“My direct number. Day or night.”
I took it with both hands, as though it might disappear.
After Daniel left, the kitchen felt too quiet again.
Ethan remained.
His shirt sleeves were rolled to his forearms now, and there was a faint smear of soot near his cuff from the cigarette he had never finished. He looked less like a magazine cover and more like a man standing at the edge of a problem he could not buy his way around.
“My accounting office opens in one hour,” he said.
I shook my head. “Mr. Caldwell, about the bills—”
“Ethan.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“My name is Ethan.”
“You’re my employer.”
“At the moment, I’m also the person asking you not to argue while concussed and bleeding.”
“I’m not concussed.”
“You’re stubborn enough to be.”
Despite everything, a fragile breath of amusement escaped me. It hurt my lip.
His expression shifted, softening so briefly I might have imagined it.
Then I remembered the debt.
“I can’t have you pay it,” I said. “Not like that. I don’t want to owe you.”
Something in his face changed at the word owe.
“You won’t.”
“That’s easy to say when you’re the one writing the check.”
“It isn’t a check. It will be settled through the employee emergency fund.”
“I didn’t know there was one.”
“Apparently neither did anyone who needed it,” he said, and there was anger in that, but not at me. “That changes today.”
The sky beyond the high kitchen windows began turning gray-blue. Morning pressed against the glass.
Ethan looked suddenly tired.
“Why?” I asked.
He understood the real question.
Why me? Why now? Why care?
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Then he looked toward the sink where I had been scrubbing the same skillet as if cleanliness could erase fear.
“My mother worked in houses like this,” he said.
I stared at him.
That was not an answer I expected from Ethan Caldwell.
“She cleaned offices at night after my father left,” he continued. “Then kitchens. Hotels. Private homes. She wore her name tag crooked because she said rich people looked at tags instead of faces, and she wanted to see who noticed.”
“Did anyone?”
“One woman did. She helped my mother get into nursing school.”
His eyes stayed on the sink.
