I gaped at the woman. Days in this hospital bed? Weeks of recovery? I shook my head. “But I have a business, employees… You’re telling me I can’t work for weeks? That just won’t do.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “Depending on your recovery… yes. But once you’ve healed some more, I might be able to clear you for short periods of work. Right now, you just need to focus on getting well.”

She gave me another smile, went through what would happen in the next few days then left me alone with my angry, worried alpha.

He did not give me any respite, unfortunately.

“What the fuck, cupcake?” Rowan demanded softly but with a pinched expression the second the door shut behind her. “The nurses said you had to have been in agony for hours. Days.” He clutched my hands more firmly. “Not pain. Not something niggling but easy to ignore. Fucking agony. They couldn’t believe that you were on your feet fucking working when you collapsed.”

Rowan’s concern was palpable, even if he was trying to disguise it with the usual masculine, over the top protectiveness.

“I have a high pain tolerance. I burn and cut myself regularly. Plus, I trip over anything and everything,” I said, going for a joking tone despite my raspy, thin voice.

Rowan’s expression didn’t waver. “No one has that high of a fucking pain tolerance, Nora. Why in the fuck didn’t you tell me that you were in that much pain?”

I sighed, knowing that Rowan was not going to let this go. It seemed hiding my crazy was pretty much impossible at that point.

“Because I don’t know how to trust my body, and it tells me I’m dying on a biweekly basis,” I admitted in a shameful voice.

Rowan’s brows furrowed in confusion.

“I’m a mess,” I groaned. “Not in a way that’s obvious. Because I’m excellent at hiding it. But I’m fucked-up, Rowan.” I chewed my lip. “It’s something you should know. Granted, it should’ve been a little earlier than now and not a conversation I relish having in a hospital bed… no matter how ironic it is,” I chuckled mirthlessly.

Rowan was not finding anything funny, his mouth curled into a grimace and his shoulders stiff.

I’d have to go all the way to satisfy him, tell him everything in order for him to understand at least a little.

“I did not have the same childhood you did,” I began. “I don’t have a mother who will send me care packages.”

I thought fondly of Rowan’s mother… the way he talked about her and his entire family, so glad that people like that existed. That they existed for him.

“We were born poor,” I continued. “I don’t remember my dad. But that makes sense since he died of an overdose when Ansel and I were two months old.”

I didn’t know what the man looked like, what his name was. Mom didn’t keep pictures, and I never searched for them. I didn’t need to know who he was. Ansel did. He was all about our ancestry, wanting to know the man our father was and might’ve been.