The long way to yes

Mira Calloway had a rule: never let anyone see her before six in the morning. It wasn't vanity. It was survival. The mop bucket, the industrial-strength disinfectant, the squeak of her sneakers on freshly waxed linoleum — none of it looked good under fluorescent light, and Mira had learned a long time ago that people who looked like they had money didn't like being reminded that people who didn't were the ones cleaning up after them. She'd been at Government Medical for eight months, ever since she'd packed one duffel bag and left Hensley's Ford, the kind of small town where everyone knew your father had died owing money and your mother had stopped answering the phone by six p.m. Mira had come to the city to disappear into it, to be nobody in a place big enough to let her. Cleaning the ninth floor — Cardiology, the private wing, the floor where the powerful and the well-insured recovered from their powerful, well-insured hearts — was supposed to be invisible work. Which was why she didn't expect to find Dr. Theo Actonberg asleep on the floor of exam room 914 at 5:40 in the morning, still in his scrubs, one arm flung over his eyes like he was hiding from the sun that wasn't even up yet. "Oh — sorry —" Mira froze in the doorway, bucket in hand. "Don't be." His voice was rough with sleep, but not unkind. He didn't move. "I live here now. Population: one doctor, several vending machine burritos, and whatever's left of my dignity." She should have backed out and come back later. Instead, against every rule she'd built for herself, she laughed — a short, surprised sound she hadn't let out of her chest in weeks. He opened one eye. Looked at her properly for the first time. "You're new." "Eight months isn't new." "It is to me. I've been avoiding this floor for eight months." He sat up, wincing, dragging a hand through hair that was clearly expensive to cut and currently a disaster. "Theo." "I know who you are." Everyone did. Actonberg was a name stitched into the hospital's donor plaques, its east wing, its endowed chair in cardiothoracic surgery. His grandfather had built half the wing she was currently mopping. "I'm supposed to clean this room before rounds." "Then clean it. I'll just lie here and be furniture." She didn't laugh again. She made herself not laugh again. But something in her chest had already tilted, just slightly, the way a shelf tilts before anything actually falls off it.