“I just told her I was exhausted, Rachel,” Ethan muttered, his sentence trailing off into a whisper.

“I did not ask her to…”

“You complained to her while our daughter was lying here with a hundred and four fever,” I said.

“Do not talk to him like he did something wrong,” Sylvia snapped, stepping directly between Ethan and me.

“He has a career to protect.

If he loses his position at the company because he was sitting in an emergency room for five hours, are you going to pay his salary?”

“I work thirty-six hours a week as an ER nurse practitioner in this exact hospital system, Sylvia,” I said, keeping my tone as cold and level as a scalpel.