Chapter Fourteen – Bittersweet
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bittersweet
I n the weeks that follow, our new life starts to feel real, but I still catch stunned looks on my brothers’ faces sometimes. Just for a second, like everything still feels too good to be true. I’m sure they see the same in mine.
We fall into a solid routine. Every morning, we wake up with Jo and make her breakfast while she gets ready for work.
In the afternoons, when we get home, we have a couple of hours of lazy downtime before she returns.
Then we cook together while she tells us about her shift and asks us about ours.
After dinner, we shower, and every night ends the same: the three of us hungrily waiting for her in the nest.
But threaded through the happiness of our home life is the shadow of what she’s going through at work.
The shift at the hospital has been brutal.
It’s not just gossip anymore; it’s the silence in the break room when she walks in, the way conversations pause mid-sentence and never resume.
Some of her colleagues won’t meet her eyes.
Others speak to her with exaggerated politeness, like they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, or anything at all.
She’s patched things up with Jenna and Kacy, her closest friends at the hospital, but even with them, there’s a stiffness, like they’re still recalibrating who she is and they’re not sure how to treat her anymore.
But with others, it’s way worse. She told us one of the attending physicians has started double-checking every chart she signs, even when she follows protocol to the letter. Nurses have begun to “mistakenly” reroute consults to other residents.
It’s like the moment people found out she wasn’t human, they stopped believing she could be a doctor, as if the years she spent studying and sacrificing meant nothing.
On Wednesday, she comes home with dry eyes, but they’re red and puffy. We all jump from the couch and rush to her, our chests humming loudly.
“I’m okay,” she says when she sees our faces.
She drops onto the couch, and we circle her, anxious, waiting for her to tell us what happened.
“The hospital’s making me disclose to every patient that I’m a nyra before I see them, so they can choose if they want to ask for someone else,” she says, her face buried in her hands .
Shane hisses through his teeth.
“Can they do that?” Jay asks, his voice clipped.
“Yes,” she says, exhausted. “I talked to the legal department today. There’s basically no regulation about what they can or can’t do in this situation. There’s never been another gregalis resident before.”
I press my teeth together so hard I’m surprised they don’t crack. “I’m sorry, Jo.”
It’s pointless; we’re all obviously sorry about everything, but being sorry helps nothing.
On Friday, Alice stops by with her husband, Jayme, and their little girl, Kate. Jo worked a brutal twenty-four-hour on-call shift yesterday, so today her shift was short.
When we walk in, she’s sitting on the wooden bench in the backyard with Alice and Jayme, watching Kate chase leaves across the grass. Alice isn’t warm, but she isn’t hostile either.
Jayme, though, goes out of his way to be friendly.
He’s a criminal defense attorney, used to working with cops, and he clearly picks up on the stiffness Alice can’t quite hide.
Maybe that’s why he makes such an effort, chatting with Jay about department policies and cracking jokes with Shane.
It feels like he’s trying to smooth the edges, and we appreciate it.
A little while after we join them, Alice asks Jo if she’s happy.
“It’s complicated,” Jo replies. “At home with my mates, I’m happier than I ever thought was possible. But everything else, every other part of my life, is kind of crumbling.”
“I still think you should let me help,” Jayme says as they’re getting ready to leave.
“The fact that there’s no regulation just means we have the chance to establish one.
The way they’re treating you is prejudice, Jo.
We could fight it. Not just for you, but for any nyra or aegis who ends up in the same situation someday. ”
But Jo is firm in her decision to avoid a lawsuit at all costs.
“I appreciate your offer, Jayme. But let’s be realistic: I'm a total outlier. There isn’t anyone else like me in the system.
A resident suing the hospital where she’s still in training?
That could bury my career. I won’t risk it unless it’s my last resort. ”
When they say goodbye, Jayme stares at Jo for a while. “They seem like good guys,” he says.
She smiles. “They are.”
Not every visit is nice, though.
On Saturday morning, a woman we’ve never seen before shows up at our door with a still-warm loaf of banana bread.
Says her name is Bree Sorensen, and that she lives three houses down.
She somehow knows a lot about us: where we work, what time we leave in the mornings, even what truck we drive. I have no idea how .
She looks disappointed when we tell her Jo is at work and says she’ll come back later.
She does, in the same afternoon. Jo answers the door this time. The woman immediately pulls her into a hug and kisses both her cheeks. Jo invites her in and makes coffee, and we leave them to chat while we finish cutting the grass.
But when I come inside to grab a bottle of water, I know something’s off.
Jo’s scent hits me first, acid sharp, the way it gets when she’s upset.
I move closer and catch sight of her at the kitchen counter, standing stiffly, facing the woman, voice like ice when she says: “I think you should leave.”
The lady looks like she wants to argue, but when she spots me at the doorway, she gets up and leaves without another word.
Jo is livid. “Can you believe that woman?” she says, slamming the fridge shut. “She told me her church could help women in ‘difficult situations’ like mine.”
“What difficult situation?” I ask, confused.
“Living with three men,” she snaps. “She tried to convince me to ‘abandon my sinner life’.”
Every instinct I have tells me to go after that woman and make sure she never comes near Jo again, but I clench my jaw and wrap my arms around her instead.
That week, the truck started running hotter than usual. Jay ran the codes and traced it back to either the thermostat or the coolant temp sensor. So Sunday morning, we’re out front, popping the F-150’s hood.
It’s crisp outside, sunny but cold. We have tools laid out on a towel in the driveway, music playing low off Shane’s phone.
Jay crouches near the front tire, double-checking the sensor diagram on his phone while I lean over the engine bay, sleeves shoved up, forearms streaked with grease.
Shane wrestles with the housing bolts, his knuckles white around the wrench.
“You’re gonna round it out if you keep forcing it,” I mutter without looking up.
“I barely touched it,” he snaps.
Without a word, I toss him a clean rag. He catches it midair, wipes his hands, then tosses it back. That’s when we hear someone call from the sidewalk, voice amused and easy:
“Well, that’s a pleasant sight. Three guys and a truck. You fixing her, or just trying to scare her straight?”
I straighten up and squint toward the street. It’s the guy from next door, the one who waved when we first moved in.
“Coolant sensor’s acting up,” I tell him. “Might be the thermostat too.”
He steps closer, smiling as he offers a hand. “Mike Thompson.”
I lift my hands, palms up. “Sorry, greased to hell.”
“Fair,” Mike chuckles. “My old F-150 used to pull that crap every winter. I miss that beast. But my husband’s a fuel-efficiency guy. Won’t let me near anything that gets under twenty MPG.”
“Sounds like a wise man,” Jay replies.
We stand around for a few minutes, talking trucks, tools, and early cold snaps. Shane finally gets the bolt loose with a grunt of triumph and sits back, holding it like a trophy.
It’s weird, having a friendly conversation with a stranger, especially a human man. But it’s good.
Mike starts to head back toward his house, then pauses and turns. “Has Bree Sorensen come by to bully you yet?”
I blink. “Red hair, three doors down? Yeah. She upset our mate just yesterday. How’d you know?”
Mike snorts. “When Hugh and I moved in two years ago, she gave us hell. For someone who loves church so much, she really hates anyone who doesn’t fit her mold. I figured aegis would set her off, too.”
He waves it off. “Don’t let her get to you. She’s just a Karen. Loud, judgy, but harmless.”
When we tell Jo about Mike, she smiles and says we should invite him and his husband to the barbecue she’s planning, once she sets a date.
Life gets bittersweet, torn between joy and tension.
The following week, we drive to Bridgeport to watch an ice hockey game for the first time, and Jo’s buzzing with excitement to introduce us to the sport.
None of us expected to like it as much as we do.
The cold air in the arena, the roar of the crowd every time the puck slams into the boards, the tension before a face-off: it’s electric.
We don’t know the rules, don’t know the players, but Jo gives quick explanations with glowing eyes and half-yelled commentary between bites of pretzels and sips of cheap beer.
She loves our reactions, how quickly we get into it, how we lean forward during power plays like it actually matters.
But the very next day after the game, she comes home with red eyes again. I’m in the living room when she walks in, so I reach her first, and she starts sobbing the moment she’s in my arms. Jay and Shane rush in seconds later, coming from the back of the house.
We hum for her and let her cry. When the tears finally slow and she can breathe again, she tells us what happened.
“The last patient didn’t even let me finish,” she says, choking on the words. “As soon as I said I’m a nyra, he cut me off and said he didn’t want me playing doctor on him. That he was really sick and needed a real doctor.”