She blinked at it, then up at him. Did he . . . want to shake her hand, to end this? Like a professional goodbye, or maybe some kind of weird gentleman’s agreement that would remind her not to get any more ideas about wrecking his rental property? Honestly, after everything they’d talked about, it felt insulting enough that she almost wanted to take a pass.

Instead, to get it over with, she put her hand in his.

But it wasn’t a handshake he wanted.

As soon as they touched, he tilted his palm; he pressed his against hers, wrapping his warm, strong fingers around the edge of her hand, the same as he had that night in Donny’s apartment, to keep her from falling. She knew he could hear her sharp intake of breath but hoped he couldn’t hear the way her heart thudded in response to his touch, his nearness. Even through her still-stuffy nose, she could tell that he smelled like sleep and her sheets and something else, something clean and spicy, and without thinking, she tipped her face up to get closer to it.

He leaned down, and set his lips against her forehead. Soft, sweet, and somehow sad.

A goodbye.

Still, the best medicine she’d ever had, for the seconds he stayed there. She felt—rather than heard—him murmur something against her skin, but before she could ask what he’d said, he straightened, loosening his hold on her hand.

This time, when he turned to go, he didn’t change his mind.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Two weeks and two days since he’d seen her.

Not that he was counting.

But he was counting.

He stared down at the stack of call sheets where he’d been scribbling notes all day, half-formed words about patients he’d seen over the course of his shift. The fragments, they were part of the job, or at least they were part of the way he’d always done it: nothing that’d make sense to anyone else, but that made perfect sense to him when he finally sat down to do notes in between rushes or at the end of his shift. Sometimes he’d write things like pudding cup, and that would remind him that the woman in treatment three who’d fainted in the middle of her daughter’s piano recital had taken a bite of her orderly offered chocolate pudding right before she mentioned to Will that her jaw bothered her, only a little, really, but it was the jaw pain that made him put in the orders for an MI workup, and once he saw the words pudding cup he could somehow remember it all for the patient note.