Chapter 29 RONAN
Ronan
The house is too big when she’s not in it.
I never noticed before. I lived here alone for years and it was fine, it was mine, it was as quiet as I wanted it. Now she’s been gone three days and I keep finding myself in rooms with no reason to be in them, checking for her out of habit, coming up empty.
I’m in the gym and my hand goes to the heavy pair before I’ve thought about it. The ones I used to warm up with. The shoulder feels good. The leg’s holding. Nobody here to stop me.
I stand there with my hand on the iron, and I think about doing it. Every instinct I’ve built a life on says do it, push, take the ground back faster.
Then I take the pair she cleared me for, and I do the work, and I rack them.
I told her I’d do this right, and I don’t give my word and then break it the minute the room’s empty.
And I’m not rebuilding this body to prove a point to a rack of dumbbells.
I’m rebuilding it for what I’ve got planned.
Walking her down to the cove like I promised, no cane.
Carrying her up the stairs I used to need help climbing.
Her legs around my waist without me having to think about the leg.
All of it. Every week I do this right is a week closer.
The heavy pair can wait. Everything about her has been worth the wait.
In the afternoons I walk the beach. There’s a black rock down the shore, tide-slick, a big one, and the last time we walked together we turned around fifty yards short of it.
Today I make it all the way there and put my hand on it, out of breath and grinning at a rock like an idiot.
I haven’t felt this since before the accident.
Fifty more yards of my life, back.
I take the return trip easy. I’m not limping into that reunion.
I’ve got a whole list of things to tell her when she’s back, saved up, waiting for her face when I hand them over.
Mrs. Vale comes in the afternoons, feeding me on Tessa’s schedule whether I’m hungry or not.
Today she’s in the kitchen putting things back where she thinks they go, which isn’t where Tessa put them, while I pretend to read on the terrace, and she stops in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder.
“Will Miss Quinn be back this week?”
“Yeah. Friday.”
“Then I’ll do the big shop Thursday.” A nod, and it’s settled.
She goes back to the kitchen, and that’s the whole conversation, and it carries me the rest of the day. Friday. I don’t doubt it for a second. Why would I?
* * *
She calls at nine.
“Hey, you,” she says, and God, I missed her voice.
“Hey yourself. How was your day?”
“Long. Boring. Paperwork with more paperwork inside it.” I can hear how tired she is, right down the line.
“You hate paperwork.”
“I do. Deeply.” Then, before I can follow that anywhere, she says, “Tell me about yours. Did you do the exercises?”
“Your weights, your reps. On the record.”
“Look at you, being reasonable.” She laughs, but it’s a small one, thinner than her real laugh. “It’s very unsettling.”
“Don’t get used to it. And I made it to the black rock today. Past the point.”
“Ronan.” Now there’s something real in it. “All the way there?”
“All the way.”
“Any swelling afterward?”
“No.”
“Short of breath?”
“No.”
“Good.” The nurse first, running her checks. Then the checks run out, and what’s underneath comes through quieter. “I’m so—” She stops. When she comes back, she sounds close to crying. “That’s really good. That’s really, really good.”
Good news shouldn’t do that to a person. I add it to the pile of things about this week I can’t explain.
“First thing when you’re back, we’re walking it together.”
A pause. Two seconds, maybe three. Long enough.
“Soon,” she says. “Listen, I’ve got an early morning, I should—”
“Tessa.”
“Yeah?”
I’ve got the question right there. What’s wrong. What aren’t you telling me. It’s been sitting in my mouth for three days.
“Nothing,” I say. “Sleep well. Call me tomorrow.”
“I will. I miss you.”
It sounds true. That’s what I keep coming back to, after she hangs up. It sounds true, all of it, every night. So why do I sit there afterward with the phone dark in my hand, running the call back, checking it for cracks?
I put the phone down and knock it off. She’s coming home Friday.
* * *
The next night she doesn’t call.
Tessa: Long day. Dead on my feet. Miss you. Call you tomorrow.
I read it more times than I’ll admit to. I type out Call anyway. I don’t care if you fall asleep on the line. I look at it. Then I delete it and tell her to sleep well, because some part of me doesn’t want to push on the door she’s holding half shut.
So my head goes where it always goes. That the something is me. That a week back in her real life is showing her the obvious—whatever we are was built in a house she was paid to be in, and out on her own ground it doesn’t hold. That she isn’t too tired to talk. She’s working out how to tell me.
I don’t believe it. Most of the day I don’t believe it. The nights are harder to argue with.
Three more days. Then she’s standing in that kitchen again and whatever it is, she can hand it to me in person. I can hold a line for three days.
That’s where my head is when I hear Sadie’s car on the drive.
She lets herself in without knocking, with a bag of something from the good bakery in town because she’s decided feeding me is a medical intervention.
“You’ve got your color back,” she says, setting the bag down. Then she looks at me too long, reading me over without being asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’ve got the face.” She starts unpacking pastry onto a plate nobody asked for. “The one from when we were kids and you’d decided not to tell anyone something was bad. Sit. Talk.”
I sit, because it’s easier than not, and because I have been carrying this around with no one to put it down in front of.
“It’s Tessa,” I say. “She’s—I don’t know.
She went back to Portland to sort out her life, and it’s fine, she’s allowed, but something’s off and I can’t get at it.
She’s pulling back. Little by little. And I can’t tell if it’s the stress of being home or if it’s—” I stop.
I make myself say the smaller, truer thing.
“Or if it’s me. If she got some distance and started to think better of the whole thing. ”
Sadie’s hands go still over the plate.
“I keep thinking about how it started,” I say.
“Live-in nurse, contract, the whole arrangement. Maybe out there in her real life it stops making sense. Maybe I’m the thing that only worked at the estate, in the fog, with nowhere else to look.
” I hear how it sounds. I say it anyway, because it’s what’s been eating me.
“I know how this goes, Sadie. I’ve watched things get taken before. ”
My sister sets down the pastry.
“Ronan,” she says carefully. “What has she told you about why she’s there?”
“Hospital stuff. Paperwork. The apartment.” I frown. “Why?”
“That’s it? That’s all she’s said?”
“Why would there be more?”
She stares at me. I watch her run it back, whatever it is, checking she heard me right.
“She didn’t—” Sadie stops. Presses her fingers to her mouth. Starts again. “Ronan, she’s been off the floor since the board opened it. That’s why she was free to come here.” She takes a breath. “The hearing’s in three days—”
“What hearing?”
Sadie closes her eyes. “I assumed she’d told you. God. You two are—she’s been prepping with her lawyer every day, I thought that’s why she’d gone quiet on you.” When she opens them, she looks like she’d give anything to take the last thirty seconds back.
“The board’s coming after her license,” she says quietly. “A patient died on her shift and the complaint puts it on her. It’s serious, Ronan. Very serious.”
I’m on my feet before I know I’ve moved.
I don’t say anything. I walk to the window and stand there with my back to her, and I try to make it fit.
Three days I’ve been building a case against myself.
Three days of running that phone call back, hunting for the moment she went cold on me, and there was never a moment because that was never the story.
I had it upside down. She’s fighting for her life forty minutes from this kitchen, and I’ve been standing on a beach wondering if she’d changed her mind about me.
“Hospital business,” I say, still facing the glass. “Paperwork. Her apartment.” Every word comes back meaning something else. “The hearing is the hospital business.”
“Ronan—”
“She’s not handling her life. She’s on trial.”
License. I know what that word means to her. I’ve seen what she turns into in the space of a breath, the day she knelt on my study floor and kept me alive. Her license isn’t a piece of paper. It’s the thing she’s proudest of. It’s who she is.
And they’re trying to take it, and she’s three days out from finding out if they can, and she has been going through it alone.
“She didn’t tell me.”
Sadie doesn’t move.
“She talked to me every night,” I say. “She told me she missed me. She asked if I was doing my exercises.” I have to stop and breathe before the rest of it. “She stood right there four days ago and told me she was fine.”
Sadie doesn’t say anything. There isn’t anything.
She’s about to lose everything she is. And she told me it was nothing. I believed every word.
She kissed me goodbye.
She promised she’d come back.
So why didn’t she tell me?