Usually she didn’t mind the quiet or the solitude, this sense in the still hours of the night that she was the only one around. Even when she was on her way to her most difficult patient, she could find enjoyment in these few moments of peace.
Ed Hardy was a cantankerous eighty-year-old man whose kidneys were failing after years of battling diabetes. He wasn’t facing his impending passing with the same dignity or grace as Jo Winder but continued to fight it every step of the way. He was mean-spirited and belligerent, lashing out at anyone who dared remind him he wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old wrangler anymore who could rope and ride with the best of them.
Despite his bitterness, she loved the old coot. She loved all her home-care patients, even the most difficult. She would miss them, even Ed, when she moved away from Pine Gulch in a month.
She sighed as she drove down Main Street with its darkened businesses and the historic Old West lampposts somebody in the chamber of commerce had talked the town into putting up for the tourists a few years ago.
Except for the years she went to nursing school in Boise and those first brief halcyon months after her marriage, she had lived in this small Idaho town in the west shadow of the Tetons her entire life.
She and Scott had never planned to stay here. Their dreams had been much bigger than a rural community like Pine Gulch could hold.
They had married a month after she graduated from nursing school. He had been a first-year med student, excited about helping people, making a difference in the world. They had talked about opening a clinic in some undeveloped country somewhere, about travel and all the rich buffet of possibilities spreading out ahead of them.
But as she said to Quinn Southerland earlier, sometimes life didn’t work out the way one planned. Instead of exotic locales and changing the world, she had brought her husband home to Pine Gulch where she had a support network—friends and family and neighbors who rallied around them.
She pulled into the Hardy driveway, noting the leaves that needed to be raked and the small flower garden that should be put to bed for the winter. Mrs. Hardy had her hands full caring for her husband and his many medical needs. She had a grandson in Idaho Falls who helped a bit with the yard but now that school was back in session, he didn’t come as often as he had in the summer.
Tess turned off her engine, shuffling through her mental calendar to see if she could find time in the next few days to come over with a rake.
Her job had never been only about pain management and end-of-life decisions. At least not to her. She knew what it was like to be on the other side of the equation and how very much it could warm the heart when someone showed up unexpectedly with a smile and a cloth and window spray to wash the winter grime she hadn’t had time to clean off because her life revolved around caretaking someone else.
That experience as the recipient of service had taught her well that her job was to lift the burdens of the families as much as of her patients.
Even hostile, antagonistic family members like Quinn Southerland.
The wind swirled leaves across the Hardys’ cracked driveway as she stepped out of her car. Tess shivered, but she knew it wasn’t at the prospect of winter just around the corner or that wind bare-knuckling its way under her jacket, but from remembering the icy cold blue of Quinn’s eyes.
Though she wasn’t at all eager to encounter him again—or to face the bitter truth of the spoiled brat she had been once—she adored Jo Winder. She couldn’t let Quinn’s forbidding presence distract her from giving Jo the care she deserved.
APPARENTLY PINE GULCH’S time machine was in fine working order.
Quinn walked into The Gulch and was quite certain he had traveled back twenty years to the first time he walked into the café with his new foster parents. He could clearly remember that day, the smell of frying potatoes and meat, the row of round swivel seats at the old-fashioned soda fountain, the craning necks in the place and the hot gazes as people tried to figure out the identity of the surly, scowling dark-haired kid with Jo and Guff.
Not much had changed. From the tin-stamped ceiling to the long, gleaming mirror that ran the length of the soda fountain to the smell of fried food that seemed to send triglycerides shooting through his veins just from walking in the door.
Even the faces were the same. He could swear the same old-timers still sat in the booth in the corner being served by Donna Archuleta, whose husband, Lou, had always manned the kitchen with great skill and joy. He recognized Mick Malone, Jesse Redbear and Sal Martinez.
And, of course, Donna. She stood by the booth with a pot of coffee in her hand but she just about dropped it all over the floor when she looked up at the sound of the jangling bells on the door to spy him walking into her café.
“Quinn Southerland,” she exclaimed, her smoker-husky voice delighted. “As I live and breathe.”
“Hey, Donna.”
One of Jo’s closest friends, Donna had always gone out of her way to be kind to him and to Brant and Cisco. They hadn’t always made it easy. The three of them had been the town’s resident bad boys back in the day. Well, maybe not Brant, he acknowledged, but he was usually guilty by association, if nothing else.
“I didn’t know you were back in town.” Donna set the pot down in an empty booth to fold her scrawny arms around him. He hugged her back, wondering when she had gotten frail like Jo.
“Just came in yesterday,” he said.
“Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me?”
He opened his mouth to answer but she cut him off.
“Oh, no. Jo. Is she...” Her voice trailed off but he could see the anxiety suddenly brim in her eyes, as if she dreaded his response.
He shook his head and forced a smile. “She woke up this morning feistier than ever, craving one of Lou’s sweet rolls. Nothing else will do, she told me in no uncertain terms, so she sent me down here first thing so I could pick one up and take it back for her. Since according to East, she hasn’t been hungry for much of anything else, I figured I had better hurry right in and grab her one.”
Donna’s lined and worn features brightened like a gorgeous June morning breaking over the mountains. “You’re in luck, hon. I think he’s just pullin’ a new batch out of the oven. You wait right here and have yourself some coffee while I go back and wrap a half-dozen up for her.”
Before he could say a word, she turned a cup over from the setting in the booth and poured him a cup. He laughed at this further evidence that not much had changed, around The Gulch at least.
“I think one, maybe two sweet rolls, are probably enough. Like I said, she hasn’t had much of an appetite.”
“Well, this way she can warm another up later or save one for the morning, and there will be extras for you and Easton. Now don’t you argue with me. I’m doing this, so just sit down and drink your coffee, there’s a good boy.”
He had to smile in the face of such determination, such eagerness to do something nice for someone she cared about. There were few things he missed about living in Pine Gulch, but that sense of community, belonging to something bigger than yourself, was definitely one of them.
He took a seat at the long bar, joining a few other solo customers who eyed him with curiosity.
Again, he had the strange sense of stepping back into his past. He could still see the small chip in the bottom corner of the mirror where he and Cisco had been roughhousing and accidentally sent a salt shaker flying.
That long-ago afternoon was as clear as his flight in from Japan the day before—the