The Landing

The helicopter came in low over the ridge, catching the afternoon light catching the light in a way that felt like showing off.

I spotted it from the window of my clinic, hands going still over the stitches I was placing in Mrs. Patterson's cat. Helicopters weren't exactly common in Pinewood. Private helicopters owned by tech billionaires who grew up in trailers on the edge of town were even less common.

"Dr. Calloway?" Mrs. Patterson's worried voice pulled me back. "Is Whiskers going to be okay?"

"He's going to be fine." I finished the last suture with steady hands, willing myself not to look at the window again. "Keep him indoors for a week. No climbing. And maybe consider closing the garage door before you start the car."

"I don't know how he got in there. He's usually so careful."

Cats were never careful. They were curious, which was basically the opposite of careful. But I smiled and patted her hand and didn't say any of that because Mrs. Patterson had been coming to me since I opened this clinic four years ago, and she didn't need my cynicism along with her vet bill.

After she left, I stood at the window and watched the helicopter disappear behind the trees.

He was back.

Jude Sinclair. The name I'd spent eight years trying to forget. The boy who'd eaten ramen in my tiny apartment and promised we'd change the world together. The man who'd left for Silicon Valley and never looked back.

Now worth two billion dollars, according to the internet. I'd looked. More than once, if I was being honest.

I'd mostly stopped three years ago, when I'd finally accepted that he wasn't coming back for me. That "I'll be gone a month, maybe two" had been a lie, whether he'd known it at the time or not. That I'd given my whole heart to someone who'd valued his dreams more than anything I could offer.

So why was he here now?

I locked up the clinic at five, same as always. The October air was crisp, the leaves on the maples along Main Street just starting to turn. Pinewood was pretty in the fall, one of the reasons I'd stayed when everyone expected me to leave.

The other reason was that leaving would have felt too much like running. And I wasn't the one who ran.

"Wren!" Iris Park jogged across the street from the coffee shop, her dark hair escaping from its ponytail. "Did you see it?"

"See what?"

"Don't play dumb with me. The helicopter. It's Jude Sinclair's. He's at his grandmother's place."

"Gran Sinclair is still alive?"

"Barely, apparently. She had a fall last week. That's why he's here." Iris studied my face with the precision of a best friend who'd seen me through the worst of it. "You okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"Because the love of your life just landed in your backyard."

"He wasn't the love of my life."

"Wren."

"He was a mistake I made when I was twenty-one. A mistake that taught me some valuable lessons about trusting people who have one foot out the door."

Iris didn't look convinced. "Have you seen him? Does he know you're still here?"

"I don't know. And I don't care." I started walking toward my truck. "I'm going home. I have a bottle of wine and a documentary about penguins waiting for me, and neither of those things will break my heart."

"Wren..."

"I'm fine, Iris. Really."

I wasn't fine. But she didn't need to know that.

My house was a small craftsman bungalow on the edge of town, close enough to the clinic that I could walk when the weather was good. I'd bought it three years ago with money I'd saved and a loan from the local credit union, and I'd spent every weekend since making it mine.

It was nothing like the apartment Jude and I had shared in Portland. That place had been tiny, barely functional, with a hot water heater that quit whenever the temperature dropped below forty. But we'd been happy there. Or I'd been happy. I wasn't sure anymore what he'd felt.

I poured myself a glass of wine and sat on the porch, watching the sun sink behind the mountains. In the distance, I could see the lights of the Sinclair property, the old farmhouse where Jude's grandmother had lived alone since his grandfather died twenty years ago.

I'd met Gran Sinclair once, at the beginning. She'd made me tea and told me stories about Jude as a little boy, how he'd taken apart every appliance in the house trying to understand how they worked, how he'd read everything he could get his hands on, how he'd been the brightest thing in a family that didn't appreciate brightness.

"He's going to do something extraordinary," she'd said. "And the world is going to know his name."

She'd been right about that. The world did know his name now. Jude Sinclair, founder of Sinclair Tech, the AI company that was revolutionizing everything from healthcare to finance. He was on magazine covers and conference stages and the kind of lists that measured success in zeros.

And I was here, in Pinewood, stitching up cats and watching penguins.

I'd made the right choice. I knew I had. When he'd left, I'd had two options: follow him into his new life or stay and build my own. I'd stayed. I'd finished vet school. I'd come back to the town that had raised me and opened a practice that actually helped people.

I had a good life. A life I'd built with my own hands.

So why couldn't I finish my wine?

Sleep came in fragments that night. Dreams of eight years ago. Jude laughing. Jude holding me. Jude packing his bags with that look that said the future was somewhere I wasn't.

By morning, I'd decided on a strategy: avoidance. Pinewood was small, but not that small. If I was careful, I could go days without running into him. He'd be busy with his grandmother, dealing with whatever crisis had brought him home. I'd be busy with my work. Our paths didn't need to cross.

Famous last words.

I was halfway to my clinic when I saw the helicopter again, grounded now in the field behind the old gas station, a team of people in matching jackets swarming around it. Even from a distance, I could see something was wrong. One of the rotors was bent at an angle that rotors definitely shouldn't bend.

"Storm damage," said Bill Martinez, who was leaning against the gas station wall with his coffee like he had nothing better to do. "Came in last night. Whole area got hit, but that thing took the worst of it. Some branch or debris, they're saying."

"So he's stuck here?"

Bill grinned the knowing grin of someone who'd watched this story unfold eight years ago. "Looks like it. Roads to Portland are closed from mudslides. Could be a few days before anyone gets in or out."

A few days. Jude Sinclair, stuck in Pinewood for a few days.

I walked faster toward my clinic, trying to outrun the feeling building in my chest.

But I knew, even then, that some things you can't outrun.

No matter how many years you've practiced.