She turned.“Graham.”
“I want to stay.”
“On the couch then.”
Chapter 11
Graham had fallen asleep on her couch.
Maren stood in the doorway between the living room and the hall, holding her toothbrush, and watched him.He was sitting upright with his head tipped back against the cushion and his arms crossed over his chest, the way a person slept when they had trained themselves to be ready to move.His boots were still on.The lamp on the side table was still lit, and the yellow glow caught the olive tone of his skin and the shadow along his jaw where he hadn’t shaved since Thursday.
They had been planning for three hours.She had drawn the hospital floor plan from memory on the back of a grocery receipt—the one she’d used to mark her page in the paperback—and he had studied it with the same focused attention he brought to everything.He asked questions she hadn’t expected.Which fire doors had crash bars versus electronic locks.Whether the stairwell between the second and third floors had a camera or just a motion sensor.Where the supply closets were in relation to the nurses’ station on each floor.She had answers for all of them.
Somewhere between the camera placements and the shift change overlap, they had stopped sitting at opposite ends of the couch.She couldn’t pinpoint when it had happened.One of those gradual shifts—a lean to look at her drawing, a repositioning to rest an arm on the cushion behind her—until his knee was touching hers and neither of them mentioned it.
He had fallen asleep mid-sentence.He’d been explaining the extraction protocol Caleb had outlined, something about two-person teams and communication frequencies, and his voice had slowed, and his eyes had closed, and that was it.Gone.Like someone had pulled a plug.
She had let him sleep.Had sat there for another twenty minutes with his knee against hers and the grocery receipt floor plan balanced on the armrest, reading her paperback by the light of the lamp and listening to him breathe.
Now it was 6:14 a.m., and she had brushed her teeth, put on coffee, and was standing in her own hallway looking at a man asleep on her couch and trying to decide what to do about it.
She decided to make breakfast.
She cracked four eggs into a bowl and beat them with a fork.Found a half-empty bag of shredded cheddar in the fridge.Pulled bread from the drawer and set two slices in the toaster.
The eggs hit the pan with a hiss.She kept the heat low.
“You should have woken me up.”
She didn’t turn around.“You fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about radio frequencies.Your body made a decision.I respected it.”
She heard him stand.Heard the creak of the couch springs releasing his weight, and then his footsteps crossing the living room.He stopped in the doorway.
“How long was I out?”
“About five hours.”
“Five hours.”He said it like a confession.“I don’t sleep five hours.”
“You did last night.”She pushed the eggs around the pan with a spatula, folding in the cheese.“Sit down.These are almost done.”
He didn’t sit.He stood in the doorway and watched her cook, and she was aware of him the way she was always aware of him—steady, constant, a presence that had stopped being background noise weeks ago.
“I should go,” he said.
“After you eat.”
“Maren.”
“Graham.”She turned around and pointed the spatula at him.“You’re about to tell me something practical.That it’s not smart for your truck to be parked outside my house all night.That someone could have seen.That there are operational reasons why you should have left at eleven.”
He leaned against the doorframe.“All of those things are true.”
“And I don’t care about any of them.You haven’t slept more than three hours at a time since you got to Blossom Springs, because you told me that yourself on Thursday when I asked why you looked like you’d been awake for forty years.So you slept on my couch.The world didn’t end.Sit down and eat your eggs.”
He sat.
She set a plate in front of him—scrambled eggs, two slices of toast, a glass of water because she didn’t know if he drank orange juice and she wasn’t about to ask.And a cup of black coffee.She sat across from him with her own plate and watched him take his first bite.
