By Clara Langford. A free reader bonus.

Bonus Scene: The Visit in May

A Mercy General Series bonus scene, Colin POV. Set several months after The Reckoning at Mercy General.

Theo's car was a rental, a compact something in a shade of gray that made it nearly invisible against the parking lot behind Colin's office, and he was fifteen minutes early, which Colin noted the way he noted most things now: not as a fact to be filed, just as a fact.

"You found it," Colin said, coming out onto the sidewalk before his nephew had a chance to knock.

"Google found it. I just drove." Theo looked up at the building, a converted storefront two doors down from a coffee shop that smelled, even from here, like something worth crossing the street for. Gold lettering on the window, still new enough to catch the morning sun at an angle that made Colin glance away from it every time he walked past. MARSH RURAL HEALTH ADVISORY. Nothing fancier than that. He'd thought about a Latin motto for about four minutes, the kind of thing Harrowgate would have insisted on, and then thrown the idea out entirely. "This is a real office. With your actual name on it."

"That was the idea."

"I thought you were joking about the whole thing. The consulting. I pictured you working out of a motel room forever, honestly."

"I did that for a while." Colin held the door. "It got old."

Inside, it was small. One room for him, a smaller one for the part-time assistant he'd hired in March, a woman named Denise Halloway who was, confusingly, not his ex-wife and had laughed the first time he'd apologized for the name overlap, saying she'd heard worse reasons for a man to be careful with introductions. A single window looked out on Fifth Street. A single filing cabinet, half empty, stood in the corner like it was still deciding whether to trust him with its contents. He did not own a leather notebook embossed with anyone's company mark. He had never replaced the drugstore one, though it had, eventually, filled up, and now sat on a shelf behind his desk with four others just like it, cheap and plain and full.

"So what do you actually do," Theo said, dropping into the chair across from the desk the way he'd dropped into chairs his whole life, like furniture existed purely as a formality. "Like, day to day."

"Small hospitals hire me before a company like the one I used to work for gets anywhere near their books. I read the covenants. I look at who's buying up the referral base. I tell them what to watch for, and sometimes what to refuse to sign." Colin sat down across from him. "It's the same work I did for nineteen years. I'm just finally doing it for the side I should have been on the whole time."

"Does it pay anything?"

"Less. Considerably less." Colin found he didn't mind saying it. "I have three clients so far. A hospital in Iowa. One in Ohio. One in Kentucky I haven't visited yet, and probably will, this fall. It's not Harrowgate money. I don't especially want it to be."

Theo looked around the office again, slower this time, the way a person looks at a place trying to decide if it's real. "Mom said you sound different. On the phone."

"Different how."

"Like you're actually there. When I'm talking. She said before, sometimes, it was like talking to somebody reading a script from a different room." Theo shrugged, a nineteen-year-old's shrug, equal parts honesty and embarrassment at having said something that honest. "I didn't really notice it until she said it. But yeah. You do."

Colin let that sit for a second, the particular kind of comment that would have made him deflect a year ago, turn it into a joke, move the conversation somewhere safer. He didn't do that now.

"I was somewhere else for a long time," he said. "Filing things. It turns out that takes up more of a person than you'd think, even when you can't see it happening."

"And now you're not."

"Now I'm mostly here." He said it plainly, the way he'd promised himself, on a certain drive south almost a year ago now, that he was going to try to say things from then on. "I'd like you to meet somebody, if you've got the afternoon."

Theo's eyebrows went up in a way that made him look, for a second, exactly nine years old again, the kid who used to ask if Uncle Colin's stapler was a real staple gun. "The doctor. Mom mentioned her. Like, mentioned her mentioned her."

"Her name is Sylvia. Yes."

They walked the two blocks together, past the coffee shop and a hardware store with a chalkboard sign out front debating the merits of two kinds of basil, past a bookshop with a cat asleep in the window who did not open an eye for either of them. Bhatt Family Medicine sat in its Victorian on Fifth, waiting-room windows open to let in the first real warm day of the year, and through the glass Colin could see June at the front desk, laughing at something, and past her, in the doorway to an exam room, Sylvia, in her white coat, saying something to a patient that made the older woman laugh too.

"That's her," Colin said, and heard something in his own voice he still wasn't fully used to hearing there.

"You look like Dad used to look, talking about Mom," Theo said. "Before they got married. Kind of like you got hit by something and you're not mad about it."

"That's about right."

Sylvia looked up before they reached the door, the way she always did, some instinct that had nothing to do with hearing the bell, and her whole face did the thing it did now when she saw him, a small, unguarded shift that she still hadn't fully caught herself doing and probably never would. She said something to June, handed off a chart, and came out to meet them on the porch, Norbert trailing behind her at the exact unhurried pace of a beagle who had decided, sometime in the last several months, that Colin's visits were events worth waking up for.

"You must be Theo," she said, and shook his hand like she meant it, the way she shook everyone's hand, like the person on the other end of it mattered. "He talks about you more than he'd probably want me to admit."

"He talks about you a lot too. It's kind of a lot, actually." Theo grinned, and Norbert, sensing an opening, abandoned all professional dignity and shoved his head against Theo's knee until it got scratched.

"That's the dog's review of you," Sylvia said. "He's generally right about people."

They stood on the porch a while, the three of them and the beagle, June waving through the window at whoever hadn't come inside yet, the afternoon doing the ordinary, unremarkable thing afternoons did in May in a town like this one, warming slowly, going gold at the edges the way it would for real in a few more hours. Colin thought, not for the first time and probably not for the last, about how much of his life he had spent believing that this kind of thing, small towns and open porches and people who actually meant their handshakes, belonged to somebody else's life. Not because he'd decided it. Because he'd never once stopped filing long enough to notice he'd been given the choice.

He had noticed now. He intended to keep noticing.

"Rita's has a lunch special on Tuesdays that Theo needs to experience," Sylvia said, checking her watch. "I've got forty minutes before my next patient. Coming?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Colin said, and meant, as he had started meaning most things now, exactly that.

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