Page 60 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Close enough. Figured I'd head out to the farmhouse. Get out of your hair."

The kitchen goes quiet. Not comfortable quiet. Hospital quiet.

"Today?"

"No sense dragging it out."

"You've got two weeks left on the—"

"I know what I've got left." It comes out harder than I mean it. I watch her take the hit and put her face away, one drawer at a time, until there's nothing left in it but nurse.

"Okay," she says. "Sure. That's good progress. You'll want your own bed."

"Yeah."

"I'll get your meds together."

"Nellie."

"You'll need the schedule written down; you never remember the evening dose—"

"Nellie."

She finally looks at me, and for one second there's a girl standing in a kitchen instead of a nurse, and everything I feel is right there behind my teeth. It wasn't one time. I'm not leaving because I want to. I'm leaving because I woke up happy and couldn't stand it.

"Thank you," is what comes out instead. "For all of it."

"It's what I do," she says. "I patch people up and send them home."

She turns back to the stove. Conversation over. And I stand there on my crutches in a kitchen that smells like her coffee, being handed exactly the door I asked for, hating every square inch of it.

Tater picks me up at noon. Nellie hands him my duffel on the porch and tells him to make sure I ice it at night, and she says it to him, not me, and that's how I know how bad I've done it.

I look back once from the truck. She's already gone inside.

***

Tater lasts two days before he comes for me.

He hauled my duffel up those farmhouse steps himself and didn't say one word the whole drive, which for Tater Monroe is the same as biting clean through his own tongue.

Two days. Then he finds me in the engine bay, elbow-deep in the pump panel, torquing a bolt that doesn't need it.

"So Debbie went by the cottage yesterday," he says. "Dropping off a casserole dish."

"Okay."

"Says the whiteboard's wiped clean."

My hand slips off the wrench.

"It's a whiteboard, Tater."

"It's not a whiteboard and you know it." He leans on the rig, arms crossed. "I carried your bag out of that house, Owen. I watched that woman tell me about your ice schedule because she couldn't stand to look at you. I gave you two days to come tell me what you did, and you didn't, so here I am."

I keep working. He lets the silence sit until it gets heavy enough I have to say something to make it stop.

"I'm not doing this with you."