Chapter 3 RONAN
Ronan
My new nurse is unpacking a suitcase in a room I never offered her, and I’m running the math I should have run the moment she walked in instead of the moment she walked out—propped up in a bed I didn’t ask for, in a room that isn’t mine, in a house I can’t cross.
Sadie didn’t call the agency.
She never meant to. That look she gave me yesterday on her way out the door—the one I read as surrender—was the look of a woman who’d already won and hadn’t decided whether to tell me yet.
Enjoy the quiet, Ronan. She knew it had a shelf life.
She left me sitting in it overnight for sport.
Frank was gone by six, which I assume was also arranged.
I call her.
She answers on the second ring, which means she’s been waiting. “How do you like her?”
“Send the agency nurse.”
“There is no agency nurse.”
“Sadie.”
“There was never going to be another agency nurse. You’d have eaten one alive by Tuesday and I’d be doing this whole thing again next week, and I’m a busy woman. I don’t have the bandwidth to keep restocking my own brother.”
“Then I’ll manage on my own.”
“You nearly went down getting out of bed on your own yesterday.”
“I’d like the record to show I remained upright.”
“You remained upright because Nurse Number Four caught your arm before you hit the floor. She called me about it before she’d made it back to the highway.
” I can hear her settling in, the small contented sound she makes right before she enjoys herself at my expense.
“The one I sent this morning says you tried to fire her inside ten minutes, which is a personal best, and that she’s staying anyway.
That’s the part you should be paying attention to. ”
I roll the quarter once across my knuckles and set it down. “I want a professional. Not a favor you called in from someone who looks like she should be asking me for a hall pass.”
“She’s twenty-five, and she’s the best trauma nurse I’ve ever worked beside, and I have worked beside a great many. You don’t get to be picky, Ronan. You got to be discharged. Those were different transactions.”
“I’m aware of what I signed.”
“Are you? Because what you signed says live-in care through week eight, or you finish recovering somewhere with a nurses’ station and a nice view of a parking lot.
And I’m the physician who signed off on sending you home, which means I’m also the physician who gets to decide home isn’t working.
” Her voice gentles, which is somehow worse.
“I’ll do it. I love you, and I will absolutely have you readmitted, and you’ll hate it more than you hate her.
So those are the options. Tessa, or a facility. Pick.”
There it is. The thing about my sister is that she doesn’t bluff. She decided a long time ago she didn’t have to.
“This is coercion,” I tell her.
“Take your meds.” And she hangs up, because she also decided a long time ago that the way to win an argument with me is to refuse to have one.
I set the phone down. I’ve been outmaneuvered, cleanly, by the one person who’s been beating me at this since we were kids, and there’s no profit in pretending otherwise.
Fine.
If I don’t get to decide whether she stays, I’ll decide the rest. All of it.
“Miss Quinn.”
She appears in the doorway faster than I’d like, in a gray T-shirt now, honey-blonde hair twisted up in a knot that’s coming loose, a beauty mark just above the corner of her mouth, and none of it makes her look more like a nurse and all of it makes me lose the thread of the point I’m about to make. She waits. She’s good at waiting.
“Since my sister has made it clear you’re a fixture,” I say, “we’ll establish how this is going to work.”
“Sure.” She comes in and sits in Frank’s chair without being invited, tucks one leg under herself like she’s settling in for a chat with a friend, and looks at me with the patience of someone who has all morning. “Rules. I love rules. Go ahead.”
That isn’t what I planned for. I planned for resistance. Resistance I can dismantle. Agreement leaves me holding a speech with nowhere to put it.
“One. I work. I have a company. The accident didn’t change that, and I won’t be managed away from my work like a child kept from a hot stove.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
She nods, agreeable. Terrible. “I’m not going to fight you about your laptop, Mr. Sinclair. You’re a grown man and it’s your company.”
I wait for the catch. There’s always a catch with the competent ones. She offers none. She watches me, unbothered.
“Two. The medication is my decision. I’ll take what I need, when I need it. I don’t require a chaperone for my own prescriptions.”
“Absolutely. Your body, your call.” She tips her head. “I’ll just chart it.”
“Chart what?”
“What you take. What you skip. The times, the pain scores, the nights you don’t sleep because the leg’s bad and you won’t say so. That’s my job—I keep the record.” She smiles, and it’s a perfectly pleasant smile, and there is a knife somewhere inside it. “Sadie reads the chart.”
And there’s the catch. Not a fight. A consequence, set down so lightly I nearly missed it.
I refuse the pills, she writes it down, my sister reads every refusal in my own nurse’s tidy hand, and the facility conversation opens itself back up without Tessa ever raising her voice.
She’s handed me my freedom and quietly wired it.
It’s good. I’d respect it in a board meeting.
“Three.” My voice hardens, because the ground has moved and I don’t care for it.
“I don’t want to be hovered over. Asked every hour whether I’ve eaten, whether I’ve rested, whether I’ve had a productive bowel movement.
I’ve spent three weeks being narrated to myself in a bed I can’t get out of.
I’d like to be left alone in my own house. ”
She doesn’t answer right away. “I can do alone,” she says.
“I’m not going to hover. I wouldn’t want it done to me either.
” She moves on before I can ask. “But I’m staying in the house.
That part isn’t a rule you get. If you try to get out of that bed at three in the morning and go down, I’d rather be one hall away than forty minutes. ”
“I won’t try to get out of bed.”
“Then it costs you nothing to have me close.” She unfolds from the chair and stands, and somehow she’s gained ground while I was busy defending mine. “Anything else?”
There’s one more. It’s petty, and I want it anyway. “Don’t call me hon.”
She laughs before she can stop it.
I look at it a second too long.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Sinclair.”
On her way past she sets one of the cans I’ve been ignoring on the tray table that swings across the bed, square on top of the closed laptop. She says nothing about whether I’ve eaten. She does it, in fact, in perfect compliance with rule three.
“Drink it or don’t,” she says, and turns for the hall before I can answer.
“Miss Quinn.”
She turns back. And I find I don’t have anything to follow it—or rather, I have several things, all of them about whose house this is and whose rules still stand, and none of them worth the breath.
So I don’t say them. I look at her instead.
She looks back, steady, and doesn’t do any of the things people do when I hold a look too long. She lets me.
“Noon,” she says. “I’ll take your pain scores.”
She goes, across the hall to the room she took, and I’m left with a can I won’t open and the suspicion that I’ve finally met someone who doesn’t rattle.
I open the can and drink it.
I tell myself it’s because I was thirsty.
* * *
Noon.
She’s carrying a tablet instead of the chart, and at some point she’s pushed the loose knot of hair back up off her neck. I notice both. The second one I don’t manage to set back down.
“Pain,” she says. “One to ten.”
“Four.”
She doesn’t write it down. She looks at me, then at my hand, and I follow her gaze to my own fingers wrapped around the bed rail hard enough to bleach the knuckles, and they have been for some time.
“Four,” she says again. She isn’t arguing. She’s letting me hear it back.
“Four.”
“Okay.” She taps something into the tablet, and I’d give a great deal to know what, because we both know it isn’t four.
It’s been hours propped at the same angle and the leg has progressed from complaint to grievance to something with a pulse of its own, and I’ve decided, with the full conviction of a man who once renegotiated a contract from a gurney, that I’d sooner it fell off than admit it.
“You’ve been propped up at the same angle since I got here,” she says. “Time to get you off your back. Down a little, onto your side, twenty minutes. It’s circulation, not a favor.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Lie at one angle long enough and the skin starts to break down. Pressure, blood flow, none of it good. I can help you, or you can do it yourself and I’ll stand here and say nothing. Either way you’re shifting off your back.”
It’s the right offer, which is the maddening part.
She doesn’t wait for me to decide twice.
She lifts the laptop out of my hands, mid-sentence, and sets it on the dresser beside her tablet, out of reach and without a word about it.
Then she lowers the head of the bed in one smooth motion, and the upright working version of myself folds flat with it.
I’m still deciding how I feel about that when I reach to ease myself over onto my good side, and the leg announces exactly how long I’ve been ignoring it.
The left arm does all of it, the right shoulder useless, and halfway down the ribs make their opinion known and I stall there, stuck at an angle I can’t hold.
I won’t ask for the hand.
I don’t have to. She’s already there, one hand at my hip, the other closing over my good forearm, turning me onto my good side and keeping clear of everything that’s screaming.
The turn brings me around to face her. I haven’t let anyone stand this close in weeks.
A strand of her hair has come loose against my jaw.
It smells like nothing medical, warm, faintly of citrus, and the part of my brain that should be tracking the pain registers that instead, against my will.
“There,” she says, quiet. “You’ve got it.”
Here’s what I didn’t account for. For three weeks every pair of hands on me has been sorry. Hers aren’t. Hers are just working. And for a second, lying on my good side with the heat of her hand still on my arm, being helped doesn’t cost me anything.
The moment I notice it, it’s gone.
“I’m fine.”
“I know.” She lets me go without comment, lets me keep the lie, and tucks a pillow in behind my back so I don’t roll flat again, then moves to the leg.
She settles a second pillow between my knees, hands sure at the brace, easing it to an angle that takes the pull off the hip, and somehow the whole arrangement is more comfortable than anything four nurses and I managed between us in days of trying.
She straightens and looks down at me with steady green eyes.
“Pain score,” she says. “For the chart.”
“Four.”
The corner of her mouth moves. “Eight.” She writes it down and goes, and leaves me on my side with the pillows where she put them and my lie corrected.
I don’t care for that discovery at all.