Chapter 5 RONAN
Ronan
The worst part about Miss Quinn isn’t that she argues.
It’s that she stays.
Arguing makes sense. People argue when they’re frustrated, angry, convinced they’re right. Staying is harder to explain.
At seven she looks in, finds me awake, and comes the rest of the way with the tray as if the night before never happened.
The blind goes to halfway so the light falls short of my face, and she has my wrist between her fingers before I’ve decided whether I want to be handled this early.
“Morning.”
“It’s barely that.”
Her thumb settles over the pulse, her eyes on me instead of the window. “Pain. The real number this time.”
“Four.”
She doesn’t reach for the chart. She keeps her thumb at my wrist and waits.
Neither of us looks away. Her hand is half the size of mine. Whatever my pulse is doing, she knows it before I do.
“Seven,” I say.
She writes it down now. “Sit forward for me.”
I sit forward. The ribs make their opinion known and I keep it off my face, which she notices anyway and has the decency not to mention. She fits the cuff around my arm and pumps it, watching the gauge instead of me, reads the number, and writes it down.
She moves to my right side, and I turn my jaw toward the wall before I’ve thought about it. She doesn’t remark on the scar. She straightens the blanket over the brace, checks the leg’s square on the wedge, then steps back.
The room cools.
“Your ribs need a fresh dressing. I’ll do it this afternoon.” A look over her shoulder, the corner of her mouth not quite committing to a smile. “That gives you all morning to be difficult about something else first.” She nods at the tray on her way past. “Eat.”
Two days I’ve spent waiting for the seam—the point where the patience wears through and she starts handling me like the four before her.
I haven’t found it. The four before her turned somewhere in the first day.
Stopped seeing a man and started seeing a problem to solve.
She hasn’t. She’s tired around the eyes, the same piece of hair loose again, and none of it has cost her any of the steadiness. That’s the part I can’t work out.
My phone goes before I can think too hard about any of it. Frank, of course. She moves to the foot of the bed and busies herself with the chart, listening, and not pretending otherwise.
“What.”
“Morning to you too.” Paper shuffling, the particular pause Frank uses before he makes me do something I won’t enjoy. “We need to talk about Reyes.”
I lean back into the pillows. “What about him?”
“His numbers have been off the table since March and they haven’t come back. He missed the platform deadline again Thursday. I’ve covered it as long as I can defend covering it, and when the board asks, I’d rather have moved first than explain why I didn’t.”
“No.”
“Ronan.”
“No.”
“He’s down forty percent on a good week. I’m not enjoying this either, but the math—”
“His daughter’s sick, Frank. She’s eight. It’s cancer, and it’s bad.”
I’ve met her twice. The first time she spent ten minutes explaining dinosaurs to me with the flat authority of a small dictator. The second time she’d lost her hair and everyone in the room pretended not to notice.
“Keep him. His title, his salary, his insurance, all of it,” I say. “Cover the work, and keep it quiet, so nobody makes him a case.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
Frank exhales. “That’s not a sustainable position.”
“I don’t give a shit about sustainable. He keeps his job. Don’t make me say it a third time. Email me the rest.”
I end the call and set the phone down.
When I look up she’s watching me. For once she’s the one who looks away first. She writes something on the chart.
I wait for the lecture. It doesn’t come.
“Try to sleep,” she says instead.
Then she’s out the door.
A few minutes later I glance toward the open doorway across the hall. A green sweater hangs over the back of the chair. It wasn’t there yesterday.
I look away.
She told me she was staying. Apparently she meant it.