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It's a series of (un)fortunate events, that's all.
Vernon Mullins arrives in Virgin River on Hope's birthday. In hindsight, she should have taken that as a sign.
He's handsome, for sure. A charming smile and a cocky streak that falls just on the right side of arrogant and kind, kind eyes. She could see herself getting into a lot of trouble because of those eyes. But Hope has already divorced one husband and buried another, and she's not particularly looking to make an ongoing habit out of it. Besides, she's never really trusted city boys. She figures him to tire of small town life and be gone within a couple of years.
That could have been the end of it, except:
He stays.
He stays when the main road into town floods over, and he has to eat only beans and prescribe only baby aspirin for a week until the supply trucks can get back through.
He stays through the worst flu outbreak in twenty years, when barely a day goes by that someone doesn't vomit on him and they come dangerously close to losing three of their oldest residents.
He stays after the storm that wipes out half his roof and a sizeable portion of his medical equipment, and spends two months camped in her spare room while things get repaired and replaced. Virgin River gets exactly two television channels. Vernon won't watch game shows because "the promise of a little money makes people stupid," Hope rolls her eyes at anything with "love" or "fantasy" in the title, and by mutual agreement soap operas are vetoed; they end up watching M*A*S*H, peppered with his objections regarding professional medical conduct, and it becomes an evening ritual she'll never admit she looks forward to. He's surprisingly easy to be around, and he pours a generous glass of wine.
He stays, and they become friends.
That could also have been the end of it, except:
Her edges start to smooth out again, like rocks worn by the river. He kisses her on the night he's due to move out, with searching eyes and a steady hand warm on her waist and Hawkeye scheming in the background, and she realizes that she's been softening herself to let him fit flush against her this whole time.
.
Later, a long way down the road, he'll tell her "I have loved you from the first day that I met you", and it will have become the truth.
.
It's been a year, and he checks all the boxes. Her mother approves, and his family have welcomed her, and he's embedded himself in Virgin River as though he'd been there his whole life. It's this last part, more than anything else, that gets her thinking silly things like 'forever'. Bob had been itching to leave town as soon as he could, always talking a big game about opportunities in the city that never manifested; Evan hadn't been around long enough for them to even get to that conversation, and probably couldn't have made a firm decision even if he had been. But Hope knows what she wants. Hope wants to stay in Virgin River, and Hope wants to stay with Vernon, and somehow it looks like she'll get to do both.
It's been a year, and they have learned to meet each other somewhere near the middle. They have learned to fight fair. Some of her cracks have knitted themselves back together, and it's far from perfect, but it's good, and strong. It's a foundation.
It's been a year, and so Hope knows it's coming. Of course she does. They're far from wide-eyed youths, and he's a traditional man; he'll want to mark the occasion, do it at the right time. He has never been married, and the way he talks of it makes everything old seem new again.
He drives them out to Eureka for their anniversary dinner, takes her to a tiny place on the boardwalk that one of the ranchers had told him about. They order lobster, and champagne, and the warm breeze blowing off the channel flutters her hair and fills her with a jittery sort of joy. She thinks about them doing this five, ten, fifty years from now. It's a good life, the one she's picturing. She could get used to it.
After dessert, he covers her hand with his own, the one that's not holding a ring, and says "Hope McCrea, will you—", and she's never been a gambler but she rolls the dice because she wants to believe that this one is for good.
.
Hope will become the town mayor for the same reason that she will become the town gossip. She has a natural aptitude for nosing around, and she likes knowing things before she needs to. It's a lot harder to be blindsided that way.
.
On their first anniversary after he moves out, Hope finally allows herself to wallow. She takes the phone off the hook and curls up in bed. The linens have all been swapped over, the furniture rearranged, and if she shuts her eyes tightly enough, until tiny pin-pricks of colour burst behind them, it's almost like he'd never even been there.
(She will tell herself that that's how she wants it to feel.)
Her sadness is a palpable thing, seeping out of the small, quiet places she's stored it all her life and sitting heavy in the air. She doesn't quite know what to do with the weight of it. She could forgive Bob for being selfish and useless, even Evan for dying. Those had been neat, delineated crimes, in the end. The process of forgiving Vernon for ripping open her old wounds is something far more labyrinthine. He wants her to say it's okay, and come back home, and we'll get through this; simple declarative statements to broker a detente. But she can't get pardons to sit right on her tongue, because there's a certain irony, really, to the fact that despite being married three times, she has always kept her vows.
She tugs the comforter further up and watches as the shadows begin to stretch and then fade across the wall. It would be easier, she thinks, if he could feel like a stranger again. After nearly twenty years, he feels like the first chill of winter in the fall air, like the sound of crickets at summer sunset on the river bank, like coming home. And isn't that the worst part? That she'd ended up liking having someone to come home to. Having someone come home to her. That they had built this life together, piece by stubborn piece, and there's no part of him she doesn't know. That he could never be a stranger, not after all this time.
Well, no. The worst part is that she cannot stand either his presence or his absence, and that leaves her with very little else.
The next morning, she slips back into self-preservation mode like a well-worn suit. She calls her lawyer, and invents the line "I decided to raise husbands instead" as a way of reclaiming the choice in the matter.
.
Children were never on the agenda. Hope watches Charmaine grow up from afar, a wobbly-kneed kid into a willowy, headstrong teenager into a woman who will break hearts because apples don't fall far, and wonders - just for a moment - if it might have been enough.
.
He sits in his truck outside her (their) house for twenty-four minutes, considering all the possible outcomes, before he makes the decision to walk up the front steps and knock on her (their) front door. Her mouth does this thing when she opens it and sees him, falling somewhere between a grimace and a wry smile, that makes him think he probably chose wrong.
"Vernon, don't—"
He holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Hold your horses, I just came to wish you a happy birthday." It's a weak lie, all things considered, and the disbelieving laugh she huffs out tells him that she immediately notices.
"No you didn't."
"No, I didn't. I... wanted to make sure you were okay."
"That is not your problem any more," she says tersely.
"I came to Virgin River exactly twenty-three years ago, and I have made your being okay my problem every single day since. I always will."
"You have a funny way of showing it." She turns away from the door but doesn't close it, so he follows her inside. "What do you want?"
He goes for broke, because where else does he have to go?
"We can fix this, Hope." She doesn't say anything to that immediately, is quiet for the longest time, and it throws him off-kilter. Hope is never quiet. There's the ghost of something across her face, something that he wants to think could be absolution if he looked closely enough, and so he takes a step forward and reaches out for her. "Please. If you'll let us. Just tell me what to do, like you always do. We can fix this."
"There is," and she's trying not to cry now, he can tell, her voice is all tight and thick with it and it's so much worse than her silence, "no we in this, Vernon. You made sure of that." She squeezes past him and disappears up the stairs, calling "you can see yourself out."
He stands in her (their) living room, in the house they were supposed to share for the rest of their lives. There's a scorch mark on the carpet, right near his shoe, where he had once dropped a fireplace poker, and all of a sudden he feels overwhelmingly tired, right down to his bones. In two years, she has neither accepted his apology nor asked him for a divorce, and he's not quite sure where that leaves him. Where that leaves them. Vernon is good with numbers, but he's never been able to calculate how she had weighed eighteen years of happiness against one stupid, foolish mistake, and come up short. So maybe it's better this way, this strange half-life of a marriage; her apparent refusal to draw a line and just leave well enough alone allows him the illusion that there's still a chance.
No, he knows that's a lie. Nothing about this is better, because none of it is doing either of them any good.
.
"Third time's the charm," he had declared as they danced at their reception, her hand tucked up in his over his heart; it was something like a dangling thread, waiting to be picked and unravelled.
.
The thing is, sometimes it's just easy for him to forget that they're not a couple anymore. They don't live together, but in a town as small as Virgin River they see each other near on every day. They have mutual friends, interests, events. They still know exactly how to get on each other's last nerve. They are, quite irreversibly, in each other's orbit, and because they couldn't avoid it they have grown back into something that's mostly like friends, and a little like something else.
Jack had opened his bar a couple of years back, and they wind up in a booth together there more nights than they don't, playing cards or working on individual tasks in a silence that is comfortable, if not entirely companionable. In these moments, Vernon tries not to think about the life he should be spending by her side, he really tries. But whenever he does, which is often, he also thinks about the expression on her face when she'd confronted him about the affair, pinched and tight, like all the air had been sucked out of the room and she couldn't breathe. He thinks about watching her try to rebuild herself, again. He thinks about all the things he could have done differently, and it stops him.
So instead they keep on circling each other, and they argue, and they're friends. It's not enough, but he will take whatever she'll give him. He always has.
"Are you going to discard any time soon, or should I cancel my appointments tomorrow?" she asks, eyebrow raised.
"The sweet talk is what I miss the most," he replies, tossing a card onto the pile. She screws up her face in half fondness, half irritation, a look so familiar that it brings a fresh round of what if right to the surface.
He thinks about taking her hand across the table, and doesn't.
He's hardly unaware of the talk, the speculation. Theoretically, he's an eligible bachelor, and more than a handful of women have shown interest over the years. Women who would be a good match for him, women with whom he could spend an enjoyable time. They corner him at the Moonlight Mingle, proposition him at the fair, occasionally try to use Jack as an intermediary. There have been plenty of opportunities to move on. But he dances politely each time it's his turn, and he pairs up with Hope for each egg race, and he always goes home alone.
Somewhere along the way, the interest shifted into pity, telegraphed in every sideways glance. Poor Vernon, in their wide eyes and muttered breaths. Still hanging on. Still doing her bidding. He just can't let go.
Hope is his wife. His family. When it comes down to it, that's the beginning and end of everything.
.
Hope makes choices and lives with the consequences, and has little patience for those who don't; Vernon believes in strangely few absolutes for a man of science, and has too many regrets and no way to absolve them.
.
The day Hope puts an ad out for a nurse at the practice is the same day she married Bob, fifty-one years ago. It doesn't mean anything - of all of her husbands, Bob is the one who vexes her least, and having the decency to be largely forgettable after a spell is maybe the nicest thing he ever did for her - but it does get her thinking over her morning coffee. About ticking clocks, and second (third, fourth) chances, and a realization:
She is not angry anymore.
The hurt still lingers, muted and tempered by time into something that sits right underneath her ribs and wraps itself faintly around her heart every now and again, but she is not angry. Not like she was. It's been twenty years and she no longer has the energy to pretend to keep him at arm's length, to pretend that she has ever stopped caring about his well-being.
So, despite appearances, she doesn't come up with the idea to hire someone just to annoy him (she does a great number of things just to annoy him, but this is not one of them). He's getting old - they both are, even if they both kind of refuse to accept it - and his patient load has only continued to grow as more ranchers and loggers move nearby. He could do with some help. And if he won't take it from her (his not-quite-ex-wife), or her (his friend who meddles in his business because that's what friends do), he will take it from her (the mayor who has the wonderful power to do this kind of thing whether he likes it or not because the town will pay the bill).
Hope needed her anger to carry her through all those years; as it ebbs away, she realizes she equally needs something to replace it with. It will end up being the very thing she lost in the first place, but there's still too much smoke to see that far yet, so she starts with helping.
.
Here is the thing that no one considers: Hope is tenacious, but Vernon is patient, and the thing about these traits is that they so often lead to the same result.
.
She's been fussing with his blankets for the past twenty minutes, straightening the edges and brushing off invisible bits of lint. They are neither of them strangers to a hospital room, but the stakes are considerably higher this time, and so he's content to indulge her in her nervous fretting.
"Forty years," he says eventually, the thirty-fifth time she tucks in a loose corner only to untuck it a second later. "Did you know that? It's been forty years since you first agreed to go out with me."
"You're a sentimental old fool," Hope mutters, but she leans down and kisses him, once, twice, stilling her hands. He shuts his eyes against the blurry glare of the fluorescent bulbs lining the ceiling tiles and settles back into the pillow.
"Don't give me that look, woman," he grouches after a moment, feeling her tense gaze still fixed on him.
"How could you possibly know what look I'm giving you?"
"The very same one you've been aiming my way for all those forty long years now? Hope, I'd know that look if I was blind. Which I might soon be."
"You're not losing your sight," she says. Her tone brooks no argument, clipped vowels wrapped around genuine concern, and for a minute he can't imagine how even the universe would have the guts to try to contradict her. "You're not losing anything."
He chuckles softly. "Whatever you say, dear."
A knock at the door interrupts whatever comeback she'd been about to sling at him, and a young orderly sticks his head around the frame. "Doctor Mullins. You ready, sir?"
Vernon grasps Hope's hand for a long moment, feeling it tremble under his touch, and rubs his thumb over her ring. "I will be yours until the day I die," he promises her again. "Today is not that day."
.
She had spent so long wishing that things with Vernon would hurry up and resolve themselves, and now that they have, their lives were going by much, much too fast for her liking. The strange, elastic quality of time.
.
It takes her fifteen years, but Hope finally visits Rachel's grave. She stands there for a long time, brushing her fingers over the curve of the stone.
"I'm sorry," she says quietly. "I should have been there." It's all that's left to be said, and regret is less of a dirty word to her now.
Vernon, still banned from driving until his next check-up, is waiting for her in the passenger seat.
"Okay?" he asks.
She nods. "Okay," she says, and it is. "Now let's get going. I made lasagna."
"Have I ever told you how happy I am that you agreed to marry me again?"
"I agreed to not divorce you," she corrects. "It was much less paperwork."
He leans back against the headrest with a satisfied smile and closes his eyes, waiting for her to start the truck's engine. "The end result was still the same."
She considers him in the slowly fading light. The afternoon sun softens his wrinkles and picks out the last few stubborn flecks of brown in his hair, turning them silver-gold and gleaming. He's wearing a jacket she bought him somewhere around the fifteenth year of marriage, and a shirt she bought him last month, and woven into the fabric is burnt toast and weak coffee and the promise of more good years and bad breakfasts yet. He feels like coming home.