"You might want to have that conversation with someone other than me." She picks up her coffee and takes a sip, and the look she gives me over the rim is the same look she gave me when she told me to leave Millbrook. Kind but immovable.
I think about it for the rest of the morning. Between patients, between charts, between the steady rhythm of blood pressure cuffs and thermometers and the soft beep of the pulse oximeter. I think about it while I clean a wound on a seven-year-old's knee and hand her a puppy band-aid from the box I restocked last week, the same brand I put on Emma's forehead at the wreck. I think about it while I eat lunch with Priya and Denise in the break room.
I think about what Nick said.Go back to school. Finish the nursing degree. Go further.
He said it like it was simple. Like the thing standing between me and the life I wanted was just money, and money was something he had in quantities that made the obstacle vanish. And he's right, technically. The obstacle is money. It's always been money. But there's another obstacle behind that one, and it's the voice in the back of my head that sounds like Jason, telling me I'm not smart enough, not strong enough, not worth the investment.
That voice has been getting quieter.
It's still there. It speaks up when I'm tired or when my sugar dips. But it's quieter now, the volume down on a voice I thought would be with me forever.
Dmitri picks me up at six. The drive is twenty minutes. I watch the city go by through the window and I text Nick without thinking about it, the way I've started texting him during the day, small things, updates that don't require answers but get them anyway.
Good day. Full book. Mehta wants to talk to me about school.
His reply comes thirty seconds later.
Good. Can’t wait to hear all about it when you get home.
Home. He calls it home like it's already decided. Like the townhouse with the crown molding and the blue wallpaper and the dresser drawer with my cheap shampoo in the bathroom is mine. It's presumptuous and accurate and it makes me smile at my phone like a lovestruck teenager.
The car pulls up and I let myself in through the front door. The house smells like garlic and something roasting, which means Irina has been around today. I drop my bag on the bench in the hallway, kick off my flats and pad through to the kitchen in my socks.
Nick is at the counter with his sleeves rolled up and a glass of something amber beside his hand. He's reading a document, but he looks up when I walk in, and the thing his face does when he sees me is something I'm never going to get used to. A softening. Barely visible. Gone before anyone else would catch it.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi." He puts the document face down on the counter. "How's your sugar?"
"One-twenty. Checked twenty minutes ago."
He nods. "Sit. Eat. Then tell me about school."
I sit on the stool across from him. Irina puts a plate in front of me, roasted chicken with vegetables and rice. Nick watches me eat while I update him about Dr Mehta’s suggested about returning to school.
He listens without interrupting. When I'm done, he picks up his glass and takes a sip and sets it back down.
"Do you want it?" he asks.
"Yes." It comes out before I've finished thinking about it, and the speed of it surprises me. I've spent all day turning the idea over like a stone, examining every angle, cataloging every reason it won't work. But the want was there the whole time, underneath the reasons, patient and stubborn.
"Then it's yours," he says. "Apply tomorrow. I'll handle the rest."
"Nick, I need to pay for it myself."
He looks at me. I watch him weigh what I've said against what he wants to do, and I watch him choose me over his own instinct to provide.
"Then we'll figure it out," he says. "Loans, scholarships, whatever you want. And if there's a gap, I fill it. No arguments. That’s a compromise."
"Some arguments," I pout.
"Fine. Some arguments." The corner of his mouth lifts.
I reach across the counter and put my hand over his. His fingers turn and link with mine.
This is the rhythm. This is what I didn't know I was looking for when I packed my car and drove ninety miles behind a moving van with my whole life in boxes. This steady, certain thing.
I'm not the woman I was in Millbrook. I'm not the woman on the floor of apartment 4C, either. I'm someone new, someonestill forming, and the shape I'm taking fits here in a way that scares me and steadies me in equal measure.
"Thank you," I say.
He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles. The same knuckles he kissed when I woke up in his bed four days after nearly dying. The gesture is the same. The meaning has grown.
"You're welcome," he says.
