Chapter 28 TESSA
Tessa
I give myself three more days.
Because it’s good. It’s so good I can’t make myself ruin it. The mornings are slow, coffee on the terrace with the fog burning off the water. In the evenings we walk on the beach, his hand in mine, a little farther down the sand each night than the one before.
It’s the exercises that get me. He wants to do twenty. I can see him wanting it, straining against the number. And he does the ten I gave him.
“That’s it?” he asks.
“That’s it.”
“I could do more.”
“I know you could. You’re not going to.”
He gives me a look that could strip paint. Then he racks the weight, because I asked him to. A month ago this man would have done the twenty out of spite and paid for it the next morning. He’s letting himself be taken care of.
One night, we put on a movie neither of us ends up watching.
He pulls me back against his chest, and partway through, his arm gets heavy across me, and I realize he’s fallen asleep, his mouth in my hair, holding on even now.
I don’t move. The movie ends and the menu music loops and I still don’t move, because his heart is steady against my back and I don’t want the night to end. I don’t want any of it to end.
On the second day he catches me somewhere far away.
We’re on the terrace and I’ve been staring at the same page of my book for ten minutes, and he reaches over and hooks a finger under my chin and turns my face to his.
“You’re somewhere else,” he says.
“Am I?”
“You’ve been quiet.” His thumb moves along my jaw. “Talk to me. Whatever it is.”
And there’s the door again, held open wider this time. For one second I almost walk through it. I almost say I have a hearing, Ronan, and I might lose everything, and I’m so scared I can’t breathe.
Then I look at him, better than he’s been in months, and I can’t do it.
“I’m just tired,” I say. He studies me another second, then rubs a slow circle against my back, and I smile up at him. “Sorry. I’m here.”
He lets it go. He shouldn’t. But he does, because it would never occur to him that I’d keep something from him.
Later, that’s what will gut me. He saw it. He just trusted me.
* * *
On the third day, I tell him I’m leaving.
“I have to head back to Portland for a bit. A week, probably. There’s some hospital business I’ve been putting off that I need to handle in person, and my apartment’s been sitting empty all summer. I should go sort it out before it turns into a bigger mess.”
I leave out the part where the hospital business is a hearing that could end my career, and he doesn’t hear the gap, because why would he.
And the truth is he doesn’t need me here anymore, not like he did.
He’s off the danger list. He’s mobile, he’s steady on the anticoagulants, he takes his own doses and does his own exercises.
Sadie’s forty minutes down the road and Mrs. Vale will be here every day.
If he still needed me I’d never go. He doesn’t.
That’s the cruel part. He got better. My job here is done. That’s supposed to be the good news.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll come with you.”
“Absolutely not. You’re two weeks off a pulmonary embolism, Ronan. You are not spending your days sitting in a hospital corridor, worn out, so you can watch me fill out forms.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re recovering. There’s a difference.” I soften it. His jaw has gone tight, and I know he hates being told what he can’t do. “It’s dull admin stuff. There’s nothing there for you but a setback you don’t need. Let me go handle it. Rest. Walk the beach. Behave for once.”
“One week,” he says. “Then I’m coming to get you myself.”
I laugh. “Mrs. Vale will spoil you rotten, Sadie will yell about screens after ten, and I’ll be back before you miss my nagging about the stairs.”
That gets me half a smile. “I like the nagging.”
“I know you do. It’s very sad.”
“When you’re back,” he says, “we’ll go down to the cove. Properly this time. No cane. I’ll walk you all the way down.”
“Yeah?”
He’s making plans. He’s making a whole little future out loud, a week from now. He tucks my hair back. “I’ve had a lot of time to think in that bed. I’ve got plans for you, Tessa Quinn.”
I have to look away for a second so he doesn’t see my face.
* * *
I pack while he’s in the shower.
It doesn’t take long. I didn’t come here with much.
But at the bottom of the bag, where it’s been the whole time, is the folder with my license, my certifications, the letter now tucked in with them.
And beside it, still zipped in the side pocket where I put it the day I arrived and never once opened, is my stethoscope.
I take it out and hold it. It’s the one thing in this bag that’s actually me.
The rest is who I am to everyone else. The license that says I’m allowed to help, the certifications that say I’m good at it, the letter that says they’re taking it away.
But the stethoscope is just the tool. The thing I’ve put around my neck every shift to go stand between other people and the worst day of their lives.
And there’s a man in the next room who would make this his problem without being asked. Who would set down everything he just fought so hard to pick back up, and carry it himself without thinking twice.
Which is exactly why I can’t hand him this yet. I need to find out how heavy it is first.
I zip the stethoscope back into the side pocket, and I finish packing, and by the time he comes out with his hair wet I’ve got my face back on.
* * *
He carries my bag down over my objection. He shouldn’t be lifting anything yet. I let him.
At the car he sets it in the trunk and stands there with his hands in his pockets while I check for my phone and my charger and my keys three times over, so I don’t have to look at him yet.
“Text me when you get there,” he says.
“I will.”
“Drive careful. And call me if you need anything. Anything at all, I don’t care what time.”
“I won’t need anything.”
“Call me anyway.” He pulls me in by the waist, careful, and kisses me, soft and slow. “Go deal with your life,” he says against my mouth.
Then he kisses my forehead. He holds his mouth there for one quiet second.
“Come home.”
Come home.
My heart drops straight through the floor. A lump climbs up my throat, and I have about two seconds before it wins. I paste on a smile. “I will.”
His eyes narrow a fraction. “Hey.” His thumb slides under my chin, tipping my face up. “Look at me.”
“I’m fine.” My voice comes out thick. I laugh, and it wobbles. “Apparently I’m going to miss having you around to be a pain in my ass. Don’t let it go to your head.”
He pulls me in, and I hold onto him a second too long, my face pressed into his chest so he can’t see it doing what it’s doing. He smells like soap and home. I make myself let go.
Then I get in the car without looking at him again, because if I look at him again I won’t go.
I back down the long drive with my hands steady on the wheel, and at the top, where the gravel meets the road, I look in the rearview mirror.
He’s still there. Standing in the driveway in the morning sun with one hand lifted, watching me go. I lift my hand back.