Page 186 of What We Brave
"You're not stupid."
"I amnot. So I told him to lose my number and he hit me with the 'you're overreacting' and I screenshot the whole thread and posted it on my story."
I laugh. "You didn't."
"Hundred percent did. My followers hadopinions." She shakes her head, zero regrets. "Anyway. Dating cleanse. Just me and my Netflix and my peace of mind."
She says it like it's nothing. Like narrating her entire romantic life while sorting gauze at three in the morning is just... what you do. No editing. No calculating who's listening. Just Danielle being Danielle, out loud.
"What about you?" She looks at me sideways. "You've been all smiley lately. The boyfriend's treating you right?"
Just say it.
It's right there. Rightthere. I could say it the way she'd say it. Casual. Easy.Actually, there are two of them. Yeah, I know. It's a whole thing.She'd probably think it was amazing. She'd want pictures. She'd want to rank them alongside Dr. Okafor.
"He's good," I say. "Yeah. Things are good."
Great. Cool. Nailed it.
Danielle smiles and goes back to her gauze pads and I go back to my gloves and we work in quiet for a few minutes. She hums. I stack boxes and think about how a twenty-three-year-old can post screenshots of her DMs for the whole internet and I can't say a number out loud in an empty hallway.
I walk back to the nurses' station. Room four is stable. Room seven is sleeping. The monitors do their thing and the clock says 3:38 and I've got three and a half hours left in this shift.
Boyfriend.She said it twice and I didn't correct her either time.
It's not her fault. She doesn't know. Nobody here knows except Jamila and she doesn't count because she's a vault and also she's easy. Jamila was the safe one.
This is different. This is work. These are people I see every day,people who know me as Laine the nurse, Laine who's finally settling down, Laine who had a boyfriend, and seems to have another one.
I pull out my phone and look at Reid's last text.
Reid
he says goodnight but in a mean way
I close it. Put it away.
My feet are moving before I've decided anything. Down the station. Past the med cart. Joyce is charting at the far end, reading glasses on, pen moving in that steady, unhurried way she does everything. I pour two cups of the terrible coffee. Add the pound of sugar Joyce pretends she doesn't use to her cup, then walk over and set one next to her elbow.
I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't have a plan. I have a word stuck in my head and sugar coffee and whatever this feeling is that's sitting on my chest.
Joyce looks up. Her eyes move over my face.
She takes her glasses off. Sets down her pen. Picks up the coffee and takes a sip that makes my teeth ache in sympathy.
"Okay," she says. "Sit down."
I sit.
Not gracefully. I sort of drop into the chair next to her and wrap both hands around my coffee cup.
Joyce waits.
She's so good at that. The waiting. Thirty-five years of nursing and marriage and probably every hard conversation you can think of, and the woman has turned silence into an art form. She just sits there, sipping her sugar bomb, not rushing me. Not filling the space.
Which is terrible, actually, because now I have to fill it.
"So," I say.
