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“Huh.” He squinted at my badge. “Walton. You’re Jimmy’s granddaughter?”

My stomach tightened.

“I am.”

“How’s he doing? Heard he’s not been well,” he said.

“He’s hanging in there.”

He nodded slowly.

“Jimmy helped my dad bring in wheat more summers than I can count.”

A beat passed.

“Good man.”

“He is.”

The farmer shifted on the bed before offering a crooked smile.

“Glad you’re back, kid.” Four simple words. I’d spent the last seven days bracing for sideways glances and whispered conversations that never came. Maybe I’d been carrying ghosts no one else could see.

“Thank you.”

He nodded his head in approval. “Town could use another Walton.”

Lacy handed him his discharge papers. “I’d listen to her about the lifting,” she said.

He folded the papers without looking at them. “I’ll think about thinking about it.”

“That’s the best we’re getting,” Lacy said after he disappeared through the doors.

“I’ve heard worse.”

She bumped my shoulder. “You handled him just right.”

I watched the automatic doors slide closed behind him as he caught the ride to take him home. One patient down. One less reason to wonder whether I’d made a mistake coming home. Maybe I just needed to stop being so on edge every time someone talked to me. Maybe this wouldn’t be as hard as I thought, although I didn’t think I could be that lucky.

By noon, the department had found an easy rhythm. A middle-aged woman with dehydration after insisting coffee counted as water. A teenager who’d rolled his ankle trying to jump down from a hayloft. And a six-year-old whose mother couldn’t understand why his breath smelled “like something died.” The answer turned out to be half a blue crayon he’d shoved up his nose three days earlier. Lacy laughed so hard that she had to leave the room. I wasn’t far behind. A dab of Vicks beneath my nose was the only thing that kept me from gagging while removing the waxy culprit. By the time they left, both of us were laughing.

I finished my notes at the nurses’ station while Lacy leaned against the counter beside me, flipping through a chart.

“You’re fitting right in,” she said, her eyes shining.

“High praise.”

She snorted. “Just wait for Friday nights when the football team decides they’re invincible.”

My fingers stilled on the keyboard. Lacy clipped another chart onto the rack.

“Football?”

“Yeah. Coach runs them hard,” she said as she glanced down over a clipboard, her curls dropping to cover her face. A smile tugged at my mouth despite myself.

“Jace mentioned conditioning this morning.”

“He’ll sleep well tonight.”