People probably thought of words like employee and employment was good things, but they were terms of inexplicable sadness to Destiny. They felt so impersonal to her, like a card to be punched out at the whistle, a clock to be run down to the wire of when overtime kicked in. It wasn't family in the way that life down at the trailers was. That was the kind of place where everybody was in the same boat patching the sink holes. Maybe it wasn't the kind of place where some more respectable business owner like Nick could imagine anything good coming out of. Michael had made it a point to get her out of there, and Destiny could appreciate that for the sake of Wyatt, but things always came into focus better with hindsight. She wasn't a project to be saved.
It wasn't a place for Wyatt, and right now, that was the only thing that kept her from going back full-time to the string of broken caravans on the shit side of town. Destiny liked living with the boys just fine, but who was going to bring ciorba to the girls when they had colds? And who was going to brew them penny royal tea when their periods ran dangerously late? Yeah, Destiny wasn't here to be saved, and maybe the problem was that she was too busy trying to save everyone else, but it made her feel good in a life when everything else seemed determined to make her feel shitty.
"You know what I meant. Isn't it your name on the property license? The lease?" His name didn't have to be glowing neon for this place to belong to him.
Talk returned to the knee. She didn't ask how he'd gotten hurt on Halloween, it was all too obvious to her the ways in which things had been capable of going wrong that night. Nick said he didn't feel it, which she figured without ever asking the specifics of his paralysis. "Is it swollen?" He might not be able to feel it, but fluid retention wasn't usually natural. "If it is, I've got some stuff you could put on it."