Sadie
The first morning I wake up and don't have to think about where I am, I know something has changed.
It's been twelve days since Nick carried me off the floor of my apartment. Nine since Mikhail removed the IV. Eight since I told Nick I was in, sitting in his bed with the sheet tucked under my arms and my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
Today I wake up in his bed the way I've woken up every morning since, on my side, facing the window, with his arm heavy across my waist and his breath warm against the back of my neck. The curtains are drawn but the light comes through at the edges, and the house is quiet the way it's always quiet in the mornings before the phone calls start.
I check my sugar before I do anything else. The meter is on the nightstand beside a glass of water Nick fills for me every night before we go to sleep. One-fourteen. Clean. Stable. I've been stable for six days straight, which is the longest streak I've had in over a year, and I know it's because Mikhail adjusted my doses with a level of precision that makes the endocrinologist I saw twice in Millbrook look like he was guessing.
Nick's arm tightens when I shift. He's awake. He's always awake before me, but he stays still until I move first, because he figured out sometime in the first week that I need the act of waking up to be mine. I need to orient myself before I'mtouched, before I'm spoken to. He noticed it without me telling him, and he adjusted without asking, and every morning it loosens something in my chest that I didn't know was still tight.
"One-fourteen," I say.
His mouth presses against the nape of my neck. "Good."
That's the whole conversation. It happens every morning. The number and the word. It's the smallest ritual I've ever had with another person and it's already the one I'd miss the most.
I shower in his bathroom, which is roughly the size of my entire apartment, and has water pressure that makes me want to weep with gratitude. There's a shelf in the shower now with my shampoo on it, the cheap drugstore kind I've used since college. Nick hasn't replaced it. He hasn't upgraded it or swapped it out for something expensive. It sits beside his on the shelf, my three-dollar bottle next to his whatever-it-costs bottle.
He doesn't try to make me into someone else. He just makes room for me exactly the way I am.
I dress in the clothes Dmitri brought from my apartment. My own jeans, my own shirts, my own underwear. Nick offered to buy me new things and I told him not yet, and he nodded and didn't push, and when I opened the dresser drawer he'd cleared for me, everything was folded the way I fold it.
I eat breakfast at the kitchen island. Toast and peanut butter and a glass of juice, the same breakfast I've eaten since I was twelve. Nick sits across from me with his coffee and his phone, scrolling through messages, and every few minutes his eyes come up to check on me in a way that isn't hovering. It's monitoring. The way a man monitors something he's invested in keeping alive.
Dmitri drives me to the clinic because the walk from Nicks’ is simply too far.
The car drops me at the staff entrance. Dmitri stays at the curb until I'm inside.
Priya hands me coffee the moment I round the corner. She looks at my face the way she's been looking at my face every morning since I came back, checking for something she can't name.
"Good morning?" she asks. It's a question and an assessment rolled into one.
"Good morning." I take the coffee. It's hot and terrible and perfect. "What've we got?"
"Full book. Mehta's in early. She wants to see you before we open."
I find Dr. Mehta in her office with the door half-closed. She waves me in without looking up from her laptop, finishes typing something, then closes the lid and gives me her full attention.
"Sadie. How are you feeling?"
"Good. Stable. Mikhail cleared me last week."
"I know. He called me." She says it matter-of-factly. I'm still getting used to the idea that my boyfriend's private doctor and my boss speak to each other about my health, but it tracks with everything else about my life now. The circles overlap and I sit squarely in the middle.
"I want to talk to you about something," she says.
I sit down. My hands go to my lap the way they always do when I'm preparing for information.
"The nursing program at Metro City College is accepting late applications for the fall semester. I spoke to the admissions office yesterday. Your credits from Ohio would transfer. You'd need eighteen months to complete the degree, assuming a full course load. Less if you took summer sessions."
I stare at her.
"I'm not pushing," she says. "I'm presenting an option. You're an excellent MA, and I'd hate to lose you. But you were two semesters away from an RN when you left school, and the reason you left doesn't apply anymore."
My mother. She means my mother. The reason I left was my mother's diagnosis, and the reason I never went back was the cost, and then Jason, and then survival.
"I can't afford it," I say.
