Chapter 1 - The Bedside Order
“Rip those stitches out and cook—my family didn’t come here to eat trash.”
Colin’s hand clamped around Mara’s forearm before the sentence had even finished leaving his mouth. The blanket slid off her legs, cold air hit the paper-thin hospital gown, and pain shot across her lower back so hard she tasted metal.
“Colin—” She reached behind herself by instinct, but he had already shoved her robe against her chest as if dressing her were the same as helping her.
The bedroom in their little Pittsburgh rowhouse still smelled like antiseptic and pharmacy paper. Mara had been discharged less than twenty-four hours earlier after lumbar surgery. The white bandage at her lower back pulled tight as she tried to sit up, and the room tilted.
His face looked wrong to her. Too put together. Hair combed. Clean shirt. He kept glancing toward the hallway where voices drifted faintly through the open front door.
“Please,” she said, breath catching. “I can’t stand up yet.”
“You can stand long enough to put eggs in a pan.”
He yanked again. Her bare feet touched hardwood for half a second before one knee buckled. She slid sideways and caught herself on the edge of the bed, the jolt ripping a cry out of her that didn’t sound like her own voice.
That was the moment Evelyn stepped into the doorway with a pharmacy bag in one hand and a container of soup in the other.
She took in the scene quickly—the robe bunched in Colin’s fist, Mara twisted over the mattress, the bandage peeking above the gown. The bag slipped from her hand. Orange pill bottles scattered across the floorboards.
“What are you doing?” Evelyn asked.
Colin let go at once, but not fully. His hand hovered at Mara’s elbow, halfway between a grip and a performance. “She was getting up.”
Mara looked at her mother. Evelyn had spent thirty-two years working nights as a nurse and had a way of going still when she was angriest.
“You do not touch her again,” Evelyn said.
From outside came a car door slamming and then Colin’s sister Dana calling from the porch, cheerful and early and completely unaware.
May you like
Colin shut his eyes for one beat too long.
Then he said, low and panicked, “If she doesn’t come out there, everything falls apart.”
