Chapter 6 TESSA
Tessa
I’ve spent the whole afternoon trying not to think about a phone call that wasn’t mine to hear.
Leaving things behind is most of the job. You see what you see, and you don’t carry it out of the room with you. But I was three feet away with his chart in my hands when he told Frank no, and heard the no get harder, and heard him swear when Frank pushed. It won’t leave me alone.
Because it doesn’t match the man I’d already built.
Ronan Sinclair is difficult, controlling, and arrogant, too used to being obeyed and not nearly used enough to being told no, and all of that is still true.
It just has to make room now for a man who kept an employee that had stopped earning his keep, made sure a sick little girl didn’t lose her father’s insurance, and went out of his way so nobody would catch him doing it.
I dry the mug harder than it needs and put it in the rack. Fine. So he likes being needed. That fits. Men like Ronan don’t give up control, they grow it—they collect people and problems until they can’t be done without, and then they call it leadership.
It’s tidy, and I decide to keep it, because the alternative is standing at a sink rearranging a man I’ve known two days.
The back door opens and a woman lets herself in carrying two grocery bags. Late fifties, sturdy build, silver hair pinned back. She crosses straight to the counter and starts unloading vegetables without so much as a glance around the room.
“You must be Mrs. Vale.”
“I am.”
I dry my hands and offer one. “Tessa Quinn.”
She looks at my hand for a second before going back to the groceries. “I know who you are.”
Fair enough. I lower my hand.
“The new nurse,” she says.
“That’s me.”
“Number five.”
Something about how she says it makes me feel less like a person and more like a weather pattern. She sets a carton of eggs beside the stove.
“Lunch is at one.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“He won’t.”
I smile despite myself. Mrs. Vale doesn’t.
“He’ll say he’s not hungry.”
“He already did.”
“He was wrong then too.”
The coffee machine gurgles to life. I lean against the counter. “Is he always this difficult?”
“Worse.”
I wait. That’s apparently the complete answer.
And that’s that. No welcome speech, no advice, no explanation of the man down the hall—just lunch at one and the clear sense that Mrs. Vale has better things to do than discuss Ronan Sinclair with me.
Then something thumps down the hall.
“That’ll be him,” she says, and goes back to her coffee.
He’s supposed to be asleep. Instead he’s too upright, the bad shoulder held stiff, laptop open across the blanket, one hand braced on the mattress. A folder lies on the floor just past his reach.
He looks at it. Then at me.
“I dropped a file.”
I cross the room and close the laptop. He lets out a breath through his nose but doesn’t stop me, which tells me more about the shoulder than the chart did. I pick the folder up off the floor and set it on the rolling table.
“You were reaching for that,” I say. “Cracked ribs, a torn rotator cuff, a healing femur, and you went after a file on the floor.”
I move the laptop to the dresser, out of reach, and he watches me do it, saying nothing.
“Your dressing’s due. We’ll do it now, while you’re up and making good decisions.” I wash my hands and bring the tray over—gloves, saline, gauze, tape, work I could do half-asleep and have, in far worse rooms than this one.
“Shirt.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“You’re always in the middle of something.” I pull the rolling table around. “Left arm first. I’ll get the right.”
He reaches for the hem with his good hand and gets it halfway. The right shoulder won’t follow.
I don’t make him ask. I sit down on the edge of the bed, hip against his good side, work the shirt up, and ease the sleeve down off the bad shoulder.
There’s no way to do this that keeps my hands off him.
My knuckles drag warm skin the whole way—his stomach, his chest, the hard curve of his bicep—and he doesn’t move, and his breathing has gone careful.
The shirt comes free and I fold it once, because my hands want something ordinary to do.
I’ve undressed a hundred patients and felt nothing. The problem is that Ronan Sinclair doesn’t look fragile, even now. The crash took a great deal from him and somehow failed to make him smaller.
He won’t do me the courtesy of being the hundred-and-first.
I snap the gloves on and peel the tape back slow. The dressing lifts clean at the top, catches near the bottom, and his stomach tightens under the skin.
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your ribs did.”
The old dressing comes away. The wound is tender but clean, and it’s healing. I wipe around it with saline. Every inch of him has gone still under my hands.
I lay the fresh gauze down and reach to hold it while I find the tape, and somewhere in it my palm goes flat against his chest.
His heart is slamming.
I’ve had my fingers on this man’s pulse twice a day since I got here. I know what his pain does to it. This isn’t that.
I look up before I can stop myself, and he’s already looking at me, and neither of us moves. His heart goes on under my hand, telling me exactly what he’d never say out loud.
Then I sit back, too fast, and tape the gauze down with far more attention than four inches of skin requires.
“Healing well,” I say. My voice comes out almost level. “Another week on the stitches. I’ll redress it daily.”
“Fine.” His is rougher. He clears it. “Good.”
His shirt is still folded on the blanket. For a second neither of us reaches for it. Then I do, because I have some sense of self-preservation left, and this time he lets me help him into it without a word.
I gather the tray. “Say something if it spikes tonight. Don’t tough it out.”
“I never do.”
“You toughed it out to a seven this morning.”
I’m at the door when he says my name.
“Tessa.”
He’s never used it. Not once. I turn around, and he looks as annoyed by the slip as I am by how much I noticed.
I wait.
“Nothing,” he says.
It isn’t nothing. I’m not foolish enough to ask.
“Sleep,” I say, and go.
I stand in the hall a second with the tray in both hands, breathing like I’ve come up a flight of stairs, which is absurd, because all I did was change a dressing.
In the kitchen the coffee’s made and Mrs. Vale is gone. There’s a note by the pot in hard block letters. Lunch at one. If he refuses, threaten Sadie.
I smile before I can help it.
Then my phone goes off in my back pocket, and the smile goes with it. I know before I look that I shouldn’t. I look anyway.
One new email. Portland General.
My fingers go cold around the phone. For a moment the kitchen and the coffee and the man down the hall all pull back, and I’m aware of exactly how close Portland is, and how little the distance helps.
I don’t open it. I archive it unread and set the phone face down on the stone and stand there gripping the edge of the counter until my breathing goes back where it belongs.
Across the hall, his room is quiet. I tell myself that’s good. It means he’s resting. It means I can get through the next hour without thinking about the held breath, or my hand on his chest, or his heart going hard underneath it.
I take one sip of coffee I don’t want.
The phone stays quiet on the counter. For once, so does his room.
I leave them both alone.