Chapter Three
Casey
I CARRY THE CARD FOR nine days. It lives in the left pocket of my scrub top, which is the pocket I don’t use for anything clinical, the one where I keep a spare pen, a piece of gum, and whatever else doesn’t matter enough to stay organized.
I touch it once a shift, sometimes twice, and every time I think about throwing it away, I put it back, which tells me everything I need to know about myself and nothing I want to admit.
On the ninth night, Marnie catches me checking the pocket during a lull at the nurses’ station. “Call him or throw it away,” she says without looking up from her charting. “You’ve been fondling that card like it’s sexy. It’s getting weird.”
I snort. “I’m not fondling anything. I’m organizing my pocket.”
“You organized your pocket a few minutes ago too. How disorganized could it be?” She gives me a stern look, but the caring shows through. “Call him, Casey.”
“He was my patient.”
“Was. He was discharged nine days ago. He’s a man with a phone number and a line that worked on you, and you’re standing here pretending your pocket needs attention.
Call him.” She finishes her note and clicks the pen shut.
“Or don’t, and stop being strange about it.
Those are the two options. There’s no third option where you carry the card around for another week, and I don’t say anything. ”
It’s a shorter shift than usual, and a boring night, so I get home early.
I could shower and fall into bed. Instead, I call him from my kitchen at 6:14 a.m., still in scrubs, shoes kicked off by the door.
He picks up on the second ring, which means he was either awake or he sleeps with the phone close.
Given what I know about Sterling Hollingsford, both are equally likely.
“It’s Casey. From the hospital.”
“I know who it is.” His voice is alert, with rasp or hesitation. He was awake. “You took nine days.”
“Technically ten.” I take a deep breath, putting myself in the right frame of mind to talk to a man who was a patient but is now...I don’t know yet. “I was busy.”
“You were deciding.”
He’s right, but I don’t confirm it, because confirming it gives him an advantage he doesn’t need. “I’m picking the restaurant. I’m picking the time. You’re going to eat what they serve, not make suggestions about the menu, and if you send a car for me, I’ll turn around and go home.”
There’s a pause that I’d call amused if I were being generous. “All right.”
“Friday. Seven o’clock. I’ll text you the address.”
I hang up before he can negotiate, because Sterling Hollingsford will negotiate the weather if you let him stand in it long enough.
The place I pick is a diner off Independence Boulevard called Sal’s, which has fluorescent lighting and a waitress named Donna, who calls everyone hon and means it.
I pick it because I can afford it, the food is good and unpretentious, and I want to see what Sterling Hollingsford does when you put him in a vinyl booth under a Pepsi clock and hand him a laminated menu.
WHAT HE DOES IS ORDER eggs at seven in the evening and not comment on the diner.
He’s wearing a sport coat and no tie, and he got there before me, which surprises me. I’m always punctual. He’s probably the type to show up a half-hour early. The car parked outside is sleek and expensive. It looks out of place amid the SUVs, vans, and older model sedans.
When I step inside Sal’s, he looks entirely out of place too but completely unbothered by it.
He stands when I come in, which is either good manners or a reflex he can’t turn off.
He doesn’t look at my outfit, which is jeans, a sweater I bought six years ago, and a coat that does its job but isn’t fashionable.
“You look like you walked into the wrong restaurant,” I say, sliding into the booth across from him.
He nods just a bit, admitting it without addressing it. “I looked at the menu. The eggs are real and the coffee is hot. I’ve been in worse rooms with better lighting that served me food I liked less.”
Donna brings coffee without being asked because Donna is good at her job.
Sterling thanks her by name, which means he read her tag.
That could be good manners, or it could be the ingrained habit of a control freak who reads every room he enters even when the room is a diner off Independence and the stakes are eggs.
I order a club sandwich. He orders the eggs, sunny side, with toast. Donna doesn’t blink. I like that he doesn’t order for me and doesn’t comment on what I order. These are low bars, but I’ve watched a lot of men trip over low bars, and he clears them without appearing to notice they exist.
The conversation is better than I expected, which is the problem. “How was your day?” I ask because he hasn’t volunteered it and I’m curious whether he will.
“I fired a VP who deserved it and talked Halloran out of a bad real estate play. I ate a salad I didn’t enjoy.” He picks up his coffee. “How was yours?”
I sip my orange juice. “A man came into the ED with a foreign object lodged somewhere foreign objects shouldn’t be lodged.”
He leans a bit closer. “What kind of foreign object?”
I grin. “The kind you buy batteries for.”
Sterling laughs hard enough that Donna looks over from the register.
“You’re making that up,” he says.
“I’m not making it up. The X-ray is burned into my memory. I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my career, and when I’m eighty, it’ll be the story I tell at dinner parties.” I shrug. “It’s not the first or the last time either, I’m sure.”
He lifts a skeptical brow. “You go to dinner parties?”
With a shrug, I say, “I go to Sal’s. Close enough.”
He grins, and it changes his whole face. I look down at my sandwich because the grin is doing things to my pulse I’m not ready to examine under fluorescent lighting.
He asks about my shifts because he wants the answer, not because he’s waiting for his turn to talk. “Your car made a sound when you parked. I heard it in here. Is the check-engine light on?”
That surprises me, but the whining/grinding sound is hard to miss sometimes. “Since October, maybe? I’ve been interpreting it as a suggestion rather than a command.”
He doesn’t offer to fix it, which is the first thing most men with money would do. “What did the mechanic say?”
“I haven’t taken it in yet.”
He looks astonished, though he surely has people who do such things for him. “Why not?”
“I’ve been working doubles since September, the car still runs, and I’ll deal with it when I deal with it.”
He nods as though that’s a reasonable answer, which most men in sport coats wouldn’t.
He’s also, without being obvious about it, recalibrating in real time.
He started the conversation the same as he’d run a meeting, efficiently, with purpose, and a direction he intended to steer.
Within twenty minutes, he has figured out that I don’t steer, and he adjusts.
He stops leading questions toward the topic he wants.
He starts asking ones he doesn’t know the answer to.
“Do you like Charlotte?” he asks, and I can tell he actually doesn’t know, which pleases me more than it should.
“I like my apartment, my job, and Marnie, whom you’ve met.
” I think about it for a moment. “I like that the parking garage at the hospital is free and has a dedicated employee floor, which in Charlotte is practically a civic miracle.” I drag a fry through ketchup.
“I don’t need to love the city. I need the city to let me do my work and leave me alone, and Charlotte is very good at that. ”
He eats the last bite of his toast. “That’s a strange thing to value in a place.”
I lift a shoulder. “It’s a practical thing to value in a place. I grew up in a town where everyone knew everything about everyone. Not from community affection but as...leverage so one could always outdo another. Charlotte doesn’t keep inventory on me, and I appreciate it.”
He considers this with the same close attention he gave my sutures, and I suspect that’s how Sterling Hollingsford processes information.
He doesn’t react immediately. He collects it, analyzes it, and then decides how to react.
Somewhere behind those gray eyes the collection becomes a conclusion, and the conclusion arrives fully formed, as though it was always there, and he was just waiting for the last piece.
“Why nursing?” he asks, halfway through the eggs, which he eats methodically, with fork and knife precision.
“Because I’m good at it, it matters, and the hours are terrible enough that you never run out of things to complain about with the people who understand.” I smile and eat another bite.
“That’s three reasons.”
“You asked one question. Three reasons seems generous.”
He smiles. “You could have done something else.”
“Everyone can do something else. I picked the thing where I’m useful on the worst night of someone’s life. The money isn’t bad, the parking isn’t the worst, but I’ve seen things that would make you put down those eggs.”
“Don’t you want something more?”
I swap out the orange juice for a cup of coffee from the carafe that’s exactly as hot and mediocre as always.
It’s better than the stuff at the hospital, but that’s like comparing rocket fuel to diesel.
“I’m a nurse from Hickory with student loans I just finished paying off and a Corolla with a check-engine light I’ve been ignoring since October.
I’m content as I am, and I have no interest in being anybody’s project.
” A note of warning creeps in, and I let it.
He frowns. “I don’t have projects.”
I scoff. “You have nothing but projects. You run a company. Everything is a project.”
He sets down his fork and looks at me with those intense gray eyes.
His expression is similar to the night I sat in his room for four minutes after that crack in my composure following Delphine’s death.
I hold the look because I’m not going to be the one who glances away first. He needs more people to challenge him.
“What are you interested in, if I’m not a new project?” It’s best to be direct, but he takes his time answering. He doesn’t fill the pause with a placeholder, which I respect and also find deeply annoying, because I’m a person who fills pauses with noise.
“You told me no.” The left side of his mouth lifts.
“Twice. Once with the phone number and once with the discharge. I’ve spent nine days thinking about you telling me no, because it almost never happens.
I liked it, and I wanted to see you again to find out whether I’d still like it when it wasn’t three in the morning, and I was full of painkillers. ”
“That’s not a compliment.” I shake my head. “That’s a symptom. You don’t get told no enough, and you have confused the experience with attraction. I’m not a therapist, Sterling.”
He doesn’t get angry. “I’m not asking you to be a therapist.”
I hesitate because he didn’t react the way I expected. “What are you asking me to be?”
“I’m asking you to finish your sandwich and tell me whether you want to do this again on Thursday.”
It is, against every instinct I’ve trained into myself over six years of keeping patients at arm’s length and men at further, exactly the right thing to say. He doesn’t promise. He doesn’t explain. He asks for Thursday and leaves the rest of it alone.
I should say no. I have a policy about this.
Technically, it’s a rule, or has been for six years, enacted since my mother died, and I learned that the only life you can count on is the one you build yourself.
I keep the apartment small. I keep the friendships selective.
I keep the men temporary, which isn’t hard when I always select the temporary type, filtering out those who might be... complicated.
Sterling Hollingsford doesn’t feel temporary, and that’s the problem. He’s COMPLICATED in uppercase, flashing neon letters, but I’m not running for the door.
I finish the sandwich. He finishes the eggs. Donna refills the coffee a third time without asking, and he thanks her again. She gives me a look over his shoulder that communicates several things I don’t intend to acknowledge. When she gives me a thumbs-up, I ignore it.
The bill comes to twenty-two dollars. He reaches for it, but I pull the check toward me before he gets there. “I picked the restaurant.”
“You did.”
“Then I’m paying for the meal.”
He looks at my hand on the check and then at me, clearly recalibrating. He’s not thinking about the twenty-two dollars but is figuring out this isn’t about the bill, or about pride. It’s about me choosing the terms of my own life, and if he doesn’t let me, there won’t be a Thursday.
“All right.” He doesn’t argue, and I add that to the mental file I’m building on Sterling Hollingsford, right next to the board meeting memory he shared to fill a room with nothing so a stranger could grieve in peace.
He walks me to my building because I let him.
The walk is four blocks from where we parked, and the night air is cold enough that I’m glad for the coat.
Sterling walks at my pace, which isn’t his pace.
His stride is longer, and he has clearly shortened it without being asked.
I’m trying to decide whether that’s thoughtful or manipulative, realizing I’m probably overthinking it either way, when he says something about the building on the corner having good bones.
“It’s infested with rats. Pest control is out every day.”
He pauses and nods. “Even rats appreciate good bones.”
That startles a laugh from me, and we walk on.
At my door, he doesn’t try to come up. He doesn’t kiss me, linger, or angle for an invitation to come inside.
He says goodnight as though the word has been considered and selected from a short list, and he means it, which is a strange quality in a man who negotiates for a living.
Then he walks back to the diner so he can get into that ridiculous car with the pony on the hood. I watch him walk away until I lose sight of him somewhere after the good bones/bad rats building.
I stand in my doorway for longer than I should.
I’m annoyed with myself not him. I wanted him to kiss me.
I’m sure he knew it, and he left anyway.
The restraint is either courtesy or strategy.
Courtesy is refreshing. Strategy is just another man out to get what he wants from me but presented in a different way.
I don’t appreciate manipulation, but I’m not convinced that was what he was doing.
I go inside, lock the door, take off my coat, kick off my shoes, and stand in my kitchen with my phone in my hand. I type one word.
Thursday.
His reply arrives before I put down the phone.
I’m looking forward to it.
I grin at my phone in my kitchen like I’m nineteen and don’t know any better. The part of me that keeps patients at arm’s length and men even farther away is already losing this argument. I should be more alarmed than I am.