Page 252 of Wild Card 13

Grandma Ruth, who had apparently decided subtlety was for people without fractured ankles, reached for Lucy’s hand. “Would you help me stand when they get the car? These two are making me feel elderly.”

“You are elderly,” My grandfather snickered.

“I am experienced.”

Lucy’s hand slid into Grandma’s without hesitation. “Of course.”

There were a thousand things I wanted to say. I wanted to tellLucy I knew what it cost her to come. I wanted to tell her I saw the wrong button on her coat and the flush in her cheeks and the way she had looked at my face before she looked at the boot. I wanted to tell her that I would spend the rest of my life being worthy of this one moment if she ever gave me the chance.

A nurse called our name for final discharge.

Grandpa Hal gathered the papers. I grabbed Grandma Ruth’s purse and coat. Lucy stepped to the side of the wheelchair, one hand still offered, steady without taking over. Grandma allowed it, which was its own miracle.

As we moved toward the entrance, the automatic doors opened and winter light spilled across the tile. Pale. Cold. Ordinary. Grandpa went ahead to bring the sedan around. Grandma Ruth complained that nobody trusted her to walk five feet. Lucy listened like the complaint mattered. I followed with my grandma’s things in my arms and my heart somewhere up near my throat.

At the doors, Lucy paused beside me. “I left Dottie with Bea,” she said, as if that explained anything.

“Dottie is going to unionize over the missing pup cup.”

“She waited by the door for fifteen minutes.” Lucy looked out at the parking lot. “I told her she was being dramatic.”

“Was she?”

“Yes.” A beat. “She was also right.”

I turned my head. She did not look at me.

Outside, Grandpa Hal’s sedan rolled carefully toward the curb. The driver’s seat waited for me like a threat to my knees. Grandma Ruth sighed dramatically in her wheelchair. Lucy’s hand rested on the back of it, small and steady and there.

Showing up, I was learning, did not always look the way you planned. Sometimes it looked like coffee left at an office door. Sometimes it looked like missing the coffee because your grandmother needed you more.

And sometimes it looked like a woman with every reason to protect herself walking into a crowded hospital waiting room.

I looked at Lucy’s profile in the winter light and kept my hands full so I would not reach for what was not mine yet. But hope, fragile and stubborn, moved through me.

CHAPTER 32

LUCY

NOW

By the time I admitted the coffee had become a routine, Dottie was already sitting by the office door like faith had a schedule.

At first, I told myself the coffee was an event.

A strange event. A suspicious event. A Ty Burns event, which meant it came with broad shoulders, emotional inconvenience, and a statistically unreasonable chance of ruining my morning.

Then it happened again.

And again.

And then late winter started loosening its grip on Northbend by stubborn inches, and somewhere between the last hard freeze and the first morning the snowbanks near the staff lot turned gray at the edges, Ty Burns became part of the structure of my day.

I hated that sentence. I hated that I had just thought it in a full, grammatically correct way.

Dottie did not hate it. Dottie had embraced the concept with the sort of devotion usually reserved for saints, fools, and dogs with access to whipped cream.

By the time the Frosthawks’ playoff chances began turning into the kind of math that made coaches look at whiteboards like they had personally betrayed them, Dottie knew the sound of footsteps in the hallway better than most of the front office staff. She knew thehour. She knew the pause outside my door. She knew the faint paper-and-coffee smell of a Paper Lantern bag before it appeared.