“Someone special?” Presley asked lightly.

“No. You?”

“No, no one. No one special.”

“I told you who I’m waiting for. What are you waiting for?”

Presley’s immediate instinct was to say nothing. She had no aspirations for marriage or family. As she started to form the words, she caught herself. Was that really true? When she thought of her family, she was certain that wasn’t what she wanted. Her parents were well-matched. They enjoyed entertaining, enjoyed seeing and being seen, but she couldn’t remember witnessing a hint of passion or even intimate companionship. They shared a love of power and success and money. She enjoyed those things too, but more as personal satisfaction, not what she wanted to cement a relationship with. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m waiting for, looking for, anything. Some people just aren’t meant for serious relationships.”

“Not sure I believe that.” Harper turned down a narrow dirt road, the headlights illuminating trees and the occasional bright eyes of animals by the side of the road. “Sometimes I think people who say they prefer to be alone are just afraid to be with someone else.”

Presley fisted her hands. “That’s a rather arrogant thing to say.”

“Is it?” Harper stopped in front of a big, white, two-story rambling farmhouse like so many of the others they passed everywhere, with a larger barn, a cluster of outbuildings, a truck in the yard, and other signs of a working farm. “You’re probably right. Even so, I think it would be a loss to someone if you decided you really would prefer to be alone.”

Heat stirred in Presley’s depths. “And I think your Ms. Right will be very lucky.”

Chapter Eighteen

A light burned over the front door, outlining the Reynolds house against the inky sky. The farmhouse was smaller than the White place, a long porch with a metal roof and a white railing with a few missing spindles running along the entire front. Symmetrical windows on either side of the door were echoed by matching ones on the second floor. A soft light glowed in one upstairs window. Before Presley and Harper reached the worn wooden steps, a man came through the screen door, the hinges creaking loudly in the still air. He didn’t bother to hold it, and it slammed behind him. He wore brown canvas work pants and a faded red T-shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders and small paunch. He looked to be about forty, but in the dim light, his age was difficult to tell. Like so many of the men Presley had seen around town, his wide jaw was whiskered and his face lined and weathered. His thick dark hair, cut close, still held the circular indentations of a farm cap. His forearms were ropy with muscle, and his hands large. He pushed his hands into his pants pockets, his movements jerky and uneasy.

“I’m real glad you could make it, Doc,” he said as Presley and Harper reached the porch. His deep voice was as scratchy as a day-old beard.

“No problem, Don.”

Harper held out one hand in greeting. In the other she carried a large black leather satchel, something Presley had not seen in almost a decade of visiting hospitals and doctors’ offices. Harper L. Rivers, M.D. was embossed on the side in inch-high gold letters. The leather was worn at the corners and scraped in places on the sides where she imagined Harper had pushed it into the compartment behind the seat of her truck and set it on the floor in dozens of houses such as this. Harper looked completely natural, completely right, carrying that bag into this worn and faintly tired-looking house. Presley was the one who felt out of place.

Was it possible she had stepped back fifty years when she’d gotten off the airplane? That seemed like a long time ago now. And if that was true, did she really want to go back?

Presley shook the whimsy aside as Harper motioned to her and said, “Don, this is Presley Worth. She’s from the hospital.”

“Ma’am.”

“Good to meet you, Mr. Reynolds,” Presley said.

Don Reynolds focused on Harper again and pulled open the screen door. “He’s upstairs in bed. Emmy is with him.”

“What about Darla? Is she sick?” Harper asked as they followed Don Reynolds into his house.

“Not as near as we can tell. She’s eating fine and doesn’t have a fever. Emmy took her temperature.”

“That’s good. What about the two of you? Noticed anything out of the ordinary lately? Been any place new—eaten out at an unfamiliar spot?”

He laughed harshly. “Not hardly. Haven’t been off the farm to speak of all spring and with money tight…”

“Jimmy’s school friends? Any of them sick that you know of?”

“We didn’t ask him.” Don Reynolds’s voice held a hopeful note, as if Jimmy sharing an illness with other kids must mean it couldn’t be very serious.

“Well, we’ll take a look at him and see,” Harper said.

The foyer was more a hall barely big enough for a coatrack on the wall and a small table where a pile of mail sat unopened. Rooms on either side looked well lived in, with big sofas and end tables holding empty drink glasses and a scatter of magazines. A wooden staircase, not as wide or elaborate as that in the White place, led to the second floor.

They trooped upstairs and down the narrow hall to a room where an open door emitted a slanting square of pale yellow light onto the bare wood floor. Presley hung back a little, letting Harper enter first with Don Reynolds. She stopped just inside the door. The room was small with a single window and a dresser connected to a desk piled with the things boys played with: a baseball glove, a motorized truck of some kind, a stack of books. The wall held a few posters from movies Presley didn’t recognize.

A woman in a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and purple rubber flip-flops sat on a straight-backed chair by the side of the single bed. Her dark wavy hair was caught back in a yellow scrunchie. She looked eighteen, but Presley knew if she’d gone to school with Harper she was at least ten years older. A gold wedding band glinted on her left hand, the same hand that was currently stroking the hair of a pale-looking boy with frightened eyes. Harper had said he was eleven, but his thin body and wan expression made him look eight.

“Hi, Emmy.” Harper introduced Presley as she had before, and the boy’s mother nodded, though Presley didn’t think she actually paid any attention to anything other than her son.

“Glad you’re here, Harper,” Emmy said in a monotone.

Presley remembered the eerie wail of the mother in the ER, and sweat broke out on her arms. Such misery. Was this Harper’s life?

“Can I sit where you are, Emmy?” Harper said. “You can sit on the bed on the other side with him if you like.”

Wordlessly, Emmy Reynolds went around the end of the narrow bed and gently sat next to her son, her hand going back to his hair. Don Reynolds leaned against a spot next to the window, his hands back in his pockets again as if he didn’t know what to do with them.

Harper turned the chair until it faced the bed and sat, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She’d put her bag on the floor next to her but hadn’t moved to open it yet. “I’m Dr. Rivers. How you doing, Jimmy?”

“Okay.” The boy’s voice was weak and whispery. He glanced at his mother anxiously.

“It’s okay, baby, the doctor is here to make you better.”

Harper’s calm expression never changed. “Your dad tells me you haven’t been eating much the last few days. Not hungry?”

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“Does your stomach hurt?”

The boy shook his head.

“What about the rest of you? Does anything else hurt?”

“My head a little bit,” he said shyly. “It just feels funny.”

“Funny like dizzy?”

The boy shrugged. “I guess.”

“Okay, then. I’ll just take a look at you and listen to your heart and your lungs and your belly.”

The boy’s brows drew down. “Why are you gonna listen to my belly?”

Harper smiled and reached down with one hand to unclasp her bag, the motion automatic and practiced. Still gazing at Jimmy, she came up with a stethoscope that she put in her ears. “You know the sound it makes when you’re hungry, right? Well, I’m going to listen to see if maybe you’re hungry and didn’t notice.”

He grinned. “Okay.”

Harper pulled down the sheets to just below his navel and moved her stethoscope over his chest and abdomen, right side, left side, all the way down to the top of his Spider-Man pj’s. When she was done, she swung the stethoscope around her neck and put her hand on his belly. “I’m going to press and you tell me if it hurts. If it does, I’ll stop right away, okay?”

He nodded. Her touch appeared sure and gentle as she examined his upper abdomen and then lower down. At one point he told her it felt funny.

“Funny, like hurt?” Harper asked.

He shook his head. “Just funny. Like…sore, a little.”

“Okay.” She shone a light in his eyes and his throat and felt his neck. When done, she put her stethoscope back in the bag and smiled at him. “You were terrific. I’m going to talk to your mom and dad outside for a few minutes, okay?”

“Sure,” he said and closed his eyes.

Presley stepped aside until Don and Emmy Reynolds filed out into the hall with Harper behind them. She slipped out, and Harper slowly closed the door. Presley’s heart kicked in her chest and she realized her palms were damp. She couldn’t even imagine how the boy’s parents must feel. Harper hadn’t given any indication that anything was wrong, but in that moment, when everything hinged on what Harper was about to say, the hall felt suffocating. Harper had become the center of these people’s world. Presley tried to imagine what that responsibility must feel like, the burden it must be to carry, and the cost it must extract in emotional coin.