Abigail sat alone in the cafe. Business had been, understandably, very slow since most of the town's men had left. The women didn't seem very interested in socializing or eating out, and the new men who had been brought in to work in the mill worked very long hours and seemed to just want to sleep once they had finished. Occasionally one of her regulars would come in, or a child would ask for a pastry or two, but for the most part, she found herself wiping down unused tables.

This hadn't been the homecoming she was hoping for. Her mother had come down with smallpox months before, and everyone had expected her to die. It was a disease that frequently killed even the young and healthy, so an elderly woman wasn't expected to be any match for it. But her mother had joked with her that she wasn't done with life, and she fought. And somehow, miraculously, she had won, and Abigail eventually felt it was safe for her to return home to Hope Valley.

On top of that though, as she was preparing to leave, she had received a telegram that was so preposterous that she thought it was some kind of cruel joke. But Bill had confirmed it in a rare telephone conversation: Jack was alive, and back. It wasn't until a little later though that the truth of his condition became apparent. So, what should have been a homecoming filled with new beginnings was one where she had to say farewell to most of the men of the town and watch as Jack and Elizabeth struggled.

Her concentration on the cruelty of fate was broken by hearing the door open. Bill stood there and shyly smiled at her. She smiled back. They hadn't spoken since the meeting several days back.

"Coffee?" She asked. He nodded. As she got up to get it for him, Bill sat down with a sigh. He rubbed his face with his hands.

"I'd ask you what was the matter, but I think the better question is, what isn't the matter." She said as she placed the cup in front of him.

"A very good question. There isn't much that isn't the matter these days."

She smiled and sat back down. She tried to think of a conversation topic that wasn't complete doom and gloom.

"Nathan's been gone for a little while. Do you know where he went?" She inquired.

"Calgary. Said he needed to see some supervisor of his there."

"Ah." The conversation seemed to die there. Abigail figured she had suggested a topic; now it was his turn.

She was wrong though. That wasn't the end of it. After a moment, he said, "He told me something though, before he left. Something odd."

"What was it?"

Bill shifted in his chair slightly. "He said that he needed to talk to this supervisor about some business between the RCMP and the army."

"Well there's nothing strange there. They've had connections forever."

"I don't think that's what he meant. He seemed to be implying that there was some unsavory business going on there. Which is honestly what brought me here to see you."

Abigail was interested at this point. Like most townspeople she had found the arrival of the army men, and the new workers, very strange, but she was too preoccupied with thinking about her mother, Elizabeth, Jack, and her normal mayoral duties (which had piled up in her absence) to pay much attention.

Bill reached into his coat. "I've been paying our two new overlords a few visits here and there. And I've just been casually looking at their documents. And I found -"

"Casually looking at their documents? You mean breaking and entering?"

"I didn't break anything. Unless you count the code on the safe."

Abigail sighed. Typical Bill.

"So anyway, I found some records in the ledger. It's way too early to see what they're doing here, but these ledgers go back pretty far. We're not the first town they've come to take over. They've been all over Central Canada."

"We're not in Central Canada."

"I know. And based on what I've seen, I think I know why they left."

He unfolded a piece of paper that had some scratch marks on it. Abigail looked it over, but it was all but illegible.

"I can't read this Bill. I could never read your handwriting."

"I jotted down anything I found in the ledgers that looked strange. And there was a lot of strange stuff in there. They're either very bad at math and desperately need a new accountant, or they have literally lost money. As in, it has disappeared."

"And I'm guessing you have an idea of where it went."

Bill nodded. "I think they stole it. And there's more too: some of the money didn't disappear, but its destination wasn't what it should be. Like, for example, if you were to hypothetically buy 300 tons of iron from an ironworks, who do you think should get paid for it?"

"Um, the ironworks?" Abigail replied. It felt like a trick question.

"You would think so. And they did get paid. But they weren't the only ones to receive payment. Apparently another recipient was the RCMP. So either the RCMP was overseeing the transaction, or it was an example of money laundering. Skimming off the top."

Abigail exhaled. "Hoo. Okay, that's not good."

Bill nodded. "I really, really wish Nathan was back. I'm sure he'd love to hear this."

"So where do I come into this story?" She asked, sounding tired. She didn't think she had room in her head for another life complication.

Bill gave her a puzzled look. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, what do you want me to do? You said this is what brought you to see me. I assume you're about to give me some unsavory sounding job that I will not want to do but you'll somehow talk me into it, the way you always do."

Bill looked back at her blankly. "No, I wasn't going to give you a job. I just wanted to talk to someone about this. It's a difficult thing to just keep to yourself."

Abigail smiled at him. "I think you might be getting old, Bill. You never used to need to talk to anybody about things like this."

Bill grinned and looked down sheepishly. "Yeah, maybe. But sometimes, you just need someone to talk to."


Jack's hands were raw and his fingers were bleeding. He knew he should have been wearing gloves for all of this, but he didn't have any with him and he didn't feel ready to go back to Elizabeth's house to fetch his old ones. But working on the construction was the only thing that seemed to give him any semblance of peace these days, so he kept going. And the house was coming up so quickly that he had begun to worry about what he would do with himself once he finished, because at the rate he was going, he'd be done by November.

Ironically though, the hard work had actually made him feel quite a bit better. His mind wasn't quite the roar that it had been when he had nothing to do and was surrounded by people. It hadn't slowed down much, but at least when he was outside in the fresh air and working with his hands he had something to channel his energy into. He never left the plot; he had gotten a sleeping pad, blankets, and one spare change of clothes from the RCMP office (Nathan hadn't been there), so he didn't need anything. He once had to go back to the sawmill to take some more materials, but he went in the middle of the night. There was no guard, which seemed bad. It made him sad to think that that meant Lee was gone, as Lee never would have made such a mistake.

Elizabeth, true to her word, came by once a day, usually in the evening. She brought him hot food for dinner and bread, cheese, cold meats, and an apple or two for the following day, at which point she would return the next evening and the cycle would start again. She forced him to eat his dinner in front of her, which made him laugh the first time, but he complied. His appetite had recovered somewhat as well. He still wasn't ravenous, despite the heavy physical work he had been doing, and he knew his clothes were getting a bit loose, but he had energy, which was all he cared about. And Elizabeth usually seemed satisfied with how much he would eat when she came.

He looked up at the sky as he picked at a blister on his palm. The sun was going down; she would be there soon. He smiled to himself, as he had started to look forward to her visits. They had even managed to chat a bit the last few nights. She would tell him about Little Jack, and he would talk about which room he had worked on that day. It almost felt normal.

He walked down from the plot to the stream nearby in order to wash up. He hadn't had a proper bath in a while and he knew he must not smell, or look, very good. His beard had grown in and his hair was getting too long again. Still, he tried to make himself look as presentable as possible.

While rubbing the cold water across his arms, he heard a twig snap behind him. He smiled. Elizabeth.

"You're early today!" He called, not turning around. "What's on the menu tonight?" His sense of humor was recovering too.

When he heard no response, he shook his hands of water and turned around. The smile died on his lips when he saw the person standing there.

It wasn't Elizabeth. Instead, Jack found himself locking eyes with Lucas.

Neither said anything at first. Lucas looked somewhat unsure of himself, and Jack looked suspicious.

"What are you doing here?" Jack finally said, a bit colder than was really necessary.

Lucas took a deep breath. "I don't really know, exactly."

"Long ways to come from the saloon if you're just looking for a walk." Jack said as he walked past Lucas, heading back up the hill to the plot.

"I wasn't looking for a walk, and I wasn't at the saloon."

"Your business is your own." Jack responded, trying to end the conversation, if it could be considered a conversation.

Still, Jack didn't hate Lucas. He wished he did. He thought his sense of style was atrocious, especially considering that this was a tiny country town where the word 'overdressed' didn't even begin to cover it, and he still wasn't entirely comfortable with Lucas' friendship with Elizabeth. But Jack's mind had begun to slow down just a bit, he was thinking a little more clearly, and the thought of Lucas didn't infuriate him the way it did before. He had been kind to Elizabeth, and Jack couldn't hate anyone who had been kind to her.

Lucas followed him up the hill. He still hadn't said anything though, and the way he was just watching him made Jack uncomfortable.

"If you're not going to say anything, you should leave. I'm expecting my wife soon."

"I know. She told me that she's been coming to see you every day."

Jack flinched a bit to hear that, as he wasn't wild about this situation - him isolated and Elizabeth going to see Lucas on the regular - but he couldn't blame her for needing someone to talk to.

After another pause, Jack said, "So...why are you here?"

Lucas shoved his hands into his pockets. "She told me you've seemed better lately. She says you're eating again, and you seem a bit more coherent."

Jack smiled. "Yeah. Yeah, it's been good to have something to do. I was never one for sitting around."

Lucas nodded. "Keeping occupied will definitely help with it."

Jack glanced at him. "Help with what?"

Lucas grimaced. He hadn't meant to say that.

"Nevermind."

"No, I insist - help with what?"

Lucas squirmed and looked around. He surveyed the progress that Jack had made on the house.

"Don't even think about changing the subject." Jack retorted, before Lucas could even try to. Lucas gave him a dirty look; he had read his mind.

"Help with the coping."

"The coping?" Jack said bluntly. "The coping with what, exactly?"

"With your head."

Jack was getting annoyed. Lucas was talking in circles and he didn't like it. His own mind was confusing enough without adding perplexing conversation to it.

"Lucas, I really wish you would just get to the point, whatever your point may be."

Lucas looked him in the eye. His face was serious, and couldn't be described as kindly exactly, but it didn't look unkind either.

"I just wanted to check on you. To see how you were doing."

Jack almost laughed. The idea that Lucas, a man he had nearly come to blows with several times, would express any kind of concern for him was hilarious.

"Well, I appreciate your kindness." Jack said sarcastically. Lucas didn't know how to respond, so he just stood there very awkwardly.

"You can leave now." Jack finally said.

Lucas looked up at him.

"I heard you used to draw."

Jack groaned. Why wouldn't he just leave?

"It was a hobby of mine, yes." Jack expected Lucas to start making fun of him for it.

He didn't though. He just nodded. "Have you been drawing lately?"

Jack shook his head. "I don't have any paper, and I don't think I'm in the mood for it anyway."

"You should try. It'll help. In a lot of cases, art can help people. Help them make sense of things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to work out."

Jack stared at him. The conversation had turned very bizarre. Lucas was a bartender, and he despised Jack, so to hear him talk about art and coping mechanisms as if he were a friend trying to help threw him off. Still, it made sense, what he was saying, and Jack had definitely turned to drawing more than once in the past in order to relax or reflect on something that bothered him. He had also drawn a lot during his time in the hills, it was one of the few pieces that he had retained of Jack Thornton when he otherwise forgot himself. But still, he wasn't sure what game Lucas was playing at.

Lucas looked up from the ground. "Elizabeth really hasn't told me much, in case you were wondering. She says its private and between you two. But when she said you're eating a little bit again and that you seem better, I thought that seemed like a good sign, and I wanted to see it for myself. You're still out here working like a maniac though, so you're probably not even close to normal yet. And you look thin."

While Jack didn't love the idea of discussing very intimate emotions with a man he barely knew - he had trouble talking about them with Elizabeth, and she was his wife - Lucas wasn't wrong. He seemed to know at least a little bit about what was going on in Jack's head. And he wouldn't admit it, but Jack had actually been thinking about trying to get some paper and pencil lately, as his hands had been itching to start drawing some of the things he saw in his dreams.

And, Jack was also strangely grateful. Lucas didn't have to do any of this. Jack had never given him any reason to give a damn about him, and here he was, almost acting like he cared about his well-being.

Jack finally said, "I heard you're a doctor."

Lucas's expression instantly changed. "Then you heard wrong. I'm not a doctor."

"Fine, you were going to be one, right before you dropped out of school."

Lucas didn't respond apart from deepening his frown.

Jack picked up a tool and started playing with it. He wasn't actually doing anything, but he figured it would be better to look only mildly interested in what he was about to ask, and Lucas, who Jack guessed knew about as much about tools as Jack knew about medicine, wouldn't know the difference.

"Have you ever heard of something called 'shellshock'?" Jack asked, trying to sound disinterested, as if he were just making casual conversation.

"Of course I have."

"It seems to be fairly common, thanks to the war. Jesse was telling me about it. Do you know Jesse?"

"I know Jesse. I also know he had shellshock, probably still has it a little bit. He improved a lot though."

Jack got a curious look on his face and his attempts to appear distant vanished.

"He had a bad case?"

"They're all bad cases. And it's existed long before the war. Shellshock is just the term army people give to it. We always just called it 'psychological trauma' or something like that."

"We?"

"Medical professionals. I mean, not we, them. But the effects of psychological trauma are pretty well known, and they're common across people. Army experience isn't unique in that regard. They're handling it shamefully though. They dismiss it as cowardice. People have even been shot for it, which is just evil. As if you could be in a trench for months, surrounded by explosions all the time and watching your friends die, and somehow not have any aftereffects. I wish they'd take me into the army just so I could knock some sense into them on that score."

Lucas then took a deep breath in and out. "It's interesting that you bring it up, because I think you've got something similar. I know you haven't been to war, but it's far from the only cause. We've seen this kind of thing in a lot of people. People who have been through rough events. Really rough events. The saddest cases are in children." His voice drifted away.

"Children go through this?" Jack asked, his voice filled with disbelief. He couldn't imagine such a thing.

Lucas nodded. "Awful to think about, isn't it? They're so helpless. You think you don't know how to cope with this, imagine having even less understanding of the world around you. And a lot of the time, they don't have their parents, or worse, the parents were the source of the hurt in the first place. It's the hardest thing you'll ever see."

The two men went quiet. Jack was deeply impressed. Lucas had a far greater degree of empathy and compassion than he had previously given him credit for.

Lucas was eventually the one to break the silence. He broke it with a question.

"Do you get dizzy, Jack?"

Jack looked puzzled, but he answered. "Not really. Maybe if I haven't had any water for a while."

"Headaches?"

"No."

"Do you ever feel nauseated?"

"Usually not. Why all the questions?"

Lucas took a deep breath. "Just curious I guess. Those are all good though, it means that you're probably not having any physical aftereffects of the injury. That's always something we worry about, but I think you're physically fine. It's just trauma that you're trying to get over. And it may not feel like it now, but I think you're doing well. You're already a lot better than the last time I saw you."

He then quickly added, "I mean, I'm guessing. I don't know for sure."

Jack had to smile. He couldn't help it. Lucas was such a bad liar.

"Lucas." He said slowly. "You keep using the word 'we'."

Lucas's face took on a very obvious look of disgust. Not with Jack, but with himself. He had said way too much. And it made Jack's smile grow larger.

"You're doctoring me now, aren't you?"

"Doctoring you?"

"Yeah. These are the questions doctors might ask. You can take the man out of medical school, but you can't take the medical school out of the man. I think that's what I'm getting from this. Is that also where you picked up your incredible fashion sense?"

Lucas sneered at him and turned to walk away. Jack laughed.

"Hit a nerve, did I?" He called after him, in a teasing sort of tone. Lucas turned back briefly to give Jack a nasty look, but all that accomplished was to make Jack laugh even harder. And as Lucas disappeared from view, Jack couldn't believe that this guy - an overdressed bartender with no poker face who couldn't lie, couldn't turn off his doctoring instinct despite his best efforts, and who had a soft spot for children - had ever managed to get under his skin. He'd almost describe Lucas as amusing.


Nathan was falling over with exhaustion as he exited the stage. He had taken the first one home that he could get, but it had been delayed by bad weather, so the trip was extended by an extra nine hours. Nathan had wanted to speak with Bill as soon as he returned home, but he knew it would have to wait until the morning. Bill wouldn't like Nathan waking him up in the middle of the night a second time, and Nathan himself thought nothing sounded better than to collapse into his own bed at that moment.

It was for that reason that he visibly cringed when he heard someone call his name. Who was up at this hour?

He turned and saw the army doctor, Yanic Redmond. Nathan was genuinely surprised to see him.

"Why are you still here? You sent our men away weeks ago."

"I'm not here officially. But I got a message from a mutual friend of ours. Harry."

First name basis. Harry didn't let just anyone call him that. They must have been longtime friends.

Redmond continued. "Seems like he gave you a job to do."

Nathan narrowed his eyes. "How much did he tell you exactly?"

Redmond smiled. "Enough."

"And was he the same person who told you not to send me for conscription?"

"He was indeed. We made up some story about how you have high blood pressure. Which you don't, but you should learn to lighten up, or someday you will."

Nathan rolled his eyes. "My blood pressure is perfect, thank you very much."

"I'm well aware. But it's our secret."

Nathan was too tired to spar with this man. "Well, whatever reason you have for being here, I really don't care. I'm turning in. I've had a very, very long few days."

"Get used to it. Your job is far from over, Constable. And don't worry, you're rid of me. I'm off to a little town about three days southeast of here. Outbreak of smallpox there. And they're pretty isolated, being so near the mountains, so it's tough for them to get care."

Nathan looked at him, suddenly very serious. Smallpox was a big deal, even if it was three days away. "Why does the army care about that?"

"Because it's close to an army training facility, and they'd rather not see their new recruits get infected. Smallpox can put a young man in the ground just as easily as an elderly one."

Nathan nodded. "I know. Isn't it dangerous for you too, though?"

"You can only get it once, and I had it years ago."

"I had it too, as a child. I've got scars from it still, on my legs."

"Better than being dead. Well, I will leave you alone to get some rest. But I wanted to make sure you got back in one piece."

"Is it surprising that I did?"

Redmond looked deadly serious as he replied, "A little, considering what you're looking into. Tread carefully, Constable. You've got more enemies here than you realize."