"I said I needed someone present. Someone qualified. Not someone running double shifts." I kept my voice even. "You would not be working as my surgical assist during this time."
Her face dropped. Something moved across it fast, there and gone before I could name it.
"At all?" she said.
"Not as often," I corrected. And I watched her try to hide the relief, which told me more than she probably intended. "The point is for you to recover. You cannot do that if you are running yourself back into the ground the moment you leave this bed. You would have your own space, real meals, and time to sleep more than three hours between shifts."
"That's very generous," she said. "But I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because." She pulled at a loose thread on the blanket. "My mother lives with me. I can't just move out and leave her."
"How many bedrooms do you need?"
She blinked. "What?"
"The penthouse has three guest suites. Your mother is welcome to one of them."
The look on her face was almost worth everything. Pure, unguarded disbelief.
"Riven. I cannot bring my mother to live in your penthouse."
"You can."
"She would never agree to that."
"Does she have somewhere stable to go right now?"
The silence that followed was its own answer.
"This is too much," she said quietly. "You'd be doing too much. I don't know how to accept something this big from someone I barely know outside of an operating room."
"You know me well enough," I said. "Six months, Mireya. You have read me better than most people I have known for years."
She looked at me for a long moment. Something shifted in her expression that I couldn't quite read.
Then my pager buzzed against my hip.
I checked the screen. The ICU. I stood, pushing the chair back.
"I have to go," I said. "But think about it. Please."
I picked up my coat from the back of the chair. At the door I stopped, and I turned back, and I looked at her sitting there in that thin hospital gown with her hair loose and her hands folded in her lap like she was bracing for one more thing to go wrong.
"I need to know you're somewhere safe," I said. The words came out quieter than I meant them to. "I need to know my sister is cared for. And right now those two things happen to be the same solution."
I held her gaze for one beat too long.
"Think about it," I said again. And left before she could see that I had meant the first part more than the second.
My office was quiet when I got back to it.
I made coffee I didn't need, stood at the window I always stood at, and tried to remember why inviting Mireya Rosen to live in my home had seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.
It had made sense in the hospital room. She was exhausted and homeless and too proud to ask anyone for help. Emma needed supervision. The guest suites were empty. The logic had been clean and simple and I had presented it that way and I had meant every word of it.
I had also meant the first part more than the second and I was trying very hard not to think about that.
