Page 17 of Daddy's Ring
"I'm okay." Another lie, but this one feels necessary. "Declan's been taking care of me. Making sure I eat and take my meds and don't move too much."
"Of course he has." Nia's mouth quirks. "Man's been in love with you met. You think he's going to let a little thing like major surgery stop him from fussing?"
"It's not fussing." I defend him automatically even though she's right. "He's just?—"
"Obsessed with you? Completely gone? Would probably burn down the city if you asked him to?" She ticks them off on her fingers. She's suddenly become his biggest supporter after seeing him try to move mountains after everything happened. "Pick your favorite."
"Supportive." I settle on that because the alternatives make my chest tight. "He's being supportive."
Nia studies me over the rim of her coffee cup, and I know that look. That's her I-can-see-through-your-bullshit look, the one she's perfected over fifteen years of friendship.
"What?" I shift against the pillows, immediately regretting it when pain shoots through my side.
"Nothing." She keeps watching me though, assessing. "Just trying to figure out if you've actually talked to him about all this or if you're both doing that thing where you pretend everything's fine."
"We've talked." Sort of. In fragments and half-finished sentences that don't actually address anything real. "There's nothing to say anyway. It happened. I'm dealing with it."
"Z." Her voice goes gentle in that way that makes me want to cry. "You lost?—"
"I know what I lost." The words come out harsher than I intend. "Trust me, I'm very aware of what's gone. But sitting around being sad about it won't change anything, so I'd rather just move forward."
She doesn't argue, just nods slowly like she's filing that information away for later. We've known each other long enough that she understands when to push and when to let things breathe.
"Fine." She shifts gears smoothly, leaning back in the chair. "Then let me tell you about the absolute nightmare that is my internship right now because my boss is losing his mind."
Relief washes through me. This I can handle—normal conversation, regular problems, someone else's drama that has nothing to do with hospitals or surgery or futures I can't have anymore.
"What happened?"
"Okay, so you remember how I told you Ryan was convinced the new financial software was going to revolutionize everything?" She's already warming to the story, hands moving expressively. "Turns out the software is garbage and it's been calculating projections wrong for three weeks and nobody noticed until yesterday when the quarterly report made zero sense."
"Oh no."
"Oh yes." She grins despite the disaster she's describing. "Ryan spent four hours on the phone with tech support and I swear I watched that man age ten years. He kept saying 'this isunacceptable' in this voice like the software could hear him and would be ashamed of itself."
I laugh again, carefully this time, protecting my incision. "That sounds terrifying."
"It was hilarious." She takes another sip of her coffee. "Though I did have to stay late fixing spreadsheets, which is how I ended up at the diner at nine PM stress-eating pancakes."
"Classic Nia stress response."
"Listen, pancakes solve problems." She points at me seriously. "This is documented fact. But anyway, I'm sitting there drowning my sorrows in carbs when this guy walks in—and Z, I'm talking stupidly attractive. Like unfairly hot."
I raise an eyebrow. "This is going somewhere?"
"Maybe." Her smile goes shy, which is unusual for Nialyn. "His name's Owen. He's a firefighter, which is already basically catnip, right? And he sits down at the counter next to me and orders coffee and pie, and we just started talking."
"Just started talking." I'm grinning now despite the pain. "You hate talking to strangers."
"I know!" She laughs. "But he was easy to talk to? Like comfortable in this way where I didn't feel like I had to perform or be interesting. We talked for two hours. About everything—his job, my internship, his sister who's apparently a nightmare, my dreams about the bookstore."
"Two hours?" I whistle low. "That's serious conversation time."
"Right?" Her whole face lights up in a way I haven't seen in months. "And then when I had to leave, he asked for my number. Just straightforward like that. No games or weird pickup lines. Just 'Can I have your number? I'd like to take you to dinner.'"
"And you said yes."
"Obviously I said yes." She rolls her eyes. "I'm not an idiot. We're going out Friday. He suggested this Italian place downtown that's supposed to be amazing."
