That’s enough! her mother scolded. Wash your face. Get cleaned up and go talk to Cody. You need this, Stevie.

“What I need is to be out of here and back to work,” Stevie argued, but she stood up, ran a basin of cold water, and wet a couple of paper towels. She shivered when she peeled out of her clothing but felt like a new woman when she had clean sweats on her body and her teeth brushed. She even took the time to get all the tangles out of her curly red hair and pull it up into a messy bun.

“Best I can do, Mama,” she said to her reflection in the tiny mirror above the sink.

You are beautiful. You are smart. I’m proud of you. Her mother had told her that so many times she couldn’t count them on both hands.

“Thanks, Mama,” she said, and managed a weak smile.

When she opened the door, the smell of sizzling steaks filled the air, and Cody was singing “Millionaire” and surprisingly enough his deep voice had almost as much grit in it as Chris Stapleton’s.

“What brought that song to mind?” she asked. “Is there a woman in your life that makes you a millionaire like the lyrics say?”

“Not yet, but I can always hope there’s one out there in the future that will make me feel like I’m rich in a way that doesn’t have a thing to do with dollar bills,” he answered. “When I was in the Doctors program, I couldn’t ask a woman to give up her life and follow me around in countries like I’ve been in, but now that I’m home, things are different.”

Stevie breathed a sigh of relief. “Don’t we all hope to find that kind of person. Those steaks about ready?”

“They are, and the potatoes are done too. Wait ’til you taste the coffee,” he said.

“Good, bad, or ugly?” she asked as she poured herself a cup.

“You be the judge,” he said.

She took a sip and shivered even worse at the taste of it than she had because of cold. “Beyond ugly, even beyond downright nasty.”

“It should clean out the bathroom drainpipes,” Cody teased as he forked up a steak and put a good-sized portion of potatoes on each plate.

“Probably eat right through them.” She opened the window behind the stove and tossed what was in the cup out on the ground, then closed the window. “You can drink it if you want. I’d rather have water.”

“Me too, only I poured mine back in the pot,” he told her.

“Yuck!” Her nose crinkled. “That’s not very sanitary.”