"Yes, ma'am," Wrenleigh says, with exactly zero sincerity, and grabs the remote.
Coin appears in the doorway from the kitchen.
He's been in there for the past hour, doing dishes, making lunches for tomorrow, existing in the steady rhythm of a man who runs a household the way some people run a company—organized, tireless, and completely unwilling to admit he's exhausted.
"Girls. Bed in thirty."
"Dad, it's only?—"
"Thirty, Wrenleigh."
She groans.
Sadie Jo is already closing her textbook, because Sadie Jo doesn't argue about bedtime.
She argues about almost nothing, which worries me more than Wrenleigh's constant battles.
The loud kids are easy. It's the quiet ones who keep you up at night.
I start gathering my things—jacket, keys, the PT folder I've been leaving here between visits because it's easier than carrying it back and forth.
I'm halfway to the door when Coin's voice stops me. "You don't have to rush off."
I turn. He's leaning against the kitchen doorframe, arms crossed, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder.
His hair is pushed back and there's a spot of dish soap on his forearm that he hasn't noticed, and I hate that I find that endearing because I am a grown woman and dish soap should not be doing things to my cardiovascular system.
"The girls are going to bed," he says. "I was going to sit on the porch for a while, if you want to join me."
"Sure," I say. "I could sit for a minute."
The porch is cold.
October in Morgantown, and the temperature drops fast once the sun goes down—the kind of cold that settles into your bones if you're sitting still, the kind that smells like wood smoke and fallen leaves and the particular sharpness of mountain air turning toward winter.
I'm still in my scrubs. They're thin. Not built for sitting on a porch in October.
I don't say anything about it because I'm stubborn and I've been cold before and I'll be cold again.
Coin sits down next to me—not close, not far.
The exact distance a careful man would choose.
He sets two mugs on the porch railing.
Coffee. Black for him.
He remembered that I take mine with cream, because of course he did.
"Thanks," I say, wrapping my hands around the mug as he nods.
I think it's sweet how he knows I'm a coffee addict.
Pulls the coin from his pocket and starts turning it between his fingers—that unconscious habit, the one I've watched from across rooms and never seen this close.
The coin catches the porch light, flashing gold-silver-gold as it moves.
His hands are rough. Scarred across the knuckles.
