“Grayson Wolfe.”
“All right, all right.”
She turns back to the stove and gives the contents a fast stir while I press my forehead to the back of her head and breathe.
“How was work?” I ask when my voice is mine again.
She lets out a tired laugh, finding her feet again. “Still trying to convince a sixty-year-old pack healer from up north that learning to take a blood pressure reading isn’t an insult to her decades of herbal knowledge.”
“How’s that going?”
“She informed me, in front of the entire intake class, that her grandmother could diagnose a kidney infection by smell alone.”
“To be fair.”
“Grayson, I made her sit through the lecture on standardized triage anyway.”
“Did she pass the exam?”
“With ninety-four percent.” Miranda smiles in spite of herself. “And she pulled me aside afterward and told me, very grudgingly, that the blood pressure cuff is useful in certain edge cases. I’ll take that as a win.”
I laugh. She’s run that institute two years now, built it out of her settlement money, and she works it with a clipboard in one hand and zero patience for anyone’s status.
“I still can’t believe you put the whole settlement into the institute.”
“I told you I would.”
“You told me you might. You didn’t mention you’d refuse to keep a single dollar for yourself.”
“Why would I keep it?” She glances at me over her shoulder. “I had everything I needed.”
Something in my chest pulls tight, and she has no idea she’s done it. I press a kiss to the back of her neck.
“You’re a bigger person than I am, Miranda.”
“You’re the one who paid for the building.” She snorts and turns down the burner. “What were you going to do, Grayson? Tell me what your version of the settlement looked like?”
“I wanted to torch Vivian Banks’ career. Axel Hudson I wanted on a no-fly list. And every person at that hospital who ever put your name in a sentence with a slur, I wanted run off this continent.”
“They paid, Ethan.” Her voice has gone steady. “I punished them on my own terms. Those people worked hard to get where they are. I’m not going to take that from them just because they were cruel. Cruelty doesn’t make a person’s whole life forfeit.”
“Axel got you fired.”
“And Axel agreed to a six-figure settlement, a public apology, and mandatory training. He thinks twice now before he hits on a nurse or a female staff member. That’s more change than burning his life down would’ve gotten.”
“You put me to shame, sweetheart.”
“You’re a perfectly fine person. You’ve just got less patience.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
She turns, kisses me on the chin, then pushes me toward the cabinet. “Plates. Four. Anna’s bowl with the lid.”
“Right away, ma’am.”
Dinner’s loud.Ethan tells us a long and increasingly elaborate story about the new boy at school who has apparently challenged him to a race on the ice tomorrow, complete with sound effects and one impassioned hand gesture that knocks over his glass of water. Anna throws a piece of carrot at him at exactly the right moment to suggest she’s been planning it. Linda, who’seating with us tonight because she eats with us every Friday now whether she pretends to want to or not, laughs into her napkin.
After dinner, Linda takes Anna up to give her a bath. Ethan asks if I’ll take him on a walk to the trail because he wants to show me where he saw the deer this morning.
