Sadie
The first morning I wake up and don't have to think about where I am, I know something has changed.
It's been twelve days since Nick carried me off the floor of my apartment. Nine since Mikhail removed the IV. Eight since I told Nick I was in, sitting in his bed with the sheet tucked under my arms and my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
Today I wake up in his bed the way I've woken up every morning since, on my side, facing the window, with his arm heavy across my waist and his breath warm against the back of my neck.
The curtains are drawn but the light comes through at the edges, and the house is quiet the way it's always quiet in the mornings before the phone calls start.
I check my sugar before I do anything else.
The meter is on the nightstand beside a glass of water Nick fills for me every night before we go to sleep.
One-fourteen. Clean. Stable. I've been stable for six days straight, which is the longest streak I've had in over a year, and I know it's because Mikhail adjusted my doses with a level of precision that makes the endocrinologist I saw twice in Millbrook look like he was guessing.
Nick's arm tightens when I shift. He's awake.
He's always awake before me, but he stays still until I move first, because he figured out sometime in the first week that I need the act of waking up to be mine.
I need to orient myself before I'm touched, before I'm spoken to.
He noticed it without me telling him, and he adjusted without asking, and every morning it loosens something in my chest that I didn't know was still tight.
"One-fourteen," I say.
His mouth presses against the nape of my neck. "Good."
That's the whole conversation. It happens every morning. The number and the word. It's the smallest ritual I've ever had with another person and it's already the one I'd miss the most.
I shower in his bathroom, which is roughly the size of my entire apartment, and has water pressure that makes me want to weep with gratitude.
There's a shelf in the shower now with my shampoo on it, the cheap drugstore kind I've used since college.
Nick hasn't replaced it. He hasn't upgraded it or swapped it out for something expensive.
It sits beside his on the shelf, my three-dollar bottle next to his whatever-it-costs bottle.
He doesn't try to make me into someone else. He just makes room for me exactly the way I am.
I dress in the clothes Dmitri brought from my apartment. My own jeans, my own shirts, my own underwear. Nick offered to buy me new things and I told him not yet, and he nodded and didn't push, and when I opened the dresser drawer he'd cleared for me, everything was folded the way I fold it.
I eat breakfast at the kitchen island. Toast and peanut butter and a glass of juice, the same breakfast I've eaten since I was twelve.
Nick sits across from me with his coffee and his phone, scrolling through messages, and every few minutes his eyes come up to check on me in a way that isn't hovering.
It's monitoring. The way a man monitors something he's invested in keeping alive.
Dmitri drives me to the clinic because the walk from Nicks’ is simply too far.
The car drops me at the staff entrance. Dmitri stays at the curb until I'm inside.
Priya hands me coffee the moment I round the corner. She looks at my face the way she's been looking at my face every morning since I came back, checking for something she can't name.
"Good morning?" she asks. It's a question and an assessment rolled into one.
"Good morning." I take the coffee. It's hot and terrible and perfect. "What've we got?"
"Full book. Mehta's in early. She wants to see you before we open."
I find Dr. Mehta in her office with the door half-closed. She waves me in without looking up from her laptop, finishes typing something, then closes the lid and gives me her full attention.
"Sadie. How are you feeling?"
"Good. Stable. Mikhail cleared me last week."
"I know. He called me." She says it matter-of-factly. I'm still getting used to the idea that my boyfriend's private doctor and my boss speak to each other about my health, but it tracks with everything else about my life now. The circles overlap and I sit squarely in the middle.
"I want to talk to you about something," she says.
I sit down. My hands go to my lap the way they always do when I'm preparing for information.
"The nursing program at Metro City College is accepting late applications for the fall semester. I spoke to the admissions office yesterday. Your credits from Ohio would transfer. You'd need eighteen months to complete the degree, assuming a full course load. Less if you took summer sessions."
I stare at her.
"I'm not pushing," she says. "I'm presenting an option. You're an excellent MA, and I'd hate to lose you. But you were two semesters away from an RN when you left school, and the reason you left doesn't apply anymore."
My mother. She means my mother. The reason I left was my mother's diagnosis, and the reason I never went back was the cost, and then Jason, and then survival.
"I can't afford it," I say.
"You might want to have that conversation with someone other than me." She picks up her coffee and takes a sip, and the look she gives me over the rim is the same look she gave me when she told me to leave Millbrook. Kind but immovable.
I think about it for the rest of the morning.
Between patients, between charts, between the steady rhythm of blood pressure cuffs and thermometers and the soft beep of the pulse oximeter.
I think about it while I clean a wound on a seven-year-old's knee and hand her a puppy band-aid from the box I restocked last week, the same brand I put on Emma's forehead at the wreck.
I think about it while I eat lunch with Priya and Denise in the break room.
I think about what Nick said. Go back to school. Finish the nursing degree. Go further.
He said it like it was simple. Like the thing standing between me and the life I wanted was just money, and money was something he had in quantities that made the obstacle vanish.
And he's right, technically. The obstacle is money.
It's always been money. But there's another obstacle behind that one, and it's the voice in the back of my head that sounds like Jason, telling me I'm not smart enough, not strong enough, not worth the investment.
That voice has been getting quieter.
It's still there. It speaks up when I'm tired or when my sugar dips. But it's quieter now, the volume down on a voice I thought would be with me forever.
Dmitri picks me up at six. The drive is twenty minutes. I watch the city go by through the window and I text Nick without thinking about it, the way I've started texting him during the day, small things, updates that don't require answers but get them anyway.
Good day. Full book. Mehta wants to talk to me about school.
His reply comes thirty seconds later.
Good. Can’t wait to hear all about it when you get home.
Home. He calls it home like it's already decided. Like the townhouse with the crown molding and the blue wallpaper and the dresser drawer with my cheap shampoo in the bathroom is mine. It's presumptuous and accurate and it makes me smile at my phone like a lovestruck teenager.
The car pulls up and I let myself in through the front door. The house smells like garlic and something roasting, which means Irina has been around today. I drop my bag on the bench in the hallway, kick off my flats and pad through to the kitchen in my socks.
Nick is at the counter with his sleeves rolled up and a glass of something amber beside his hand.
He's reading a document, but he looks up when I walk in, and the thing his face does when he sees me is something I'm never going to get used to.
A softening. Barely visible. Gone before anyone else would catch it.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi." He puts the document face down on the counter. "How's your sugar?"
"One-twenty. Checked twenty minutes ago."
He nods. "Sit. Eat. Then tell me about school."
I sit on the stool across from him. Irina puts a plate in front of me, roasted chicken with vegetables and rice. Nick watches me eat while I update him about Dr Mehta’s suggested about returning to school.
He listens without interrupting. When I'm done, he picks up his glass and takes a sip and sets it back down.
"Do you want it?" he asks.
"Yes." It comes out before I've finished thinking about it, and the speed of it surprises me. I've spent all day turning the idea over like a stone, examining every angle, cataloging every reason it won't work. But the want was there the whole time, underneath the reasons, patient and stubborn.
"Then it's yours," he says. "Apply tomorrow. I'll handle the rest."
"Nick, I need to pay for it myself."
He looks at me. I watch him weigh what I've said against what he wants to do, and I watch him choose me over his own instinct to provide.
"Then we'll figure it out," he says. "Loans, scholarships, whatever you want. And if there's a gap, I fill it. No arguments. That’s a compromise."
"Some arguments," I pout.
"Fine. Some arguments." The corner of his mouth lifts.
I reach across the counter and put my hand over his. His fingers turn and link with mine.
This is the rhythm. This is what I didn't know I was looking for when I packed my car and drove ninety miles behind a moving van with my whole life in boxes. This steady, certain thing.
I'm not the woman I was in Millbrook. I'm not the woman on the floor of apartment 4C, either. I'm someone new, someone still forming, and the shape I'm taking fits here in a way that scares me and steadies me in equal measure.
"Thank you," I say.
He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles. The same knuckles he kissed when I woke up in his bed four days after nearly dying. The gesture is the same. The meaning has grown.
"You're welcome," he says.