Homecoming

Chapter 7 — Hannah

The clinic sat two blocks off Main Street, a squat brick building with a hand-painted sign: RIVERVIEW FREE CLINIC. Eli had bought the empty lot across the street the week before, and he’d told himself he was walking over to look at the property line. That was the lie. He didn’t know what the truth was.

He pushed through the glass door into the smell of disinfectant and weak coffee. The waiting room was half full — an old man with a cough that rattled the windows, a young mother with a feverish toddler, a teenager with his arm in a sling. Every face turned. In a town this size, everyone knew the black SUV parked outside. Everyone knew the man from the car.

And then, from behind the reception desk, a woman looked up — and twenty years collapsed like a punctured lung.

“Hannah.”

She froze with a clipboard in her hands. “Eli.”

She was thirty-eight, same as him, but the years had written themselves on her differently. There were tired lines at the corners of her eyes and a few strands of gray in the dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore scrubs the color of washed-out sky. She was still, unmistakably, Hannah — the girl who’d sat next to him in chemistry, who’d passed him notes during homeroom, who’d been his first slow dance and his first kiss and, eventually, his first goodbye.

“You’re a nurse,” he said. It came out stupid. Obviously she was a nurse. The badge said H. DELACROIX, RN.

“Eleven years now.” She came around the desk, and they stood there in the middle of the waiting room while the old man with the cough watched them with open interest. “I heard you were back. I didn’t believe it until —” She gestured at him, at all of him, like he was something she’d heard about on the news. “Well.”

“You look the same,” he said, and immediately hated himself for it. She didn’t look the same. She looked like someone who hadn’t slept properly in a decade.

“Liar,” she said, but she smiled — the old smile, crooked at one corner. It hit him harder than Mrs. Alvarez’s hug. “You look different, though. Good. Expensive.”

A door opened down the hall, and Hannah’s attention snapped to it with the reflex of long practice. The young mother emerged with the toddler, the child’s face flushed with fever. Hannah crossed to them in three strides, pressed the back of her hand to the little girl’s forehead, and murmured something low and warm that made the mother laugh through her worry. She wrote something on a chart, squeezed the mother’s shoulder, and sent them off with a follow-up date and a sticker for the toddler.

Eli watched her work and thought: she was always like this. Even at seventeen, she’d been the one who noticed — the kid sitting alone, the girl crying in the bathroom. He’d loved her for it before he’d had a word for what it was.

A nurse called from the back: “Hannah, Mrs. Kovac’s blood pressure’s spiking.”

“One minute,” Hannah called back. To Eli: “Walk with me? Just to the supply room. I have thirty seconds.”

He followed her down a hallway lined with children’s drawings, crayon suns and stick-figure families taped at crooked angles. At the door marked SUPPLIES, she stopped and turned to him, and the professional calm dropped for a heartbeat.

“Mom,” she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “Parkinson’s. Advanced. I moved her in with me two years ago. So —” She shrugged, a small, tired gesture. “This is my life now. Twelve-hour shifts and a baby monitor by the bed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. She’s my mother.” She studied him, and something mischievous flickered through the exhaustion. “You remember chemistry? Sophomore year?”

“Vaguely.”

“You set my sleeve on fire. With the Bunsen burner.”

Eli felt his face go hot. “Your favorite sweater.”

“You bought me a new one with your dishwashing money. Took you three weeks.” The crooked smile again. “I still have it, you know. It’s in a box somewhere.”

His throat closed. Before he could answer, his eyes caught on the hallway beyond her — the peeling paint, the ancient X-ray machine visible through an open door, its housing yellowed with age.

“That thing’s from when?” he asked.

“Nineteen ninety-eight. Don’t.” She followed his gaze and her expression shuttered. “Whatever you’re about to offer — don’t.”

“Hannah, it’s not —”

“It’s exactly charity, and this town has had enough of rich men deciding what it needs.” She exhaled hard through her nose. “Sorry. Long shift. Forget I said that.”

He didn’t forget it. He filed it away, the way he filed everything, and changed the subject. “Did you ever leave? After nursing school?”

“Columbus, for the program. Then I came back.” She leaned against the doorframe. “Somebody had to. Mom, the clinic — this place would’ve closed without staff.” A pause. “You remember Tommy Delgado? Mrs. Delgado’s son? He works the line at Mason Chemical. Came in last month with the rash — third one this year from that plant. I keep telling people to drink bottled water, but half this town can’t afford bottled water, Eli. So they drink what’s in the tap, and they come in here, and I hand them ointment, and I go home and I —”

She stopped herself. Pressed her lips together.

“Mom asks about you, you know,” she said quietly. “When she’s lucid. She always liked you.”

“Tell her I said hi.”

“I will.” Her voice caught, just slightly. “It’ll make her week.”

“Hannah!” The nurse again, sharper this time.

“I should go.” She was already turning.

“Hannah.” He reached out before he could stop himself, and his hand closed around her wrist — gently, the way it used to when they were seventeen and the world was simple. “It was good to see you.”

Her eyes were wet. “You got out,” she said quietly. “You actually got out. Why would you ever come back?”

She pulled away and hurried down the hall. Eli stood alone among the children’s drawings, her warmth still on his palm, and had no answer for her either.