1. Haverston
By seven in the morning, Alanna Voss had already misplaced her coffee filters, bruised her hip on a box labeled KITCHEN with IMPORTANT scribbled out in black marker, and discovered that her new house made a sound like an old woman coughing every time the wind pushed against the back door.
She stood barefoot in the middle of the narrow kitchen with her hair coming loose from a braid she had slept in, holding the empty filter basket in one hand and her crumbling life in the other, or so it was starting to feel like.
“No filters,” she huffed it to the silent room. “Amazing. Wonderful. A bold new chapter in which I simply perish from lack of caffeine.”
The house didn’t seem to have a ready reply, minus that damn door thwacking.
That was fine. She blew out a deep breath and told herself that, wincing when, again, the screen clacked against the doorframe.
It was a small rental on the east side of Haverston, South Dakota, with peeling white trim, a porch that dipped on the left corner, and wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom that featured ducks in little blue bows. Alanna hadn’t asked questions about the ducks. She had signed the lease, paid the deposit, prayed over the remaining balance in her checking account, and decided that a person could learn to live with almost anything if the rent was low enough.
Besides, it had three bedrooms.
That was the part she kept saying in her head like a blessing.
Three bedrooms. One for her. One for Derek. One for storage until she could afford storage. Or until she unpacked. Or until the boxes achieved sentience and killed her in her sleep, which at this point felt like a valid conclusion to their moving process.
She set the useless coffee basket aside, dragged both hands over her face, and for a long moment strained to listen for any betraying sounds from upstairs.
Blessedly, the house was quiet.
Derek was still asleep—thank God.
He needed the sleep. He needed normal mornings. He needed clean sheets, a locked door, a school district that didn’t know his name yet, and a town where no one looked at him and immediately saw orange uniforms, court dates, and the word ‘delinquent’ stamped across his face.
He needed a sister who knew what the hell she was doing.
Alanna gave the kitchen a flat look.
“Bad news for all of us, then.”
She had meant it as a joke. Kinda. But the words sat there after she said them, thin and ugly in the early light.
The whole house smelled like cardboard, dust, and the cheap lemon cleaner she had used too much of the night before. Morning light streamed through the small window over the sink in a pale wash, touching the unopened boxes, the scuffed linoleum, the single frying pan on the stove.
Her mother would have had coffee already.
Sarah Voss had possessed the supernatural ability to find coffee filters in any house, any hotel room, any church basement, any emergency. She could walk into a kitchen she had never seen before, open three wrong drawers, curse softly, and somehow produce a functioning breakfast out of two eggs, stale bread, and whatever tired vegetable had come to die in the crisper.
Alanna had inherited her mother’s green eyes, her stubborn chin, and none of her calm demeanor.
She missed that calm most in the mornings.
At night, grief could be dramatic. It could put on its black dress and sweep through a room, wailing and obvious. In the morning, it was crueler. It showed up in little practical failures. No coffee. No one to call. No mother standing in a robe at the stove saying, Honey, breathe. You’re doing fine.
Sarah had been dead for five years.
Sometimes, Alanna still waited for her to call.
She turned away from the sink before the thought could become anything wetter or more inconvenient. God knew crying before seven seemed ambitious, even for her.
The coffee problem could be solved later. Caffeine wasn’t technically required for human survival. It only felt that way to people who had driven through three states in an aging Toyota Corolla with a teenager, a dying radiator, and a U-Haul trailer that seemed personally offended by every dip in the road.
She found her boots by the back door, tugged them on, and climbed the stairs as quietly as she could.
Derek’s door was closed.
She paused outside it because she always paused outside it now.
When he was little, he had slept with his door cracked open. He had been afraid of the dark until he was nine and embarrassed about it until ten. Their father, Tim, used to leave the hall light on for him, pretending it was because he needed to see if he got up for water. After the accident, their mother kept doing it. After their mother died, Alanna kept doing it too until Derek snapped at her one night that he wasn’t a baby.
He was seventeen now.
Tall. Blue-eyed. Angry in quiet ways. Too handsome for his own good and too ashamed to know what to do with it. He looked like their father in the old photographs: golden-brown hair, long limbs, that same startled softness around the mouth when he forgot to guard it. But their father had never had to grow up under the long shadow of terrible circumstance and one choice that could have killed his shot at a real future.
Derek had.
Alanna lifted her hand, nearly knocked, then dropped it with a soft sigh. Why not let the guy sleep in? She was having enough issues on her own for the both of them, after all.
She dressed in the bedroom that still had a mattress on the floor and no curtains. Jeans. Clean white tank. Green flannel shirt because the clinic’s air conditioning was either going to work or ruin her financially. She twisted her waist-length hair into a high, messy bun, stabbed two pins into it, then watched half of it immediately slide loose over her shoulder.
“Professional,” she told her reflection in the cheap mirror leaning against the wall. “Deeply reassuring. Very doctor. Much competence.”
The woman in the mirror didn’t look convinced.
She looked twenty-five, which was both better and worse than Alanna wanted. Young enough that people still occasionally asked if she was the assistant. Old enough that no one had any patience for her not having answers. Her face was small and heart-shaped, her eyes too bright when she was tired, her mouth a little too quick to say something unhelpful before her better judgment caught up.
She had been prettier in college, or at least more willing to notice.
Back then, beauty had been something she wore like a timestamp to mark her time out of class and work. Golden hair loose over bare shoulders. Cheap lipstick. Borrowed heels. Karaoke bars with sticky floors and sound systems that screamed when someone hit the wrong note. She used to sing on Friday nights after double shifts, standing under blue neon with a microphone in her hand and two girlfriends shrieking encouragement from a booth.
But, long story short, they had been party friends. Glitter friends. Bathroom-mirror friends. Girls who said I love you so much, girl, when they were drunk, but then disappeared when love became inconvenient. After her mom died, the texts slowed, then totally stopped.
Nobody wanted to hear about funeral costs, guardianship papers, juvenile counseling referrals, or the fact that Alanna had worked a closing shift at the diner the night before her anatomy final because rent didn’t care about grief.
Fuck them anyway. She scowled even recalling Jen and Sam. She didn’t miss them, just maybe what they had represented.
She missed singing.
She missed dancing badly because it felt good. She missed flirting with men she had no intention of calling. She missed being looked at like a woman instead of a tired emergency contact. She missed a version of herself who hadn’t yet learned how many things could go wrong when she stopped paying attention.
Then guilt hit as soon as she dared to reminisce.
Derek had needed her.
Derek still needed her.
Wanting anything else felt like trying to steal from a burning house.
Alanna turned from the mirror and grabbed her keys, determined to go check in on the new hub of her life’s dreams, debts, and questionable decisions, and maybe get back in time to make breakfast. One hastily scrawled note by the coffee pot, along with a warning for missing filters later, and she was in the car ready to get her day moving.
The Corolla started on the third try.
“Thank you,” she whispered, patting the steering wheel. “I take back sixty percent of what I said yesterday.”
The engine responded with a rattle that sounded expensive.
She didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to interpret that rattle. Not today. She’d add it to the growing list of things she needed to think about, and hopefully be able to scratch this one off sooner rather than later.
Besides, it was fun to believe in miracles.
Ahead, Haverston was already awake in pieces and stretched out beyond her small, quaint street with surprisingly dense bones.
It wasn’t as small as she had expected when she first saw the dot on the map, she’d admit. Not a blink-and-you-missed-it town, at least.
There were layers here: neighborhoods tucked behind cottonwoods, a school with a newer athletic field, a grain elevator, a feed store, two churches facing each other across an intersection like old women not speaking, and a water tower painted a cheerful blue that felt almost aggressive before eight in the morning.
But everything seemed to return, eventually, to Thrumble Avenue.
The realtor had called it the main artery of town, and for once, the realtor hadn’t been lying. It ran past the old brick bank, the county office, the hardware store with hand-painted windows, and an ancient movie theater whose marquee currently advertised a superhero film from three months ago and a Saturday matinee of some B flick called…Prairie Ghost?
She almost laughed and honestly felt like she had been transported to another planet.
There were three diners within six blocks of one another, which seemed excessive until Alanna remembered that small towns treated coffee the way some countries treated borders.
Everyone had an opinion, and apparently everyone would be willing to die on said opinion, or so she was gathering. She had already been warned by her landlord that Marcy’s had the best pancakes, June’s had the best coffee, and absolutely no one with self-respect ordered pie from the Prairie Spoon unless they were doing it for church reasons.
A sandwich spot called Riverside Deli sat on the south side of Thrumble, its faded green awning catching the early sun. The windows were already lit, though the sign still said CLOSED. Through the glass, Alanna glimpsed red vinyl booths, a long counter, and a broad man moving behind it with the square, no-nonsense efficiency of someone who had been awake long enough to resent anyone who wasn’t.
Across the street from Riverside, the buildings changed with almost dramatic aplomb.
Well, maybe not dramatically. Not enough that a person could point to the exact line and say ’there, that is where the town went bad’, but Alanna wasn’t blind. She could see the vibe pulsing on that side of Thrumble like a sore thumb.
Porter Customs occupied an old brick garage with three wide bays and a black sign painted in clean white letters. Even this early, one bay door was open. A motorcycle sat just inside, chrome catching light like the flash of a knife. Two men in black leather cuts stood near the entrance, drinking coffee from paper cups, their laughter carrying over the street in low bursts.
Beside the garage, sharing the same stretch of old brick, was a bar with dark windows and a sign made from welded metal.
THE BENT NAIL.
It should have looked nondescript at this hour; a biker bar at sunrise, asleep and harmless, but it didn’t.
Actually, it looked patient and kind of ominous even in full daylight.
Alanna slowed without meaning to, and as if God hated her, one of the men outside Porter Customs immediately turned his head as if sensing her stare.
As soon as he caught a glimpse of a handsome, rather serious-looking expression, she snapped her face back to the road, heart instantly hammering.
He was probably looking at the car.
Anyone would have. The Corolla had the visual presence of a depressed shoebox and the sound of a dishwasher full of forks.
Still, the skin at the back of her neck prickled until she turned the corner.
“Very normal,” she murmured, brows flicking high in skepticism. “All of this is normal. Men drink coffee. Motorcycles exist. Bars have nails.”
It felt better to put some distance between them and her, though, and far enough away that the brief interaction abated as soon as she caught sight of her destination. The clinic was three blocks farther down and one block over, in a former feed office with terrible lighting, but enough parking for trailers if everyone involved was patient and had a PhD in Geometry.
The sign had gone up yesterday.
HAVERSTON ANIMAL CLINIC
Black letters. White background. A small green paw print stuck at the end because the sign company had offered it for free, and Alanna had been too exhausted to argue aesthetics.
She parked in the side lot, turned off the engine, and sat with both hands on the wheel.
The building waited like a looming beacon ahead.
Her building, and that was the part she couldn’t quite make real.
For years, the dream had been vague but sturdy. Become a veterinarian. Work hard. Pay down loans. Maybe someday buy into a practice. Maybe someday have a kitchen with matching chairs. Maybe someday own a dog if life stopped behaving like a series of increasingly imperative emergencies.
Then Derek got arrested.
Then the dream became practical.
A town with no full-time veterinarian. A retiring large-animal vet willing to sell off equipment cheap. A clinic space that needed work, but not too much work. A school district that didn’t know Derek. A probation plan the judge could be convinced to accept because Alanna had paperwork, and the kind of desperate politeness that made older men in suits believe she was more stable than she felt.
Haverston hadn’t been the dream.
Haverston was what happened when the dream learned to triage.
The July air was already warming, carrying cut grass, dust, and the faint yeasty smell from a bakery somewhere nearby. Her boots crunched over gravel before she unlocked the front door with a key that still felt too new, looked far too shiny before she let herself into her new habitat.
The clinic smelled like paint, disinfectant, cardboard, and possibility.
Also faintly like mouse droppings, but the possibility was doing its best.
Sunlight came through the front windows in long, clean bars. The reception desk sat to the right, secondhand but polished. The waiting area had six chairs, two of them mismatched. She had bought a rug on clearance to make the space look warmer, then immediately regretted buying a rug for a building where nervous animals would be pissing themselves in emotional retribution.
The exam room was ready enough.
That was the phrase of her life now.
Ready enough.
The stainless-steel table had a dent in one corner. The cabinets were half-stocked. The surgery suite still needed supplies she couldn’t afford until deposits cleared, but she could handle basic care, wellness visits, farm calls, emergencies if God felt merciful, and creative panic if He didn’t.
Her diploma was still in the back seat, wrapped in a towel.
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
She should hang it.
People liked diplomas. They liked proof. They liked frames and Latin and the illusion that anyone who had passed enough exams must know what they were doing.
Alanna had passed plenty of exams and then interned at a big Denver clinic where the machines were new, the floors shone, and there was always someone more experienced one room away.
Here, there was no one in the next room.
Nope. Only her…all by her lonesome.
The realization moved through her so suddenly that she had to set her keys on the reception desk.
Her chest tightened.
Not a panic attack.
She didn’t have time for a panic attack, and yet her body didn’t seem interested in her calendar. She leaned both palms against the desk and bowed her head, indulging in a moment of quiet breathing exercises she had picked up online from a yoga instructor while letting that moment sort of pass her by.
Somewhere in the building, the air conditioner kicked on with a clank that made her flinch and then laugh under her breath.
“Great.” She straightened. “Haunted by HVAC. Very on brand.”
If nothing else, the work helped.
Work had always helped because it didn’t care how she felt. Animals needed what they needed. Dishes needed washing. Forms needed signing. Younger brothers needed someone to pretend the world wasn’t rigged against them before breakfast.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the buzz of her phone in her back pocket. She pulled it to flip off the old alarm but was surprised to see the notifications pending for three new emails.
For one irrational second, she assumed disaster. Derek. Probation. The bank. The Corolla’s radiator sending electronic notice of its resignation.
But no.
Appointment inquiry.
Appointments? Already?
She pursed her lips, brow high in disbelief, while opening the first one. She supposed that the online appointment calendar had said she was open for calls today.
Subject line: Cow limping badly—do you come out?
Alanna stared, then she laughed once in sharp surprise.
“Okay,” she said to the empty clinic, wiping quickly under one eye even though there was absolutely nothing there and anyone who said otherwise could fight her. “Okay. We’re doing this.”
Alanna replied to all three with professional warmth she only had to fake a little, but honestly, by the time she finished, the clinic felt different.
Not less frightening.
Just less empty.
