Page 124 of Deacon

“I know.” The answer came easily, maybe too easily, but she met my eyes when she said it. For now, I had to trust that.

“Love you,” I said, because sometimes that was the only thing a mother could leave behind without asking for anything in return.

“Love you too, Mom.” Her voice followed me out with enough warmth that I let myself go.

I left with the worry still under my skin. Motherhood didn’t always mean getting the truth the moment you wanted it. Sometimes it meant staying close enough that your child knew where to put it when she was ready.

The drive to the construction site gave me too much time to replay breakfast. I pulled into the gravel lot beside the half-finished emergency department with half my coffee gone and my thoughts still stuck on the way Jade had stopped herself from touching her phone.

Our temporary planning office was a metal trailer planted beside the construction site, surrounded by orange cones and the steady grind of work outside. Inside, the air-conditioning ran too cold over floor plans, vendor catalogs, binders, and enough abandoned coffee cups to qualify as decor.

Blue was already working through a stack of papers. Evan sat crooked in his chair with the expression of a man personally wronged by administrative labor. He looked up the second I came in. “Thank God. Another fifteen minutes alone with staffing applications and I was going to walk into traffic.”

Blue didn’t bother looking up. “No, you weren’t.”

Evan accepted the correction without shame. “No,” he admitted, “but I would have complained about it beautifully.”

I dropped my bag beside my chair and sat. “What are we doing first?”

“Doctors,” Blue said, sliding a stack toward me. “Then nursing. Then we argue over who looks good on paper and who would actually survive a trauma night without crying in the med room.”

“That seems fair.” I reached for the stack, grateful for work concrete enough to organize.

Evan hummed and tapped one application. “And then there’s this.”

Blue’s mouth twitched before she looked at me. “You might want to sit with that one a second.”

I frowned and took the page. The name at the top stopped me: Dr. Mason Reid. For a moment I stared at it. Mason was from Wicker Falls, old shifts, and a period when I had mistaken uncomplicated for meaningful because uncomplicated had been all I wanted.

Evan watched my face with open interest. “Well, this is fun.”

Blue gave him a warning look that had never once stopped him. “Don’t.”

He put a hand to his chest, already committed to the bit. “I am being supportive.”

“No,” I said dryly, still looking at the application. “You’re being nosy.”

“I’m capable of both.” Unfortunately, that was true enough that arguing would only entertain him.

I set the page down. “He’s an attending. Smart. Good in trauma. Good with patients.”

Evan’s brows lifted, and the professional discussion immediately died under the weight of his curiosity. “And in bed, unless I’ve wildly misremembered history.”

Blue closed her eyes like patience had become a physical burden. “Evan.” She had known him long enough to recognize that warning him usually made things worse.

“What? We’re all adults. Supposedly.” His innocence was insulting, especially when he already knew exactly how much history there was to tease me about.

I gave him a flat look and refused to hand him anything useful. “It was short history.”

“That is not the part of the sentence I was inquiring about.” He leaned back, pleased with himself because embarrassment counted as victory in Evan’s world.

“Evan.” I put enough warning into his name to make the point and let the silence after it tell him the subject was finished.

“He grinned, entirely unrepentant. ‘Fine. But only because I’m a model of restraint.’”

Blue ignored him and asked the only question that mattered. “Would you be okay with him working here?”

I picked up the application again even though I already knew Mason was qualified. “It’s fine,” I said after a second. “If he’s applying knowing I’m here, then I have to assume he’s fine with it too.”