Chapter 14 TESSA
Tessa
I thought I was ready for this.
I’m standing in the front hall holding the box.
I ordered the cane ten days ago, when his shoulder started trending ahead of every projection I’d charted. This morning I put his shoulder through its range again, and there’s no arguing with it anymore. It can take his grip and his weight now. The leg has been ready longer than that.
There’s no clinical reason left to make him wait. So I carry it into the kitchen.
He’s at the table with his laptop and his coffee. I set the cane against his chair and wait.
He looks at it. He doesn’t touch it. His fingers flex once against the mug. Then he takes a sip of his coffee like the thing leaning against his chair is a piece of mail, and if I were anyone else in the world I’d believe he didn’t care.
I’m not anyone else. I take this man’s pulse for a living. I saw his eyes when they landed on it.
“About time,” he says, as if he hasn’t spent all week submitting to my schedule like a hostile board member. He closes the laptop. “What’s the protocol?”
“One lap, and we’ll see how the—”
He’s already up. Every part of the transfer I taught him done at twice the speed I taught it, and my hands are out to spot him before I’ve decided anything at all. Three weeks, and my body moves toward his without asking me first.
“Ronan. It’s not set to your height yet.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s set for the shipping box, and if you tear that shoulder showing off, we start the whole clock over. Stand still for me.”
Across the kitchen, Mrs. Vale has her back to us, up to her wrists in dough.
He stands still. Barely. I reach to set the cane and he doesn’t give it up.
My hand closes over his on the grip, and he lets it stay there.
His eyes come to my mouth and hold there.
Neither of us moves. His hand is warm under mine, and I can feel him breathing, and he smells of coffee and clean cotton, and I know I should step back.
I don’t. We’ve gotten so good at not saying a word about any of it.
He lets go. I click it one notch, hand it back, and find my voice where I left it.
“Cane on the good side. It moves with the bad leg, then the good leg follows. Small steps, and if that shoulder says one word to you, we stop and ice it. Promise me.”
“Understood.”
That’s not a promise, and we both know it, and he’s moving anyway. First step careful, second step surer, and Ronan Sinclair walks the length of his own kitchen with nobody’s hands on him at all.
Behind us, Mrs. Vale has given up on the bread entirely.
I watch him like a nurse—hip drop, stride length, how much of him is still borrowing from the shoulder.
Underneath all of it, though, I’m watching something no chart measures.
He’s standing in the middle of his own kitchen with nobody holding him, and he loves it.
At the end he turns, and the turn wobbles, and I’m three steps toward him before his look stops me. Don’t.
I stop. My hands don’t want to. He finishes the turn on his own.
And then he smiles.
I’ve seen the smirk. I’ve seen the small one, the corner of his mouth giving in when he thinks I’ve missed it.
I have never seen this one. It’s wide and it’s sudden and it’s real, it changes his entire face, and it is deeply unfair, because this man was handsome when I couldn’t stand him.
Handsome I’ve learned to work around. This I have no plan for.
My own face answers it before I can stop it, and my heart kicks in a way I’d flag on anyone else’s chart.
“Well,” says Mrs. Vale, which from her is a standing ovation.
I don’t bother hiding mine. I’m smiling at him from across the kitchen like it’s my own leg that healed, and I don’t care who sees it. “Look at you,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He’s still smiling and so am I, and our eyes catch across the kitchen and hang there. Neither of us lets go. The cane, the lap, the whole morning goes somewhere else for a second.
Mrs. Vale clears her throat.
He looks down at the cane in his hand, and I watch him decide, and he’s moving before I can say one word about it.
“We said one lap.”
“You said one lap. I’ve been sitting down for seven weeks, Tessa.
” A man who heard the objection, overruled it, and moved on.
This is what he must be in a boardroom, I realize.
This is what everyone else gets. And I know better, I absolutely know better, and I hear myself say all right, once more, slowly.
He makes it half the second lap before the leg has had enough.
I see it before he feels it. The hitch coming into the stride, the grip going white.
To his credit he stops on his own, breathing harder than he wants me to see, this man who used to run five miles before his first call.
I bring the chair around and he sits, and even that can’t touch him.
Even needing the chair can’t put a dent in this morning.
He’s flushed, and his jaw is tight from the effort, and he can’t stop looking at the cane across his knees.
“Ahead of schedule,” I tell him, and it comes out steady, and I’m proud of that.
He leans his head back and closes his eyes, and the smile comes back, the quiet one this time.
It bares the strong line of his neck, and I catch myself following it down.
“Ahead of schedule,” he repeats, mostly to himself, his throat working around the words, a man signing off on the best news he’s had in seven weeks.
“Ice on the shoulder in twenty.”
I leave him there with his cane and his quiet smile, and I take myself down to the laundry room, and I stand over a basket of towels that don’t need me either and try to work out what is wrong with me.
I should be happy. I am happy. This morning went exactly the way it was supposed to go, the outcome any nurse would frame and hang on a wall, and I smiled at him with my whole heart and meant every bit of it.
And underneath the smile, something in me sank and kept sinking, and I could feel it happening, and I am so angry at myself I could cry.
Then it comes to me, standing there with a towel in my hands.
For three weeks that walk was mine. His arm across my shoulders and his fingers curled at my waist, the whole warm weight of this enormous careful man trusting me with every single step, and it was the best part of my day, and I never once admitted that until right now, watching him take it back.
It isn’t over. I know that. The cane buys him the bathroom and the length of the kitchen and a little of his pride back, and everything else in this house is still mine.
The stairs he isn’t cleared for. The shoulder work, twice a day.
The dressing at his ribs that needs changing before lunch, the protocol that runs weeks past this morning, and a sister with power of attorney who made a live-in nurse the price of keeping him out of a facility.
Nobody is packing my bag today, no matter how proud of himself he looks crossing that kitchen.
Five more weeks. He needs me for five more weeks.
But it starts this morning. I’ve watched it start on every floor I’ve ever worked. From here he needs me a little less every week, and I keep doing my job well because I don’t know how to do it any other way, and my job done well is a house with no nurse in it.
He notices everything. And this morning he didn’t notice a thing, because for once all his attention was on his body finally doing what he told it. I wouldn’t take it from him for anything.
I take the gait belt from my kit and fold it, and I put it in the bottom of my bag, next to my hospital badge, where I keep the things I’m done with and can’t throw away.
* * *
Frank calls at eleven.
“Take it,” I say. “I’m nearly done here.”
He puts it on speaker. He stopped taking Boston off speaker around me a while ago, and I try not to think about what that means.
I don’t understand most of what Frank reads him.
A new clause in the Valence contract, something called a key man provision, and under my hands Ronan goes very still while Frank explains it.
If he isn’t materially involved, they can walk away clean.
They’ve heard he’s in worse shape than anyone’s saying, and they’ve priced it.
“Kill the clause,” Ronan says.
“I’m working on it. Petra lands the last week of August. There’s runway. Rest. I just needed you to see the language.” Frank’s voice stays easy. He’s working at it. Even I can hear that.
I smooth the last strip of tape down over the dressing.
“I should be there,” Ronan says.
He says it quietly, and not to Frank. Frank is still talking. I’m the only other person in the room.
I gather my tray and leave him to his call.
In the hallway I stop with my back against the cool of the wall, and my heart is pounding harder than one sentence deserves.
Because he’s right, that’s the trouble. He should be there.
I’ve had my hands on that shoulder every morning, and in a few more weeks there won’t be a clinical argument I can make with a straight face.
He’ll go back to Boston. I’ll go back to Portland.
Neither of us has said that part out loud yet.
I go find something to fold.
* * *
At the five o’clock shoulder session he’s quiet, half of him still in Boston, and I let him be.
Afterward he sits on the edge of the bed and I ice the shoulder, holding the pack against him with the flat of my hand because the strap chafes the healing skin.
It’s the most routine thing we do, and it is also fifteen minutes a day of my palm flat on his bare shoulder, the muscle warm and solid under my hand, while his breathing slows, and neither of us has ever once found anywhere safe to look.
“Sadie called,” he says. “While you were down at the water.”
“Checking your compliance?”
“Checking on you, actually.” He watches me, steady, the scar along his jaw catching the lamplight. “She says I’m the best-documented patient in New England and you’re the only person in my employ who’s never asked for a day off. Her exact words were, is she a saint or is she hiding.”
My hand stays where it is. All my training holds it there, steady on the ice, while everything underneath me drops.
“And what did you tell her?”
“That you don’t strike me as a saint.”
“Careful.”
“Saints don’t threaten to drug a man’s coffee.
” He shifts so he can see me properly, and now the ice pack is the only thing between us.
“You’ve been here three weeks, Tessa. You walked in the door knowing everything about me.
Hospital records, med lists, my whole file.
I know you have three brothers and a mean right elbow in a transfer, and that’s the entire inventory. ”
“There isn’t much else in stock.”
“You’re a trauma nurse off the best floor in Portland, and you took a live-in contract on four days’ notice. So either you’re planning an early retirement, or you needed to be gone.”
“I’m on leave,” I say.
“Leave.”
“From the hospital. It’s temporary.”
“Leave,” he says again, slower, turning the word over, looking for what doesn’t add up. “Voluntary?”
“Mostly.”
“Tessa.”
“It’s complicated,” I say, and I keep my face as smooth as I can under his eyes. “Hospitals are political places. Sometimes the smartest thing a nurse can do is be somewhere else for a while. That’s all this is.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then, “I could make one phone call, Tessa.”
And I want that. Standing right here with my hand on his shoulder, I want it so badly my eyes sting.
I want to set the whole crushing weight of it down on this man’s desk next to his Valence contract and let him take it apart, because he would.
I’ve watched him run a billion-dollar company from a hospital bed against every order I’ve given him.
He’d take my mess on top of the clause and the client and a body he’s still rebuilding, and he wouldn’t hesitate, and that’s exactly the problem.
He’s five weeks from getting his life back. This morning I watched him take the first piece of it, and I watched what it did to his face.
I will not be the first heavy thing he has to carry the moment he can finally stand.
“Time’s up,” I say, and lift the ice pack away. “Keep the shoulder moving tonight. Gentle range, nothing brave.”
He doesn’t move. He looks at me for a long moment, and I can see him weighing it, whether to push, and I don’t breathe while he decides.
“Okay,” he says.
That’s all. Okay. He reaches for his shirt and pulls it on, wincing once, and lets the whole subject go. If he’d pushed, I could have held the line all night. I know how to be pushed. I have no idea what to do with a man who wants the truth this much and sets it down because I asked him to.
At the door I stop with my hand on the frame. Don’t, Tessa. Don’t do it.
“Ronan.”
I turn. He’s watching me from the edge of the bed. He’s not pushing. He’s waiting. Hoping, even. It’s all over his face, and for once he’s not hiding any of it.
“Goodnight,” I say.
He nods once, and the waiting goes out of him. “Goodnight, Tessa.”
I make it three steps down the hall before the pull to turn around stops me cold. I don’t go back.
Every step he takes back toward his life is a step closer to leaving mine, and I’m the one teaching him how to take them.
God help me, I don’t know which one of us I’m rooting for anymore.