He pulled up her contact info on his phone and shot her a message. As expected, she replied within seconds to take the whole day, more if he needed it, and not to worry about work.

Anything I can do to help? she texted as he was crawling out of bed.

Get out of my damn head was what he wanted to say, but instead, he typed, Keep a close eye on Barrett. His skills with this type of insulation are untested. He was still working on trusting Lee Barrett, the new guy, even though he’d been with the company for a couple of months now.

On it, she replied, adding a smiley emoji at the end.

Cole shot out of bed and headed for the shower, which was approximately five steps away from his bed in his small but adequate apartment. He opened his music app and set it to a metal station, turned on his Bluetooth speaker, and stepped into the shower without letting the water heat up, forcing his mind to his mom and away from a particular brunette.

Faye North’s face had more color today, her short platinum hair looked as if it’d been combed recently, and her brown eyes had a hint of her usual sparkle back in them when Cole sauntered into her ICU room. The head of her bed was angled up to about thirty degrees, and the television was on, though she hit mute as soon as he walked in.

“Hey, Mom. How are you feeling today?” he asked as he hugged her. He slid one of the visitor chairs up next to her and sat down.

“I’m feeling pretty good,” she said, smiling. “A little tired, but I managed to get some sleep. Kind of a feat in this place.”

“You look better than you did last night,” Cole said. He’d stopped to see her on his way home from work, sat with her while she ate her bland dinner, and had taken off when Gabe showed up. “Has the doctor been in yet?”

His mom glanced at the institutional clock on the wall. “It’s not even eight yet.”

“So no?”

She shook her head and held her hand out in a silent plea for him to grasp it. He did, then rested their interlocked hands on the narrow mattress.

“What happened to your forehead?” she asked.

Another mark of her feeling better, as she hadn’t previously noticed the cut from last week’s altercation with the asshole at Sunshine’s. It was healing well but still impossible to hide, especially from a mom who normally didn’t miss much.

“Cole, not another fight?”

“Guy had it coming. It was no big deal.”

She exhaled, aggravated with him, as she’d done no less than a hundred thousand times in his life. “Violence doesn’t solve anything,” she said, also not for the first time.