Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Leah
I don't know when I started coming here every other day.
It wasn't a decision. It wasn't a conversation.
Nobody sat me down and said Leah, you're going to spend your evenings at a single dad's house helping one daughter with physical therapy and the other with seventh-grade math, and you're going to like it.
It just... happened.
The way important things tend to happen—not with a bang, but with a slow, quiet slide you don't notice until you're already in the middle of it.
Tonight, I'm cross-legged on Coin's living room floor with Wrenleigh, guiding her through ankle rotations that she insists are "medieval torture devices disguised as healthcare."
"Ten more," I say.
"I've done ten."
"You've done six. I'm counting."
"Your counting is wrong."
"I'm a nurse. I count things for a living."
She huffs—full-body, dramatic, the kind of exhale that could put out a birthday cake from across the room—and finishes the rotations.
Her mobility is improving.
The boot is doing its job, the swelling is down, and she's got more range of motion this week than last.
She'll deny it if I point that out, so I don't.
Sadie Jo is on the couch behind us, her math textbook open on her lap, but she stopped doing homework twenty minutes ago.
She's watching us.
Not in the suspicious way she watched me the first time I came over—measuring, testing, deciding whether I was safe.
This is different. This is a thirteen-year-old girl settling into the presence of a woman who keeps showing up, and quietly deciding she doesn't mind it.
She hasn't asked me for help with her homework tonight.
She just migrated from the kitchen table to the couch on her own, like she wanted to be in the same room.
If you ask me, that means a lot.
A kid choosing to be close to you shows how much they trust, or like you.
"All right," I say, standing and stretching my back. "You're done for tonight. Ice it for twenty minutes before bed."
"Yes, ma'am," Wrenleigh says, with exactly zero sincerity, and grabs the remote.
Coin appears in the doorway from the kitchen.
He's been in there for the past hour, doing dishes, making lunches for tomorrow, existing in the steady rhythm of a man who runs a household the way some people run a company—organized, tireless, and completely unwilling to admit he's exhausted.
"Girls. Bed in thirty."
"Dad, it's only—"
"Thirty, Wrenleigh."
She groans.
Sadie Jo is already closing her textbook, because Sadie Jo doesn't argue about bedtime.
She argues about almost nothing, which worries me more than Wrenleigh's constant battles.
The loud kids are easy. It's the quiet ones who keep you up at night.
I start gathering my things—jacket, keys, the PT folder I've been leaving here between visits because it's easier than carrying it back and forth.
I'm halfway to the door when Coin's voice stops me. "You don't have to rush off."
I turn. He's leaning against the kitchen doorframe, arms crossed, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder.
His hair is pushed back and there's a spot of dish soap on his forearm that he hasn't noticed, and I hate that I find that endearing because I am a grown woman and dish soap should not be doing things to my cardiovascular system.
"The girls are going to bed," he says. "I was going to sit on the porch for a while, if you want to join me."
"Sure," I say. "I could sit for a minute."
The porch is cold.
October in Morgantown, and the temperature drops fast once the sun goes down—the kind of cold that settles into your bones if you're sitting still, the kind that smells like wood smoke and fallen leaves and the particular sharpness of mountain air turning toward winter.
I'm still in my scrubs. They're thin. Not built for sitting on a porch in October.
I don't say anything about it because I'm stubborn and I've been cold before and I'll be cold again.
Coin sits down next to me—not close, not far.
The exact distance a careful man would choose.
He sets two mugs on the porch railing.
Coffee. Black for him.
He remembered that I take mine with cream, because of course he did.
"Thanks," I say, wrapping my hands around the mug as he nods.
I think it's sweet how he knows I'm a coffee addict.
Pulls the coin from his pocket and starts turning it between his fingers—that unconscious habit, the one I've watched from across rooms and never seen this close.
The coin catches the porch light, flashing gold-silver-gold as it moves.
His hands are rough. Scarred across the knuckles.
But they move the coin with a gentleness that doesn't match the rest of him, the way his hands were gentle on Wrenleigh's face in the ER, the way they're always gentle with things that matter.
We sit in silence for a while.
Not awkward—earned.
The kind of quiet that happens when two people have been in the same space enough times that the pressure to fill it has worn away.
Then he says, "Sadie Jo asked about you today."
"About me?"
"Asked if you were coming over tonight. Before school. At breakfast." He pauses. The coin turns. "She doesn't ask about people, Leah. She just doesn't."
The way he says it—like he's handing me something fragile and hoping I understand the weight of it—makes my throat tight.
"She's a special kid," I say. "They both are."
"They're everything to me." He says it simply.
No drama, no emphasis. Just fact. The sky is blue.
Water is wet. My daughters are everything.
"I used to think that was enough. That being their dad was enough to fill.
.. all of it." He gestures vaguely—at the house, the porch, the dark yard beyond. "The rest of it."
"And now?"
He's quiet for a long time. The coin turns. The porch creaks under us as the wood contracts in the cold.
"Now I don't know," he says. "I've been doing this alone for a decade now.
And I got good at it. Efficient. I can make breakfast, pack lunches, sign permission slips, check homework, and break up an argument about the bathroom—all before seven a.m." The corner of his mouth twitches.
"But there's this thing that happens at night, after they're in bed, when the house goes quiet.
And it's just me. And the quiet isn't peaceful. It's... loud. The wrong kind of loud."
I know that quiet.
I live in that quiet every night in my apartment—the kind that presses against the walls and reminds you that no one is coming home, no one is going to ask how your day was, no one is breathing in the next room.
The kind of quiet that makes you turn on the TV just to hear a voice that isn't your own.
"I know exactly what you mean," I say.
He looks at me. Those blue-gray eyes, catching the porch light, seeing more than I want them to see. "Yeah. I think you do."
Something shifts. Not in the air, not in the space between us—in me.
Something I've been holding at arm's length since the night I watched him carry his daughter out of my ER takes a step closer, and I don't push it back.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
"You can ask. I might not answer."
"Fair enough." I touch my scar without thinking about it—the raised line above my eyebrow, the one I've been carrying since I was four. "Your scar. You know about mine. Garrett probably told you."
"The fire," he says. Quiet. Respectful. "You were four. He pulled you out."
"I don't remember it. Not really. Just..
. heat. And Garrett's arms. And then Ellie's kitchen, and my forehead wrapped in bandages.
" I trace the line of the scar with one finger.
"I used to hate it. When I was a teenager, I tried to cover it with makeup.
Spent an hour every morning with concealer and foundation trying to make it disappear.
And then one day I just... stopped. I don't know why.
I just looked at it in the mirror and thought, this is where I started. Everything I am came after this scar."
He's watching me.
Not just looking—watching, the way he watches everything, with that full attention that makes you feel like you're the only thing in the room.
"What about yours?" I ask. "Garrett said a fight. When you were a teenager."
He almost smiles. "Garrett talks too much."
"Garrett has said maybe forty words to me this month. That's practically a monologue for him."
The almost-smile gets a fraction wider. Then it fades, and something older settles into his face.
"I was fifteen," he says. "My mom had been gone a few years.
My dad was... not around much. He was dealing with his own stuff—drinking, mostly.
I was angry about everything and I had nowhere to put it.
" He turns the coin. "There was this kid at school.
Bigger than me. Ran his mouth about my dad—said something I won't repeat.
And I just... went at him. No plan, no strategy.
Just fifteen years of not knowing what to do with the shit I was feeling, and this kid gave me a target. "
"Did you win?"
"Depends on how you define winning. He went to the nurse's office with a broken nose. I went with this." He taps the scar through his eyebrow. "His class ring caught me. Split the skin right open. Bled everywhere. The school called my grandpa because my dad didn't answer the phone."
"Your grandpa." I glance at the coin in his hand.
"Yeah." His thumb runs across the surface.
"He picked me up. Didn't say a word the whole drive home.
Just handed me a rag for the blood and drove.
When we got to his house, he sat me at the kitchen table and cleaned the cut himself—wouldn't take me to the hospital, said Adkins men don't need stitches for something that small.
" A pause. "Then he gave me this coin. Said his father gave it to him, and his father gave it to him before that.
Said, 'Every time you want to hit something, hold this instead.
Figure out what you're actually angry about before you swing. '"
"Did it work?"