Chapter 20: Not Your Nurse

Hannah's POV

I did not sleep after the stairwell.

I lay in a rented room with a hotplate and a single window.

I replayed one second over and over.

It was his hand against my jaw, and his thumb not quite still.

I had taken this job for him.

I'd told the clinic it was the city, the pay, the new start, and I'd told myself the same.

The truth was a tall man with a tumor.

He had put a six-year-old's wellbeing ahead of his own life, and I wanted to see how a man like that got well.

I had meant to watch from a distance.

I had not meant to be the one to put in the line.

What frightened me wasn't the want.

It was the arithmetic.

A man who waited seven years on a kitchen chair for one woman does not stop being that man in a month.

Lorna was on the bench every Saturday.

She was trying, which was worse, because trying made her someone he could forgive.

I could picture the whole thing clearly.

He would go back to her out of loyalty, or pity for the boy, or habit.

I would be the nurse he had been kind to on a bad week.

At nine that night someone knocked on my door.

I opened it, in socks and a sweatshirt, with a half-eaten piece of toast in my hand.

Elliot stood on the landing in his good coat.

He was grey in the face, because it was a chemo week.

He held the rail with one hand.

"You shouldn't be on stairs," I said.

"I took the elevator."

"There's no elevator."

"I took the stairs," he admitted. "Slowly."

Behind him, down in the street, a car idled at the curb.

I could see Sam through the back window, asleep with his head against the glass.

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