He ate the eggs.Then the toast.Then he drank the water in three long swallows and set the empty glass on the table with the careful placement of a man who was aware of every object he touched.Then he drank his coffee.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean for letting me sleep.”
“I heard you the first time.”
They looked at each other across the table.The feeling was the same—the sense of being in the middle of something that didn’t have a name yet and wasn’t waiting for permission.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Tomorrow.”
“My first day shift.Medical-surgical, not ICU, not emergency.I’ll be changing bandages and monitoring vitals on post-op patients who are already in the system.I won’t be anywhere near the emergency bay.I won’t see the ambulances come in.I won’t see who’s on the stretchers or where they go.”
“That’s the point.They’re keeping you away from the operation.”
“Obviously.What I’m trying to figure out is what I do with it.”
“You work your shift.You keep your head down.You don’t draw attention.You use the fact that you’re in the building to observe things you couldn’t see from the ER—staff patterns, supply deliveries, which hallways get traffic, and which ones don’t.The day shift sees a different hospital than the night shift does.”
“You want me to run reconnaissance on a twelve-hour nursing shift.”
“I want you to do what you’ve been doing for the past eighteen months, except now you know what you’re looking for.”
She held his gaze.He didn’t look away.That was the thing about Graham—he never looked away first.Not when the information was hard, not when the silence stretched, not when the space between them got small enough that looking away would have been the easier choice.
“Okay,” she said.“But I need something from you.”
“Name it.”
“Don’t sit in my parking lot.”
His jaw shifted.Not disagreement—the effort of swallowing a reflex.
“I’m serious.If I’m going to walk into that building tomorrow and pretend I don’t know what I know, I need to be able to focus.I can’t focus if I’m thinking about you sitting in a truck a hundred yards away, watching the building and not sleeping and running through every worst-case scenario in your head.That doesn’t help me.It distracts me.”
“It’s not about distraction.It’s about response time.”
“You’re not a paramedic, Graham.You can’t just park an ambulance outside and wait for me to code.”
A shadow crossed his face—the medical language, the code reference, touching a nerve she’d learn about later.She filed it away the way she filed away all the things he almost said.
“Fine,” he said.“No parking lot.”
“Thank you.”
“But you text me when you get to the hospital.And you text me when you leave.”
“Deal.”
He nodded once, stood up, and carried his plate to the sink.He washed it.He washed her plate too, and the pan, and the spatula, and the mixing bowl she’d used for the eggs.He dried everything and put it in the rack.
She watched him from the table and drank her coffee and didn’t say any of the things she was thinking, which included the fact that he washed dishes the way he did everything else—thoroughly, without wasted motion, with the quiet competence of a person who had learned that taking care of small things was how you kept the big things from falling apart.
* * *
