Chapter 9
A year is a long time in the life of a seven-year-old, and by the time the anniversary of the hospital visit came around, Noah had mostly stopped flinching at the word cast, though he still, without quite noticing he did it, checked the doorway twice whenever someone new walked into a room.
He and his father had settled into something neither of them would have called normal a year earlier, but that fit them the way a broken bone fits back together after it's properly set — a little different than before, sturdier in the places that mattered, permanently marked in the places that didn't matter as much. Therapy had become a Tuesday and Thursday routine that Noah no longer resented; Daniel had started going to a separate group himself, for parents processing having missed something they should have caught, and had stopped, mostly, apologizing to his son for it out loud, because Noah had gently and repeatedly told him he didn't need to hear it anymore. He needed his dad to just be there instead.
Evelyn was still around, though her role had shifted from babysitter to something the family had never quite found a clean word for — not family, not staff, something adjacent to both. She came for dinner twice a week. She was the one Noah called, without hesitation, the time he fell off his bike and needed someone to tell him whether it was a "hospital thing" or a "Band-Aid thing," a distinction he now took very seriously and trusted almost no one else to make correctly.
"You could've just kept being a nurse, you know," Daniel told her one evening, watching her check the skinned heel of Noah's palm with the same unhurried, exacting attention she'd once used on a hospital cast. "Instead of watching one difficult six-year-old for a living."
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"I like this six-year-old," Evelyn said. "And for what it's worth, this isn't so different from the job I had before. Same instincts. Smaller waiting room."
Noah, examining his own scraped hand with theatrical seriousness, announced, "Band-Aid thing," in the exact clinical tone Evelyn used, and both adults laughed — a real laugh, easy, the kind that hadn't come naturally to that house in a very long time.
