Page 58

She could give Sage what she knew. Maybe a little of what she suspected. None of what she kept hidden. The broad strokes.

"Bear tells me absolutely nothing about himself. I've been his “dont-need-a-doctor” for five years and I'm still not sure the man has a medical history. You'd think someone that size would at least have a story about how he got that scar on his jaw."

"The one on the left side?" Sage asked. "I noticed that."

"He told me he got it in a 'work accident.' I said, 'What kind of work?' He said, 'The kind that's classified.' And then he asked me if I had any more lollipops."

Sage's mouth twitched. “Ha...dummy.”

"The man is a vault." Rowan set the chart down and turned back, pulling a fresh pair of gloves on with the practiced snap that was as much ritual as function. "From what I've been able to piece together over five years of dedicated detective work — and believe me, getting information out of Cal Meridian is harder than getting a toddler to sit still for a blood draw — he was born and grew up here. His dad died young and his mother got sick when he was twelve. He was her only help — a kid, basically raising himself and caring for a dying woman. He chopped wood to keep the trailer warm. She died on a cold night and he was alone after that."

“Holy shit,” Sage whispered, her voice suddenly trembling.

“Yeah. He lived mostly alone for the next five years. Mary Sue Ellen made sure he was fed and I think made sure he had basic necessities. He was so big by then already that most people treated him very differently.”

“Well, people are fucking assholes,” Sage said as Rowan continued hiding a smile. “At seventeen he saved a girl from being raped by four men. She was in a rough spot and was trying to make extra money and it turned bad. Apparently Cal heard her screaming on his way back from doing work for some of the ranchers and immediately jumped into help.”

She felt sage freeze. “He…he saved her? At seventeen?” Rowan immediately noticed water gathering in Sage's eyes. There was something more here. She was beginning to suspect what it was. Rowan's hands moved to the left lower quadrant. Normal. No masses, no tenderness. “Yeah…but at that point Cal was…big. He put three of them into intensive care and one of them into the morgue,” Rowan said keeping her voice neutral though perhaps some emotions slipped through because Sage looked at her for a moment, wiping her eyes and nodding as if to say yeah… me too.

“For various reasons, the town elders wanted to make an example of him, and the girl was painted as being a whore. It was only through Mary Sue Ellen's intervention that he was given the option to go to the Navy, which he took. A year later he was in special forces training. Made it through the selection program, the one with the insane dropout rate. Something like eighty percent dropped out. Cal didn't."

"Of course he didn't," Sage muttered, and Rowan caught the tone — exasperated, affectionate, something beneath both that the girl probably didn't recognize yet.

Rowan smiled, and then looked at Sage and calmly said "Sage, I need to do the pelvic exam now. I'll explain everything I'm doing before I do it. You set the pace."

The shift came back — the stillness, the careful quality of a body preparing for something it had learned to endure.

But Sage nodded.

And her jaw was set in a way that Rowan read not as fear but as determination. The stubbornness of someone who had decided to get through this because getting through things was what she did.

“Can you—" Sage started, then stopped. Paused. Started again. "Can you keep talking? About Cal. While you—" She gestured vaguely at the stirrups. "It's easier if I'm thinking about something else."

Rowan's heart broke — clean, precise, along a fault line that had been waiting as she heard what was underneath Sage’s words.

"Of course," she said.

Rowan continued. "Special forces and the CIA for almost twenty years. Which is the part nobody really knows about, and honestly? I'm not sure anyone's supposed to. Betty told me once that Sheriff Tate tried to run a background check on Cal when he first moved back here and it came back so redacted it looked like a crossword puzzle."

“Wow,” Sage said, shifting into position. Her voice was almost steady.

She felt Sage's body tense under the exam — a brief, involuntary tightening that had nothing to do with cold instruments and everything to do with memory — before she consciously relaxed. The discipline of it. The practiced, terrible discipline of a body that had learned to override its own responses.

"Something happened to him," Rowan said as she continued, and her voice shifted — not dramatically, just a degree, the temperature dropping slightly toward something more real. "Before he came home. Something in the CIA, near the end. Nobody knows what. He doesn't talk about it and nobody asks, because this town understands that some things live in the dark and stay there."

"He's wealthy, isn't he," Sage said, her voice tense, her reaction to the exam.

Rowan shrugged. “ I’m fairly certain he's the reason this clinic has an ultrasound machine that costs more than my car or a MRI machine that should be in a hospital. But if you ask him, he'll tell you it was a grant from the county health board, and the county health board will back him up because they're either afraid of him or in love with him."

Rowan paused. Her voice took on a different tone. "It's probably both."

Sage looked at her. Really looked — her eyes searching.

"You like him," Sage said finally.

Rowan's hands stopped moving. One beat. A fraction of a second — a gap in the practiced efficiency that she filled immediately, seamlessly, the way a surgeon closed a bleeder, fast and clean and as if it had never been open.

"You're doing great," Rowan said. Her voice was warm. Her voice was professional. Her voice was doing the work of holding the room together while something inside her burned. "Almost done. Deep breath for me."