Past midnight I’m sitting on Olivia's bathroom floor in borrowed sweatpants and a t-shirt that says NURSES DO IT WITH PATIENCE. Which is both a terrible pun and a lie — Olivia has never been patient about anything in her life.
The red dress is crumpled in the corner like evidence at a crime scene. The ring is still on my finger because I tried to take it off and it wouldn't budge. Which feels cosmically appropriate.
Olivia is perched on the edge of the bathtub with two glasses of wine, her scrubs still on, her hair in the disaster bun she wears on double shifts. She watched the proposal live on the break room television during her shift. Apparently she almost dropped a bedpan on a patient's foot.
"So." She hands me a glass. "You're engaged to Jared Morgan."
I take the wine, drink half of it in one go, and commit to the lie the way you commit to a bad haircut — fully, publicly, with no exit strategy. "I love him, Liv. It just… happened so fast."
Olivia nods, sips, and nods again. The nod of a woman collecting ammunition before she opens fire.
"Fast like… You hated him two weeks ago fast?" She tilts her head. "Like he threw towels at you in front of twenty men and called you a ‘bleachers girl’ and now you're wearing a ring that costs more than your apartment?"
"People change."
"In two weeks?"
"He's different when it's just us." The words taste wrong in my mouth, like reading lines from someone else's script.
My fingers tighten around the glass as Olivia sets her wine on the edge of the tub and folds her arms. "When did he propose the first time? Privately, before the stadium — there must have been a private moment, right? How did you go from mopping his floors to living in his house in under a week?"
She's counting on her fingers now, a prosecutor with a witness who's crumbling.
"And why does a PR company have a schedule for where you eat lunch? I saw the folder, Mia. Claire from Mitchell and Associates was tagged in the stadium broadcast coordinating your entrance like a military operation."
Each question lands like a stone dropped into still water and I can feel the rings spreading, the surface breaking.
Olivia knows me. She knows the difference between Mia in love and Mia surviving — she's watched me perform for years. Through every dinner where Ron's hand found my knee under the table and squeezed until I smiled wider.
"Mia." Her voice drops. "Talk to me."
My hands go to my face and the ring presses cold against my cheekbone and something inside me that's been holding since Coach Harrison's office finally gives way.
Not crying, my body is past that. Just the collapse of a wall I built too fast with materials too cheap.
"Promise me." My voice comes out ragged behind my palms. "On everything you have. On our friendship, on every night you've sat on my balcony with wine. You will never tell anyone."
"I promise."
"Swear it, Liv."
"I swear. On my license. On my mother's grave. On the bedpan I almost dropped tonight. Just tell me already, please."
So I tell her. The contract. The money. Coach Harrison's checkbook and the NDA and the folder that was already prepared, already waiting. Two hundred thousand dollars, the insurance that won't cover it. The banks said no.
I tell her this is my boy's life and I will wear the dress and kiss the man and stand on a football field in front of the entire country and say yes because the alternative is sitting beside William's bed counting the beeps until they stop.
Olivia doesn't speak. She slides off the bathtub edge onto the floor beside me and pulls me into her arms and holds on. Her scrubs smell like hand sanitizer and the lavender lotion she uses between patients and I press my face into her shoulder and breathe.
When we finally separate she wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist and picks up her wine like a woman regrouping after a natural disaster.
"Okay. Okay, we deal with this." She takes a long sip from her glass. "But I need to ask you about something else. Luke thing."
My spine straightens against the bathroom wall. "What about Luke?"
"Did you see his face? It was on the broadcast — just for a second, the camera caught him watching the proposal." She sets the glass down. "He looked like someone pulled the floor out from under him and he was still standing in the air trying to figure out which way was down."
"It's not like that with Luke…"
"Isn't it?"
"He's my friend, Liv. He's always been my friend."
Olivia says nothing. Just watches me with that particular stillness, the one she uses when she's waiting for a patient to admit where it actually hurts.
The silence stretches and something opens up inside me that I wasn't prepared for. A door I've been leaning against with my full weight, and Olivia's quiet is the hand that turns the knob.
"He walked into Rosie's and I almost didn't recognize him." My voice is quieter now, directed at the tile between my knees. "The Luke I knew was all elbows. This person — broader, steadier, this quiet confidence he never had before. And now every time something goes wrong he just… appears."
I still remember how he stood between me and Anna like it was nothing. How he got me the job. How he asks about William like he actually wants the answer, not like he's checking a box.
Lately I catch myself wanting to know what he thinks about things that have nothing to do with either of us. I catch myself looking for his car in the parking lot near the facility before I look for anything else.
My thumb traces the grout line on the floor and still can feel how my chest does this thing when he looks at me now.
Something it didn't do in high school when he was just the boy who saved me a seat.
Olivia is very still beside me as I continue.
"I don't know what it is. I don't know if I feel safe with him because he's familiar, or if it's something else." I pull at a thread on the sweatpants. "But he's Luke, he's my friend. And I don't know if I'm confusing gratitude for… something."
The bathroom hums around us. The faucet drips its slow metronome.
"Mia." Olivia's voice is careful in a way that tells me she's about to say something I'm not ready for. "That's two men you can't figure out your feelings for. While fake-engaged to one of them."
I finish the wine in one swallow and the warmth of it spreads through my chest. Though it does nothing to untangle the knot that's been tightening there since a football field and a velvet box and a word that cost me everything.
"I know."
Olivia takes my glass. Refills it without being asked, which is either friendship or enabling and tonight I don't care which.
"Just be careful, okay?" she says quietly. "With both of them. Because one of them is a contract and the other one is a man who calls my nurses' station every other day asking about your son's vitals. And I don't think either of them knows what they're competing for yet."
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