FALLING FOR MR DOMINIC IN 30 DAYS

The hospital never really slept. Not at two in the morning, not ever, but tonight the ICU recovery floor had gone quiet enough that Marisol could hear the vending machine down the hall cycling itself on and off like it, too, was pretending to rest. Eighteen hours in. Three more to go. A monitor chirped somewhere past the nurses' station. Down at the far end, a man paced the corridor in that specific, useless way people paced when they'd run out of things to pray for and just needed their legs to do something. She was coming back from the supply room, arms full of gauze she didn't need yet, when she heard it. Crying. Not the managed kind. Not the version people performed in waiting rooms, careful, contained, aware of an audience. This was raw. Ugly, even. It tore out from behind the door of the family restroom near the end of the hall, the one that technically belonged to the executive wing, the one with better tile and a lock that actually worked. Marisol stopped walking. She had no business anywhere near that wing. It ran on its own rules, its own staff, its own quiet fences built to keep people like her out. Room 14, the only occupied room down there tonight, belonged to Dominic Crane. Billionaire. Founder of Crane Industries. Two days out from emergency surgery after they'd cut him out of a car that hadn't survived whatever hit it. His fiancée had signed in hours ago and vanished down that corridor without a glance at anyone below her tax bracket. Not her business. Not even a little. She went in anyway. That was the job, though, wasn't it. You went toward the sound instead of away from it. Seven years on this floor had worn the choice down to something closer to a nerve firing than a decision. She opened the door. Genevieve Ashworth was on the floor. Tile, not carpet, in a dress that cost more than Marisol's rent, knees drawn to her chest, back against the wall, holding something in both hands like it might try to run. Every part of her was expensively, relentlessly perfect. Every part except her face, which had come apart completely and looked nothing like the rest of her. A pregnancy test. Positive. Their eyes met and held for exactly two seconds. Then something behind Genevieve's eyes clicked shut, a door swinging on a hinge, and the composure slammed back into place so fast it was almost violent to watch. Chin up. Lips pressed. The look of someone doing math and not liking the answer. Marisol was still holding the door. This was the moment. Sorry, wrong room. Back out. Forget it by morning. She didn't. "I'm sorry," she said instead. "Are you okay?" Ridiculous question. Obviously not. The woman was on a bathroom floor with a positive test at two in the morning, mascara doing exactly what mascara does under those circumstances. "Close the door." Genevieve's voice came out steadier than it had any right to. Marisol closed it. Fully inside now. Not an improvement. Genevieve looked at the test one more time, then back up, and this look had weight behind it, an inventory being taken. Badge. Scrubs. Face. Some calculation running that Marisol couldn't yet see the shape of. "You're his nurse." Not a guess. "Marisol Vega. Nights." "Yes." "How long on this floor?" "Seven years." A slow nod, and then Genevieve rose off the tile in one clean motion, the kind that took either years of yoga or years of practicing how to get up off bad floors without letting anyone see the effort. She smoothed her dress. Picked the test back up. Set it face down on the edge of the sink, like turning off a light switch. "I need you to understand something." A pause, precise as a scalpel. "What you saw in here stays in here." Marisol said nothing. Genevieve picked up her phone. Her thumbs moved with a certainty that meant the decision had been made before she'd even gotten off the floor. She turned the screen around. A transfer screen. Ten thousand dollars. Marisol's full name in the recipient field, along with account details that had no business being that easy to find. "You have access to him every day." Flat. Businesslike. "I need him calm. His doctors need him calm. That's the entire ask. If he asks for me, tell him I stepped out. If he asks something you can't answer, deflect. That's all." Marisol looked at the number. Ten thousand dollars. She thought of the letter that had come that week. Her mother's physical therapy office, past due stamped in red ink that somehow always looked angrier than it needed to. The account she kept just for Rosa's bills had run dry three weeks ahead of schedule, and she'd been carrying that particular stone in her stomach since breakfast, through every single hour of this shift. Ten thousand dollars was six months of PT. It was the specialist appointment Rosa kept dodging. It was the fear that lived somewhere under Marisol's ribs every time her mother's voice went thin and tired on the phone in that one specific way. "That's it?" "That's it." She pressed confirm before she'd finished deciding to. Hated herself somewhere around the two-second loading spinner. "Good." Genevieve grabbed a small bag off the counter Marisol hadn't even clocked, checked her reflection once, and moved for the door with the brisk efficiency of someone closing out a meeting. "He's asking for me. I'll go in now." Gone. Marisol stood there a second, alone, looking at the test face down on the sink. The answer hidden. Not gone. Just hidden. She flipped it. Two lines. No ambiguity left anywhere in the room. She set it back down. Walked to the sink. Washed her hands with the same automatic thoroughness she used fifty times a shift, watching her own reflection like it might have something to say about all this. *What did you just do.* It didn't answer. She shut off the tap, dried her hands on the rough paper towel, and walked out, down the hall, toward Room 14, because a job was still a job and a patient was still a patient, and falling apart in a bathroom over a decision already made wasn't going to buy it back. Room 14 sat dim and blue, monitors throwing their thin light across the bed. Dominic Crane wasn't fully out. He'd been surfacing and sinking since the surgery, which the doctors said was normal, the anesthesia still working its slow way out of his system, the full picture of the memory loss still a day off. He was coming up now. She could tell by the small shift of his head. The change in his breathing. She went to check the IV, quiet, practiced, and was reaching to adjust the drip when his hand came up off the sheet and caught her wrist. She went still. He was looking at her. Eyes barely open, unfocused at the edges, the eyes of a man climbing up out of somewhere very deep and not entirely sure he'd made it. "Genevieve." Wrecked, from the breathing tube. Barely more than air. "You stayed." She had never seen that particular look on a patient's face. Not relief. Something past relief. The look of a man who'd been carrying something heavy for a long time and had just been told, finally, he could set it down. Say it. I'm not Genevieve. I'm your nurse. Marisol. She stepped out, she'll be back in the morning. Nothing came. His hand slid back to the bed. His eyes drifted shut. His breathing evened into sleep, and she just stood there, in the blue light, not moving. Two mistakes. Ten minutes. The first had put ten thousand dollars in her account that had no business being there. She had no idea yet what the second one was going to cost. She finished the vitals check. Updated the chart. Walked back to the nurses' station and sat down and stared at the wall for longer than made any sense. Her phone buzzed. Her mother's name lit the screen. She let it ring out.