He huffs a laugh and presses his mouth to my temple. We stay there for a beat before I pull back.
“Is Linda all right?”
“She’s fine. Sera got here as soon as we left. Linda’s quite spry for her age. She’s been making soup for you every day for seven days because she said that’s what you’ll want when you wake up. She’s going to weep on you in approximately three minutes when she comes up the stairs.”
He’s wrong. It takes ninety seconds.
I hear her on the staircase before she reaches the door, the slippers I picked out of the noise of the whole house earlier, and under them her heartbeat, quick for a woman climbing slowly. The door pushes open. She has a tray balanced on both arms, toast and juice and a small bowl of something that steams, and the moment she sees me sitting up against the headboard, her face folds in on itself.
“Oh, you foolish, foolish girl.”
“Linda—”
“Foolish.” She sets the tray down on the dresser with hands that aren’t quite steady and crosses to the bed. There’s a fadingyellow-green bruise at her temple where the bandage used to be, and seeing it makes something twist under my ribs. She takes my face in both papery hands and tilts it side to side, studying me. “Look at you. Color back in your cheeks. I told them. I said she’ll want soup when she wakes, and they all looked at me like I’d lost my mind.”
“How are you?” I ask her.
“I’m stronger than I look.” Her thumbs press my cheekbones once, firmly.
My throat closes. “Linda, I’m so sorry. If I’d—”
“Hush.” She kisses my forehead, the same press of her mouth she gives Ethan at bedtime, and the smell of her, flour and lavender and the faint antiseptic from her own healing temple, fills my whole head in a way it never has before. “You’re awake. The rest is noise.”
Grayson clears his throat from where he’s still kneeling. “You said you’d weep on her.”
“I will do no such thing.” Linda straightens, dabbing under one eye with the back of her wrist in a motion that fools nobody. “Eat the toast. The juice is fresh. Ethan squeezed the oranges himself, so there will be seeds. Tell him it’s the best juice you’ve ever had.”
“I will.”
She squeezes my hand once, hard, then sweeps out of the room with the dignity of a woman who absolutely did not just cry. The door clicks behind her, and I look at Grayson, and we both start laughing at the same time.
The toast tastes like more than toast. That’s the strange part. I bite into it, and there’s butter, yes, and bread, but underneath it there’s the wheat itself, and something green from the oil, and the faint metal of the knife that cut it, all of it arriving at once and too loudly. I put it down after one bite.
“Everything is so much,” I say.
“It evens out.” Grayson sits on the edge of the bed and pulls the tray closer, breaking off a corner of the toast for himself. “Right now, every sense you have is wide open with no filter on it. Your wolf hasn’t learned to dial any of it down because she’s a few days old. Give it a few weeks.” He grins. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”
The juice does have seeds. I drink it anyway, all of it, because somewhere downstairs a four-year-old squeezed the oranges, and I find I’m hungry in a way I haven’t been in years, a deep, clean hunger that has nothing to do with surviving. Grayson watches me eat with an expression that makes me want to throw a pillow at him.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m going to disappear.”
His face goes serious. “You stopped breathing twice while the healers worked. Once for almost a full minute.” His hand finds my ankle through the blanket and holds on. “Forgive me if I look at you for a while.”
I don’t have an answer for that, so I reach down and put my hand over his.
There’s a knock at the bedroom door, two knuckles, unhurried. I know who it is before he speaks because I know his footsteps from the stairs now, heavier than Linda’s, slower than Grayson’s. Coach.
“She’s decent,” Grayson calls, “and conscious.”
The door opens. Coach Ramirez fills the frame in a dark sweater, and he looks older than he did at the rink, the lines around his eyes cut deeper, the salt in his hair winning over the pepper. He looks at me for a long moment, and something moves behind his face that I can’t read.
“Miss Carver.”
“I think after all this you can call me Miranda.”
