33
Lila
Something was still off with Jade. She kept her phone facedown on the table, answered too quickly when I asked if she had slept alright, and carried herself with the careful normalcy of somebody who didn’t want to be watched too closely.
I poured coffee into my travel mug while she sat at the kitchen table in black jeans and one of my old oversized band shirts, one boot hooked on the chair rung. Her backpack waited by the door and half her toast was gone. Everything looked ordinary. That was what bothered me.
I kept my tone casual. “You good?”
She looked up immediately. “Yep.” Too quick. Too neat.
I tightened the lid on my mug and stayed where I was instead of letting her rush me past it. “That sounded suspiciously rehearsed.”
Jade huffed through her nose and took another bite of toast. “Maybe I’m just naturally convincing.”
“Maybe.” I let her have the joke before easing toward what I actually meant. “I meant after yesterday. With Matty. With all of that.”
Her chewing slowed. She swallowed, took a drink, then gave me the answer she had probably already decided on. “I’m fine, Mom.”
“Mhm.” I let the sound carry exactly how unconvinced I was.
Her eyes sharpened over the rim of the glass. “Dad handled it.”
That word still did something strange to me. Dad. It should have felt foreign after sixteen years. Instead, hearing her use it made something ache and settle at the same time.
Jade looked away first. “Uncle Matty said something awful,” she said, dry enough to make the whole thing sound easier than it had been.
“Dad punched him for it. Uncle Matty gave a half-assed apology, stormed out to lick his wounds, and he’ll probably come back later with a more heartfelt version once he’s had time to realize what an ass he was being.
” She shrugged and took another bite. “I’m good. It’s all good. I swear.”
She was trying so hard to spare me that my chest tightened. I stirred cream into coffee I had already stirred once. “That was a very polished speech.”
“You’re welcome.” Her dry little answer almost made me smile.
I didn’t let her joke me away from it. “It sounded prepared.”
Jade leaned back with a small eye roll. “You say that like I’m not gifted under pressure.”
A smile almost won. The worry didn’t move. “Jade.”
Her shoulders changed just enough to warn me I was getting close to the door she would slam if I pushed too hard. I changed direction. “You know you don’t have to protect me from your feelings, right?”
Her gaze snapped back to mine. “I’m not.”
I raised a brow and waited her out rather than argue.
She dropped her head back as if the ceiling had joined my side.
“I’m really not,” she said, and some of the polish finally disappeared.
“It was bad, yeah. And weird. And I kind of wanted the floor to open up and swallow all of you for a minute. But I’m okay.
” Her mouth twitched. “Also, if we’re being honest, watching my dad deck Uncle Matty was a little emotionally confusing. ”
The laugh escaped before I could stop it. Jade pointed at me immediately. “See? You laughed. That means I’m coping.”
I shook my head, even though she had managed to loosen something in me. “That is not how that works.”
Her mouth twitched. “It should be.”
I shook my head, still smiling despite myself. “You sure you’re okay with all of this? The move. The new school. Your dad suddenly being around. Everything happening so fast.”
Her expression softened. “Mom,” she said, quieter now, “I’m okay.” The quiet certainty sounded more honest than the polished answers before it, but I still heard the part she wasn’t offering.
I kept my voice gentle instead of challenging her. “I didn’t say you weren’t.”
“You were definitely thinking it.” She knew me too well for denial to survive, and some of the tension in her shoulders eased because I wasn’t forcing her past what she wanted to say.
That pulled a breath of laughter from me. “That is unfortunately one of my gifts.”
Her smile turned real. “It’s fine. School’s fine. The move is fine. Dad is...” She paused, considering the word that came next. “A lot. But in a mostly okay way. Everybody can stop being weird now.”
Everybody. Me. Jackson. Dad. Matty. All of us trying to make a family crisis behave like something ordinary.
Jade reached for her phone and stopped herself halfway there. I noticed. She noticed me noticing. Her hand returned to her toast while she rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “You’re gonna be late if you keep staring at me like that.”
I picked up my bag but didn’t leave yet. “You know if any of that changes, you tell me.”
“I know.” The answer came easily, maybe too easily, but she met my eyes when she said it. For now, I had to trust that.
“Love you,” I said, because sometimes that was the only thing a mother could leave behind without asking for anything in return.
“Love you too, Mom.” Her voice followed me out with enough warmth that I let myself go.
I left with the worry still under my skin. Motherhood didn’t always mean getting the truth the moment you wanted it. Sometimes it meant staying close enough that your child knew where to put it when she was ready.
The drive to the construction site gave me too much time to replay breakfast. I pulled into the gravel lot beside the half-finished emergency department with half my coffee gone and my thoughts still stuck on the way Jade had stopped herself from touching her phone.
Our temporary planning office was a metal trailer planted beside the construction site, surrounded by orange cones and the steady grind of work outside. Inside, the air-conditioning ran too cold over floor plans, vendor catalogs, binders, and enough abandoned coffee cups to qualify as decor.
Blue was already working through a stack of papers. Evan sat crooked in his chair with the expression of a man personally wronged by administrative labor. He looked up the second I came in. “Thank God. Another fifteen minutes alone with staffing applications and I was going to walk into traffic.”
Blue didn’t bother looking up. “No, you weren’t.”
Evan accepted the correction without shame. “No,” he admitted, “but I would have complained about it beautifully.”
I dropped my bag beside my chair and sat. “What are we doing first?”
“Doctors,” Blue said, sliding a stack toward me. “Then nursing. Then we argue over who looks good on paper and who would actually survive a trauma night without crying in the med room.”
“That seems fair.” I reached for the stack, grateful for work concrete enough to organize.
Evan hummed and tapped one application. “And then there’s this.”
Blue’s mouth twitched before she looked at me. “You might want to sit with that one a second.”
I frowned and took the page. The name at the top stopped me: Dr. Mason Reid. For a moment I stared at it. Mason was from Wicker Falls, old shifts, and a period when I had mistaken uncomplicated for meaningful because uncomplicated had been all I wanted.
Evan watched my face with open interest. “Well, this is fun.”
Blue gave him a warning look that had never once stopped him. “Don’t.”
He put a hand to his chest, already committed to the bit. “I am being supportive.”
“No,” I said dryly, still looking at the application. “You’re being nosy.”
“I’m capable of both.” Unfortunately, that was true enough that arguing would only entertain him.
I set the page down. “He’s an attending. Smart. Good in trauma. Good with patients.”
Evan’s brows lifted, and the professional discussion immediately died under the weight of his curiosity. “And in bed, unless I’ve wildly misremembered history.”
Blue closed her eyes like patience had become a physical burden. “Evan.” She had known him long enough to recognize that warning him usually made things worse.
“What? We’re all adults. Supposedly.” His innocence was insulting, especially when he already knew exactly how much history there was to tease me about.
I gave him a flat look and refused to hand him anything useful. “It was short history.”
“That is not the part of the sentence I was inquiring about.” He leaned back, pleased with himself because embarrassment counted as victory in Evan’s world.
“Evan.” I put enough warning into his name to make the point and let the silence after it tell him the subject was finished.
“He grinned, entirely unrepentant. ‘Fine. But only because I’m a model of restraint.’”
Blue ignored him and asked the only question that mattered. “Would you be okay with him working here?”
I picked up the application again even though I already knew Mason was qualified. “It’s fine,” I said after a second. “If he’s applying knowing I’m here, then I have to assume he’s fine with it too.”
Blue studied me long enough to make the real question unavoidable. “And you are?”
“Yes.” The answer was true.
Mostly. Mason and I had never been serious.
He had been warm, funny, attractive, and available when I wanted something physical without complications.
Then he started wanting dinners and more of me than I could offer.
I ended it before either of us could pretend it was becoming something else, and afterward his schedule stopped overlapping mine often enough that I had wondered whether coincidence deserved the credit.
Evan made a thoughtful sound. “You know who I bet will not be fine with it, though?”
I kept my eyes on the page because I knew exactly who he meant. “He doesn’t get a vote.”
Evan’s brows climbed. “Cute. I’m sure hearing you’ll be working with a man you used to sleep with will make Deacon suddenly remember that.”
I looked up. “It should.”
Blue took a sip of coffee, far too calm to be trusted. “He’ll still have a reaction.”
I exhaled. “Deacon does not get to have opinions about me working with someone I used to sleep with. I’m pretty sure he didn’t sit around celibate these last seventeen years.”
Evan’s smile sharpened because he had heard the jealousy I was refusing to admit. “You know, that would sound much more convincing if you said it like you didn’t care.”