Icebreaker

The heat had broken twice this week, which meant Harper Doyle spent most of Tuesday morning with her arm elbow deep in a golden retriever named Biscuit while the ancient air conditioning unit in the waiting room rattled like it was filing a complaint.

"He ate a sock," said Mrs. Halloran, wringing her hands by the door. "A whole sock, Harper. I don't know how he does it."

"He's a golden retriever, Mrs. Halloran. Eating things that aren't food is basically his job description." Harper kept her voice light while her fingers worked, feeling for the telltale resistance further back. There it was. She eased it forward, slow and steady, and Biscuit made a sound like personal betrayal before the sock came free, soggy and gray and definitely once belonging to someone's husband.

"Oh thank god," Mrs. Halloran said, and Biscuit, freed of his crime, immediately tried to eat the sock again off the exam table.

Harper laughed despite herself, dropped the sock in the trash before the dog could reclaim it, and walked Mrs. Halloran and Biscuit up to the front desk, where her sister Piper was on the phone with someone from the feed store, mouthing the word rent at her with wide, unsubtle eyes.

Harper held up a finger. One thing at a time. She'd learned that from her father, who used to say the animals in front of you always come before the numbers in the back room, and for two years she'd tried to run Doyle Veterinary Clinic on that philosophy alone. It worked fine for the animals. It was murder on the numbers.

She rang up Mrs. Halloran, waved off half the exam fee because the woman was seventy three and lived on a fixed income and Biscuit was, in Harper's professional opinion, an idiot she loved, and then she turned to face whatever Piper had been trying to warn her about.

"The landlord called again," Piper said, setting down the phone. "He says if we're not caught up by the fifteenth he's talking to a broker about the building."

"He's said that before."

"He used the word broker this time. That's new."

Harper rubbed the back of her neck and looked around the waiting room her father had painted a cheerful, faded yellow the year she turned twelve. The couch was held together with duct tape on the underside where nobody could see it. The fish tank in the corner had one fish left, an ancient betta named Grudge that refused to die out of sheer stubbornness, much like the clinic itself.

"I'll call the bank again," Harper said, without much hope. She'd called the bank four times this month. The answer didn't change no matter how many times she asked the question.

"You know what would fix this," Piper said, in the careful tone she used when she was about to say something Harper wasn't going to like.

"Don't."

"I'm just saying, if a certain someone who happens to be worth roughly the GDP of Portugal wandered back into town wanting to throw money at anything, this clinic would be a solid investment."

"He's not coming back to town."

"He's literally coming back to town. That's the whole reason half of Cedar Hollow has been losing their minds since Sunday. His dad died, Harper. Everybody knows Everett Knox flies in for the funeral tomorrow."

Harper's hands went still on the appointment book.

She hadn't let herself think his name in longer than she wanted to admit, not really, not the way you think about a person and not just the shape a person leaves behind. Everett Knox. The boy who used to sneak through her bedroom window with two hot chocolates from the gas station because the diner closed too early. The boy who promised her, standing on the frozen edge of Miller's Pond the night before he left for the combine, that he was going to make it and come back for her the second he did.

The boy who then didn't write. Not once. Not a letter, not a call, not so much as a postcard from whatever glittering city he landed in first.

"I know that face," Piper said. "That's your I'm-fine face. You only make that face about two things and one of them is taxes."

"I have a full afternoon," Harper said, which was true and also not an answer.

She got through three more appointments, a cat with an ear infection and two dogs due for shots, and she was elbow deep in paperwork by four when the bell over the front door chimed and the whole waiting room seemed to hold its breath at once.

She knew before she looked up. She knew from the way the temperature in the room seemed to change, the way Piper went very quiet at the desk, the way old Mr. Alvarez waiting with his cat actually put down his phone.

Everett Knox stood in the doorway of her father's clinic wearing a black suit that fit him like it had been made specifically for the width of his shoulders, which it probably had, and looking exactly like every photograph Harper had spent a decade pretending not to search for online. Taller than she remembered. Harder in the jaw. The same eyes, though. Still that same gray blue that used to watch her like she was the only interesting thing in a town full of not much.

"Harper," he said, and his voice did something to the air in the room that had no business happening after ten years.

She set down her pen very carefully, because her hands had started shaking and she'd be damned if he saw that.

"Everett," she said. "I heard about your dad. I'm sorry."

Something flickered across his face, gone before she could name it. "Thank you." He glanced around the waiting room, at the duct taped couch and the one fish still swimming in circles and the faded paint, and something in his expression softened in a way that made her chest hurt. "Place looks the same."

"Things don't change much here." She heard how flat it came out and didn't fix it.

He nodded slowly, and for a second neither of them said anything, and the silence stretched long enough that Piper actually cleared her throat from behind the desk.

"I need to ask you something," Everett said finally. "It's about the rink."

"The rink," Harper repeated.

"My father's company owns the land. Owned. I own it now, I guess, along with everything else nobody wanted to tell me I was inheriting." A short, humorless laugh. "The town's been trying to buy it off him for two years so they can put up a self storage place. I'm not going to let that happen. I want to fix it up instead. Turn it back into what it was."

Harper thought of every afternoon of her childhood spent on that ice, the two of them the last ones off it every single night until the Zamboni driver kicked them out. She thought of the promise he'd made her standing on frozen water and never once kept.

"And you need me for that because?"

"Because everyone in this town still trusts you," he said, quiet now, all the polish gone out of his voice. "And they haven't trusted a single thing with my name on it in ten years. I need someone the town believes. I need you."

Harper opened her mouth to say no, already forming the shape of the word, when the bell over the door chimed again and a man in a suit even sharper than Everett's stepped in, phone pressed to his ear, saying something about a press statement and a two o'clock call tomorrow.

"Ev, we've got to go, your mother's asking about the seating chart," the man said, then blinked at Harper like he'd just noticed there was a person standing there. "Sorry. Roman. I keep him on schedule," he added, jerking a thumb at Everett, "which is currently failing."

Everett didn't look away from Harper. "Think about it," he said. "That's all I'm asking."

He left the way he'd come, trailing cold outside air and the particular hush that follows famous people out of small rooms, and Harper stood there in the middle of her father's fading yellow waiting room with her heart going like she'd just run somewhere.

"Harper," Piper said carefully, "your hands are still shaking."

"I noticed," Harper said, and did not sit down, because if she sat down she thought she might not get back up.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Unknown number, local area code. She almost didn't answer it, except something made her pick it up on the second ring.

"Ms. Doyle? This is Cedar Hollow National, calling about your business loan." A pause, the sound of papers shuffling. "I'm afraid the extension request has been denied. Per your agreement, the balance is due in full by the fifteenth of next month, or we'll be required to move forward with the property."

Harper closed her eyes.

Outside the window, a black SUV pulled away from the curb, and for one long, terrible, traitorous second, she found herself wondering exactly how she was going to find him again.