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I've been in his house a week, and Eli won't let me cook.

His house is perfect. It's low and wide and built half into the hillside above the garden, with bundles of drying herbs hanging from every beam so the whole place smells like a pharmacy in a fairy tale.

He makes my tea in the morning. He makes my lunch and my dinner and something in between that he calls a snack (it’s too big to be a snack), so I call a third lunch. When I stand up to wash a dish, he takes it out of my hands. When I reach for the kettle, he's already filled it.

I sleep. That's the miracle. Nine hours, ten, deep and heavy, and I wake up rested in a way I'd forgotten was possible.

He doesn't.

On Tuesday he walks me through the greenhouse and names everything in it. Not the common names. The real ones, the Latin, and what each one does to a body — this one for the heart, this one for the gut, this one for the kind of grief that sits under your ribs and won't move. He talks more in that hour than I've heard him talk all week. His hands move over the leaves as he goes, touching every plant like he's taking its temperature, and his whole face is lit up, and I think, oh, this is what he looks like happy, and I want it to be me that does that to him. I want it so badly it scares me.

On Wednesday he slices the heel of his hand open on the pruning shears, a clean deep cut that bleeds all over the potting bench, and when I go for his first-aid kit he takes it out of my hands.

"I've got it."

"Eli. I close wounds for a living. Give me your hand."

"It's fine." He's already rinsing it at the tap, pressing a pad of yarrow into it with his thumb, wrapping it one-handed with a strip of clean linen, neat and fast and practised. He doesn't look at me once. When I reach for his wrist, he moves it out of my way without seeming to notice he's done it.

I stand in the greenhouse with my hands empty and the kit open on the bench, feeling like something I don't have a name for.

I've caught him three times at night. I surface in the dark at three or four in the morning and he's sitting in the chair he's pulled up beside the bed, elbows on his knees, watching me breathe. The first time it frightened me. The second time it made me cry. The third time, I lay still and pretended, and counted him instead. He sat there an hour and a half, and he never once closed his eyes.

On Thursday I open the cupboard beside his stove looking for honey and find the inside of the door covered in pencil.

Dates, running down in a neat column, starting the day I arrived. Beside each one, two numbers. The first is how many hours I slept. The second is my respiratory rate.

Oct 21 — car — 14/min. Oct 22 — 14 hrs — 13. Oct 24 — 9. All the way down to last night. 10 hrs — 9. Good.

He underlined good.

I stand there with the cupboard door open and my hand over my mouth for a long time. It's the creepiest thing anyone has ever done for me. It's also my handwriting, almost — the chart I've kept on a thousand patients through a thousand nights, the column nobody ever kept on me.

On Friday I walk down to Edna's to use the only landline in the valley, and my unit manager tells me the review is closed.

"You did everything right, Sloane." Her voice is careful, the way mine gets with families. "Everyone who looked at it said the same thing. There was nothing else anybody could have done for him."

I hold on to the edge of Edna's counter.

"And Ruth's retiring in January," she says. "We want you to take the unit. Nurse manager. Your team asked for you. All of them." A pause. "I need you in Vancouver on Monday if you want it. I'm not holding it longer than that."

My team. My unit, the one I've given fourteen years to, the one where I lost Mr. Okafor. Not a punishment. A promotion. Proof, in writing, that I didn't fail.

I want it so badly I can taste it.

"Monday," I say.

When I tell Eli that night, he listens to all of it without a word, sitting across his table with the herbs hanging over our heads and the fire going.

"Don't decide tired," he says.

"I'm not tired. For the first time in two years, I'm not tired." I lean forward. "Do you want me to stay?"

He looks at the fire. "I want you rested."

"That's not an answer."

"It's yours if you want it. You earned it."