Chapter 12 TESSA
Tessa
The water doesn’t work this morning.
I go in at six like always, and I wait for the cold to do its job and clear my head. It doesn’t. I swim hard and long and come out with my arms shaking, and the whole time, through every stroke, I can still feel his hand closing over my waist, and how close his mouth came to mine.
I almost kissed my patient yesterday.
I stand on the bottom step with my towel and make myself think it in exactly those words. My patient. My job—the one thing Portland can still take from me, and yesterday I wanted his mouth on mine so badly I forgot every reason I’m in Maine.
I pull my sweater on over the wet and go up the back path to be a nurse.
He’s in the kitchen when I come through. Coffee made, laptop open, hair still rumpled from sleep. I look away. My mug is sitting on the island, steam still coming off it. This morning that small kindness feels like standing too close to a fire.
“Morning,” he says, and watches me.
“Morning.” I take the coffee. “Shoulder work after breakfast. Walk at ten.”
He doesn’t answer. I can feel him reading me, and I keep my eyes on the chart and let him find whatever he finds, as long as he doesn’t say it out loud.
After breakfast I wrap the cuff around his good arm and take his pulse, and if my fingers are quicker at his wrist than they used to be, neither of us mentions it.
The walk is worse. The walk is him leaning into me, solid and warm, his breath in my hair, and pretending I can’t feel any of it.
He’s quiet. He’s been quiet since the study, and careful, and I don’t let myself wonder what he’s being careful with.
“Shoulder’s ahead of schedule,” I tell him at the end. “Apparently ignoring me works.”
“Then I’ll keep it up.”
“Don’t be charming before noon. It’s bad for your blood pressure.”
He smiles—the real one, the small one—and I take myself and my clipboard out of that room like the building’s on fire.
I’m folding towels in the laundry room when my hand finds my phone in my pocket, and the voicemail is still there.
It’s been there since yesterday, and I am so tired of carrying it.
I close the laundry room door and press play.
“Miss Quinn. Alan Mercer.” Like I could have forgotten.
“I’m told the review board has set a date.
I think it would be in everyone’s interest—yours especially—for us to align on the timeline before anyone gives a statement.
Call me back at this number. Not the hospital line.
” Another pause. “You were always sensible, Tessa. I’m counting on that. ”
I stand in the laundry room with a towel half-folded in my hand, and the room is very small and very warm and I can hear my own heartbeat.
You were always sensible, Tessa.
He sounds reasonable. He always sounds reasonable. That’s how he gets away with it.
My thumb hovers over delete.
Then I stop. He put it in a voicemail. Five weeks of never anything in writing, never anything I could show anyone, and Alan Mercer just talked to my phone.
I don’t delete it. I save it. I put the phone face down on the dryer, and I fold every towel in that basket with straight edges and square corners, and when I’m done I fold half of them again.
I do everything right. Meds at four, ice, range-of-motion, dinner prep alongside Mrs. Vale, who looks at me twice and says nothing, which from her is a whole conversation.
My hands know the work. That’s the terrible gift of the training—the hands go on without you, steady as machines, while the rest of you stands in a laundry room two hundred thoughts away listening to eleven seconds on a loop.
At dinner Ronan tells me something about Valence, some small victory from the redline, and I say the right things in the right places.
I can feel him watching me between sentences.
Twice he stops like he’s going to ask, and twice he doesn’t.
He wants to. I can see what the not-asking costs him, and the weight of it stays with me through the dishes.
I’m at the sink with my hands in the water when he says it, from the table.
“Tomorrow we’re taking the boat out.”
I turn. “You have a boat?”
“I have three. Knox checked the forecast—flat water, sun. And before you start, Sadie signed off. Sitting down the whole time, and Finn runs the boat. You’ve been on this property twenty days and the only part of Maine you’ve seen is the fifty yards between the house and the water.”
“You counted the days?”
“I count everything. You’d know that better than anyone. You’ve seen the whiteboard.”
I dry my hands slowly, buying time. There are a dozen good reasons to say no, and I can’t remember a single one. All I can see is open water, wind, a whole day where Portland can’t reach me.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” I try.
“I am. Tomorrow I’ll be resting on a boat.”
I don’t have an answer for that, and he knows it. And watching him pretend not to look pleased with himself, I understand what this boat is. He knows I won’t tell him what’s wrong. So he’s not asking. He’s giving me a day away from it instead, the only way he knows how.
Besides, I tell myself, it would do him good. Fresh air, a change of scenery, a morning that isn’t built around his injuries. Any nurse would sign off on it.
“Okay,” I say.
“Ten o’clock.” He turns the chair for the hall, satisfied. Then he stops in the doorway, and he doesn’t look back when he says it. “Whatever it is, Tessa—you’re not going to be doing it alone.”
He wheels off down the hall, leaving me at the sink with a dish towel in my hands and my eyes stinging.
He doesn’t even know what he’s promised me.
He can’t know. The hearing has a date now, and when it comes I’ll be standing in that room alone, because that’s how these things go. Nobody walks in there with you.
But not tonight. Tonight there’s a boat in the morning, and a man down the hall who counts my days here.
I go back to the dishes. And without deciding to, I start humming.