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

“I didn’t ask her to…”

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

“Don’t talk to him like he did something wrong,” Sylvia snapped, stepping right between Ethan and me.

“He has a career to protect.

If he loses his position at the company because he sat 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 very hospital system, Sylvia,” I said, keeping my tone as cold and steady as a scalpel.