Chapter 2 #2
She points a flour-dusted finger at the table. "Sit. I'm making chicken and biscuits and you're eating a full plate or I'm calling your brother."
"I'm twenty-eight years old, Ellie."
"And I wiped snot off your nose, so sit down."
I sit down. Some fights aren't worth having, and Ellie's kitchen is one of them.
Vanna settles into the chair next to mine, Waylon dozing on her shoulder.
She shifts him to the other side with the practiced one-handed ease of a woman who's figured out how to do everything in her life while holding an eight-pound human.
"He sleeping?" Ellie asks, glancing over.
"For now. Give it twenty minutes."
Ellie slides a glass of sweet tea in front of each of us without being asked, then reaches for Waylon with both hands. "Give him here. You need to eat too, and you can't do that with a baby attached to you."
Vanna hesitates for half a second—the new-mother reflex, the one that doesn't want to let go even when her arms are screaming—and then hands him over.
Ellie takes Waylon like she's been holding babies her whole life, which she has.
She tucks him into the crook of her arm and keeps right on cooking with her free hand, stirring the gravy without missing a beat.
Waylon doesn't even stir.
"Your mama was the same way," Ellie says to me, not looking up from the pot. "Couldn't put Garrett down for the first three months. Carried that boy everywhere. Your daddy used to say she was going to wear a groove in the floor from pacing with him."
It's a small thing—Ellie mentioning my mother casually, like a woman she knew and loved and still carries with her.
She's the only person who does that.
Garrett doesn't talk about them.
I don't remember much about them.
But Ellie keeps them alive in these little moments, these throwaway lines that aren't throwaway at all, and every single time it hits me somewhere soft.
I take a sip of the tea. It's perfect. It's always perfect.
The three of us settle into the kitchen the way women do when the space is safe enough to breathe in—Ellie cooking with a newborn in one arm like it's nothing, Vanna sipping her tea with both hands free for the first time in hours, and me just... being here.
Not a nurse. Not Garrett's sister.
Just Leah, sitting in a warm kitchen with flour on the counter and the smell of biscuits in the oven and two women who know me well enough not to ask if I'm okay when I'm clearly not.
Vanna's telling Ellie about Waylon's pediatrician appointment when I hear boots in the hallway.
Heavy, but not loud. Deliberate.
The kind of footsteps that belong to a man who's aware of the space he moves through without needing to dominate it.
Coin appears in the kitchen doorway with a laptop tucked under one arm and his cut hanging open over a dark t-shirt.
His hair is pushed back like he's been running his hands through it—dark, almost black against the overhead light.
Those blue-gray eyes sweep the room the way they always do, touching everything, landing nowhere too long.
Then they land on me.
A flicker of something that's gone before I can name it, and then it's just Coin again—locked down, unreadable.
"Ladies," he says, and his voice is low and even and does absolutely nothing to me.
Nothing. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself.
"Coin." Ellie's the one who answers, because of course she is. She doesn't even slow down her stirring, Waylon still dead asleep in her other arm. "You staying for dinner? I'm making enough for the whole damn club, as usual."
"Can't tonight. Girls are at home." He holds up the laptop. "Just picking this up for Sadie Jo. Krypton got it running again."
His eyes flick to Waylon for a second, and something shifts in his face—something quiet and far away, like he's remembering what it felt like to hold something that small. Then it's gone.
"How's Wrenleigh's leg?" I ask, because it's a medical question and medical questions are safe when I am just a nurse making professional inquiries about a former patient.
He turns those eyes on me fully and I feel it the same way I felt it in the hospital—like a hand pressing flat against my sternum. "Healing up good. She's ready to set the cast on fire, but that's Wrenleigh."
"That sounds about right." I almost smile. "Tell her to stop sticking pencils down the cast to scratch it. I know she's doing it. It causes skin breakdown."
The corner of his mouth does that thing—that barely-there twitch that I've now seen twice and shouldn't be keeping count of. "I'll pass that along. She'll ignore it, but I'll pass it along."
"That also sounds about right."
We look at each other for a beat too long. Or maybe it's not too long. Maybe it's exactly the right amount of time and I'm the one making it weird by noticing.
"Thanks again," he says. "For everything at the hospital. Both of them—you were..." He pauses. Chooses his words the way I've noticed he chooses everything—carefully, deliberately, like he only gets a certain number per day and he's not going to waste them. "You were good with them."
"It's what I do," I say, which is the same thing I told him at Ruby Memorial, and it's still true and still not the whole truth.
He nods once, taps the laptop with two fingers like a goodbye, and walks out.
Those boots, steady and deliberate, fading down the hallway.
The kitchen is quiet for about three seconds.
Vanna is staring at me.
I don't look at her. I take a very deliberate sip of my sweet tea.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're thinking it."
"I'm thinking lots of things."
"Vanna."
She mimes zipping her lips. The grin she's hiding behind her hand is visible from space.
Ellie, at the stove, hasn't turned around.
Waylon is still asleep in her arm like he was born there.
But I can see her shoulders shaking with a laugh she's not even trying to suppress.
"He's a good one, that Coin," Ellie says to no one in particular, like she's commenting on the weather.
"Quiet. Steady. Raised those girls all by himself for ten years and never once complained about it.
Not once." She pauses, stirring something in the pot.
"A man like that doesn't know what to do when someone's kind to his children.
Doesn't know what to do with it. Been so long since anyone was. "
"Ellie."
"I'm just making an observation, sweetheart. Stir the gravy."
I stir the gravy.
I do not think about blue-gray eyes or the way he said you were good with them, like it cost him something to admit it.
I don’t even think about the way his t-shirt pulled across his shoulders when he turned to leave, or the scar through his eyebrow that I felt in my own skin like a phantom ache.
Hell, I don’t think about the way he looked at Waylon like he was remembering a version of himself from a long time ago.
I stir the gravy and I help Ellie plate dinner and I eat a full meal for the first time in two days because arguing with Ellie about food is like arguing with weather—pointless and exhausting and you're going to lose.
Garrett finds me on the front steps after dinner.
I'm sitting with my knees pulled up, watching the last of the daylight bleed out of the sky over the treeline.
Fall is settling into Morgantown the way it does every year—slowly, then all at once, the mountains going gold and red like someone lit them on fire from the inside.
He sits down next to me and doesn't say anything for a while.
That's how Garrett operates—he'll sit in silence for twenty minutes and then say one sentence that guts you.
Tonight it takes him about five.
"Coin's a good man."
I close my eyes. "Don't start."
"I'm not starting anything. I'm telling you something."
"You're telling me because you saw or heard something and now you're doing the big brother thing where you either give me your blessing or threaten to break someone's kneecaps, and I don't need either one because there's nothing happening."
"I didn't say there was."
"Then why bring it up?"
He's quiet for a second. When I open my eyes, he's looking straight ahead at the parking lot, his forearms resting on his knees.
The tattoos on his arms shift in the low light. He looks like our father. The resemblance is so strong it hurts sometimes.
"Because I know you, Leah. You take care of everyone. You fix everything that's broken. And then you go home to an empty apartment and you don't let anyone take care of you." He pauses. "That's not a life. That's a shift that never ends."
"Wow. Deep thoughts from the Sergeant at Arms."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are. That's what scares me."
He turns his head and looks at me.
Really looks—the way only Garrett can, the way that makes me feel like I'm four years old and he's pulling me out of a burning house all over again.
My big brother. The one who saved my life and has been trying to save everyone else's ever since.
"He's a good man," he says again. "That's all I'm saying."
"That's never all you're saying."
The corner of his mouth twitches—and I hate that it reminds me of someone else's almost-smile, and I hate that I notice the similarity, and I hate that my brain has apparently decided to start comparing these two men without my permission.
Garrett stands up, squeezes my shoulder once, and goes back inside.
I sit on the steps for another ten minutes. The mountains are almost dark now, the gold fading to something deeper and cooler. Somewhere in the distance, a truck downshifts on the highway and the sound carries through the valley the way sounds do in West Virginia—far and clear and lonesome.
I think about Brianna. Twenty-three years old, blonde hair, fingernails digging into my wrist. Please don't tell my mom.
I think about Caitlyn. Sixteen. Junior at Morgantown High. Twenty-six minutes that weren't enough.
I think about a quiet man standing in a kitchen doorway with a laptop for his daughter and eyes that swept the room like he was looking for threats and found me instead.
I think about all of this, and then I get in my car and I drive home to my empty apartment, where I stand in the shower until the water goes cold.
I press my forehead against the tile and I let the day run off me.
I don't cry. I never cry. That's not what Mercers do.
But I stand there for a long time.
And when I finally get into bed, my hand drifts to the scar above my eyebrow the way it did the night I watched him carry his daughter out of my ER, and I think—
I'm not looking for this. I'm not looking for anything.
But something found me anyway, and I don't know what to do with it.
So, I do what I always do. I close my eyes. I set my alarm for five a.m. I tell myself tomorrow will be easier.
It won't be. But that's the lie that gets me through the night.