother's scream.
I thought: He was helping someone. He'd gotten up from a good lunch and a good book to help a stranger whose car wouldn't start, and he'd refused her money, and he'd patted the hood like a horse. This was what he'd gotten for it.
Feel where it wants to be whole, Ithra had said, a thousand years ago, with a sparrow in my hands.
Then let it.
I put my palms flat against his chest, and I let go.
* * *
It didn't come as warmth this time. It came as a flood.
Everything I had, all of it at once. More than I had given Manny, more than Gary, more than Ray. I poured it into him like water into a cracked cup and felt it rush to all the broken places. The great torn vessel first. Then the bleeding. Then the lung. I felt the edges of the tear find each other and begin, slowly, to hold. I felt his heart stumble, and stutter, and then, all at once, steady.
Not instant. It never is. A body takes the time it takes.
But it would be enough.
Around me the world came back in pieces. The driver of the pickup sitting on the curb with his head in his hands. A crowd on the sidewalk. Somebody's phone filming. Sari kneeling beside me, saying my name, pressing a dish towel into my hands. "Pressure, Eva, put pressure on it, my mom says pressure—"
I pressed the towel against the place where the blood was. To anyone watching, that was all I was doing. A waitress in a stained apron, kneeling in the street, trying to stop a stranger from bleeding out until the ambulance came.
Kade's eyes were closed now. But he was breathing. Slow and even.
The siren rose to a scream, and the ambulance swung around the corner off Main with its lights spinning red across the old brick storefronts, and the doors flew open, and two people in dark uniforms came running with a stretcher.
The first one was a woman, maybe fifty, solid and brisk, with gray hair pulled back in a tight braid. The other was younger, barely older than Kade, tall and gangly, with a buzz cut and big scared eyes he was trying hard to hide.
"What've we got?" the woman asked.
"Hit by a truck," I heard myself say. "He was crouched down. It didn't stop in time."
"Okay. Okay, honey, we've got him now. You can let go," the woman said.
I didn't want to let go.
I let go.
They moved fast, the way people do when they've done it a thousand times. Collar on his neck. Board under his back. The woman knelt and pressed two fingers to his throat and frowned, and the frown deepened, and she looked at the young one.
"Pressure?" she asked.
He wrapped a cuff around Kade's arm and pumped it and watched the needle. He frowned too.
"That's... huh. That's not bad. That's actually not bad at all," he said.
"Run it again," she said.
He ran it again. "Same."
The woman looked down at Kade. At the blood soaking his shirt, the pavement, my apron, my hands. At his legs, at the angle of them. Then up at me. Her eyes were sharp and gray and very, very puzzled.
"Okay," she said slowly. "Okay. Let's load him."
They lifted him onto the stretcher and rolled him to the ambulance, and the doors slammed, and the siren came on again, and they were gone, howling up Main Street toward the hospital, toward Regional, and I was left kneeling on the wet pavement in a puddle of blood that was cooling fast.
Sari had her arms around me. Clay was there, too, somehow. Someone put a blanket over my shoulders.
I looked down at my hands. They were red to the wrists.
They were also, very faintly, beneath the blood, glowing.
I closed them into fists and held them against my chest, and I didn't let anyone see.