Elise wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Dr. Mars says you're a pain in the arse who tries to read your own charts and argues with the nurses about medication dosages."
Sienna's mouth curved. "Both things can be true."
Elise laughed. The sound was real and unguarded and it vibrated through both of them and for the first time in three weeks the tightness in Elise's chest loosened entirely.
The door opened behind them. Dr. Josephine Mars appeared, purposeful in her white coat, her sandy hair pinned back, her reading glasses perched on her nose. She was carrying a folder and a slightly exasperated expression that Elise had come to associate with Sienna's brand of medical non-compliance.
"Well," Dr. Mars said, surveying the scene with kind eyes. "Don't you look ready to escape."
"I've been ready for a week," Sienna said.
"I know. You've told me. Daily." Dr. Mars opened the folder and scanned the contents quickly, though she clearly alreadyknew what they said. "Your imaging is clear. The lung is fully reinflated and holding. The rib fractures are consolidating well. The surgical sites are healing nicely. Your bloods are good. You're going to have some residual discomfort in the ribs for another few weeks, and the arm stays in the cast for another four, and I want you in my office for a follow-up in ten days." She looked up over her glasses. "But you can go home."
The three words filled the quiet room and Elise felt them settle deep into her body. Home. Together.
"Thank you, Josephine." Sienna's voice cracked on the name.
Dr. Mars closed the folder and tucked it under her arm. "Don't thank me. Thank your body for being stubborn and your girlfriend for being here every single day." She glanced at Elise with a look of frank admiration. "Every day, Sienna. Seven-thirty on the dot. I've started setting my watch by her."
Sienna's good hand found Elise's and squeezed. "I'm aware," she said, and the tenderness in her voice made Elise's throat ache.
Dr. Mars shook both their hands, reminded Sienna to take her medication on schedule and not to try to read the labels with a clinician's eye, and left. The room was quiet. The monitors that had beeped for three weeks were silent now, disconnected. The hospital bed was stripped. The get-well cards from the team were stacked in a neat pile that Sienna had arranged by date received, because she was Sienna. The biggest one was from Frankie, handmade, with a drawing of a stick figure in a lab coat giving a thumbs up and the caption: "The only person who'd try to diagnose themselves during surgery." Below that, in smaller writing: "We love you, Doc. Come back to us." Sienna had cried when she'd received it. She'd turned her face to the window and tried to hide it, but Elise had seen and she'd held her good hand and said, "Everyone knows except you." The card was on top of the pile now. Sienna had read it every day.
"Let's go home," Elise said.
Sienna looked at the room one last time. The window, the chair Elise had spent three weeks sitting in, the strip of ocean visible above the car park. Then Elise picked up her bags, and they moved through the hospital corridor together, past the nurses who smiled and waved, past the reception desk with its Monday lilies, through the automatic doors and into the warm morning air.
They passed through the automatic doors and the open air hit them and Sienna stopped on the pavement and closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun and stood there, breathing. Just breathing. The air outside the hospital was different from the air inside: it smelled of salt and car exhaust and coffee from the kiosk by the entrance and life. It smelled of life. Elise watched her and the tightness in her chest was not pain but gratitude, enormous and formless, the kind that had no words and needed none.
The drive to Elise's apartment was short. The windows were down and the salt breeze came through and Sienna sat in the passenger seat with her face turned toward the open window, breathing in the outside air as if she'd been underwater for three weeks and had just surfaced. The ocean was visible between the buildings, blue and glittering in the morning sun, and a gull followed them for two blocks before peeling away.
"You look like you've never seen the ocean before," Elise said.
"I haven't seen it in three weeks. I'm reintroducing myself."
The breeze caught Sienna's hair, lifting it from her collar.
"You'll be swimming in it again before you know it."
Sienna's eyes lit up. "Dr. Mars said four weeks until the cast is off, then gradual return. I can do pool walks before that."
Elise glanced at her, shaking her head. "Of course that's the first thing you think about."
Sienna turned from the window, her good hand resting on the cast in her lap. "I am a creature of routine. You knew this when you signed up."
Elise parked outside her building and came around to open Sienna's door. Sienna gave her a look that was equal parts gratitude and exasperation, the look of a fiercely independent woman who was learning, grudgingly, to accept help. Elise took the bag and offered her arm and they walked up the stairs together, Sienna moving slowly, her free hand on the railing, her breathing slightly heavier by the time they reached the second floor.
"Welcome home," Elise said, pushing open the door.
The apartment was clean. Not Elise's usual version of clean, which meant the surfaces were visible and the dishes were done, but properly clean, scrubbed and tidied and reorganised to a degree that was frankly suspicious for someone who lived alone. She'd spent the previous evening on her hands and knees with a mop and a level of determination she usually reserved for faceoffs.
Sienna stepped inside and looked around. The morning light fell through the windows and caught the fruit bowl on the table and the framed Valkyries jersey on the wall and the throw blanket draped over the sofa, the same blanket she'd wrapped around Sienna's shoulders on the night they first made love.
"You cleaned," Sienna said.
"I clean."
Sienna ran her finger along the windowsill and inspected it. "You don't clean. Not like this. You shoved everything into the spare room, didn't you."
