19. Stephanie #2
I sat frozen as he pulled back and smiled at me through the dust, that crooked smile that had been dismantling me since I was twenty.
“There’s something here,” he said.
“What?”
He stretched past me into the deeper shadow of the crawlspace. I heard the low groan of wood dragging over wood.
“A box. Sealed.” He pulled it into the light between us. “Help me open it?”
We worked at it together in the dim, prying at rusted hinges that fought us the whole way. When the lid finally surrendered with a crack, I gasped.
Letters. Dozens of them, yellowed and brittle with age, bound in bundles by faded ribbon.
“What are these?” Kevin lifted one with careful fingers. “Patient correspondence?”
I eased a bundle free and squinted at the spidery handwriting. The date at the top read 1891.
“To the physicians of Mercy Clinic,” I read aloud, my voice thin in the enclosed space. “I write to thank you for your kindness during my recent confinement. Though I lost my child, I did not lose my dignity, and that is more than I can say for my previous experience with the medical profession.”
My voice caught on the last word and wouldn’t restart.
Kevin shifted closer, and I felt his chest come up against my back, his arms folding around me from behind. I should have pushed him off.
I didn’t.
“There’s more,” he said quietly, reaching for another letter. “Look at this one. 1887. She says the doctors here actually listened to her. That they didn’t dismiss her pain as hysteria.”
“This one’s from 1894.” My hands had begun to shake around the fragile paper. “She lost three babies before this one. The other hospitals sent her home with laudanum and a pamphlet. Here, they sat with her while she grieved.”
Tears spilled over and slid hot down my face. These women, these voices sealed in the dark for more than a hundred years. Every one of them alone with a grief no one else would name.
Kevin’s arms drew tighter. He didn’t offer me a single word. He just held me while I wept for strangers I’d never meet, for a loss I understood in my own bones.
“We’ve got to preserve these,” I whispered. “They have to be part of the center.”
“The wall,” Kevin said slowly. “The one we were arguing about. What if we turned it into an exhibit? Kept the original molding, reinforced the structure, displayed the letters behind glass?”
I turned my head to look at him. His face was inches from mine, his eyes bright in the dark.
“Your medical mission and my historical preservation,” I said. “Combined.”
“Partners.”
The word hung in the air between us, heavier than the dust.
“That could work,” I admitted.
“I know.” He smiled. “We always made an exceptional team.”
Above us, a shout. “We’ve got a route! Stay where you are, we’re coming down!”
The rescue took another twenty minutes of ladders and braced planks. By the time hands hauled us up into the daylight, Kevin’s makeshift bandage had soaked through, dark red edge to edge.
“You need proper treatment,” I said.
“I need to make sure you’re checked first.”
“I’m fine!”
“Let the EMTs confirm that.”
“Kevin, you’re the one who’s actually bleeding!”
He ignored every word, planting himself stubbornly beside the ambulance while a paramedic ran through the checklist on me. Only once I’d been declared whole and uninjured would he finally sit down and let anyone touch his own arm.
The gash was deep. Deep enough that it needed stitches.
“I can do it,” I heard myself say.
Every head turned toward me.
“I’ve had training,” I explained, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. “Basic field medicine, for remote restoration sites. And I’ve watched him do it enough times.”
Kevin’s eyes found mine and held. “You sure?”
“Just tell me what to do.”
They set it up in the back of the ambulance. Kevin sat on the stretcher with his injured arm laid out across a sterile pad, walking me through it in a low, even voice while I cleaned the wound and threaded the needle with hands I willed not to tremble.
Our faces were inches apart. His breath brushed warm across my cheek, and beneath my fingertips his pulse stayed slow and even, calm where mine raced.
My fingertips had settled on the inside of his wrist, over the small careful script I’d seen from across the pool that first morning and traced in the dark since without ever letting myself read it.
It was three inches from my face now, under the hard white light of the ambulance. There was no not reading it.
A MAN WHO ANSWERS.
He’d put Alex over his heart, where the grief lived. He’d put this on the arm he raised every time he checked the time.
“You’re doing great,” he murmured.
“I’m terrified I’m going to scar you.”
“I don’t care about scars.”
“You’ll care when it’s crooked,” I muttered, not looking up from the needle.
“I’ll care when you stop looking at me like that.”
I looked up from the needle. His eyes had gone dark and intent, fixed on my face with a hunger that turned my stomach over.
“Like what?” I managed.
“Like you’re thinking about kissing me.”
“Ha. I’m thinking about stitching your arm.”
“Liar.”
I drew the last suture tight, maybe a fraction harder than the wound required. He winced.
“Done,” I announced.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
We were still too close. Still holding each other’s gaze. The clatter of the work crews receded into a low static, and the world narrowed to the space between his mouth and mine.
“Steph,” he breathed.
“We’ve got rules,” I whispered.
“You can change them anytime.”
“I’m not changing them.”
“Then tell me to back off.”
I opened my mouth. The words simply weren’t there. I searched for them and came up empty, and the silence stretched, and his hand came up to cup my face, his thumb settling against my cheekbone.
“Dr. Coleman?” A contractor’s voice cracked the moment clean in half. “We need your sign-off on the structural assessment.”
Kevin closed his eyes. Drew one long breath through his nose. Stepped back, his hand falling away, and the cold air rushed into the space where his palm had been.
“Coming,” he called.
He looked at me one last time, and the promise in that look buckled my knees.
Then he walked away, and I sat there in the back of the ambulance, needle still in my fingers, and forced myself to face the thing I’d been outrunning since the ferry.
I hadn’t told him to back off. I’d had the words right there, one syllable each, and I hadn’t been able to spend them.
My rules had lasted exactly nine days. And if a contractor hadn’t chosen that second to need a signature, I knew with a sick, thrilling certainty that I’d have let my ex-husband kiss me in the back of an ambulance in front of both our teams.
I was going to lose this. I could feel it coming for me, and worse, some traitorous part of me had already stopped running.