Thump.
I leaned back in the stiff chair and slammed my eyes shut tight. The nurses whispered about something—probably weekend plans or office gossip. Whatever it was, it was better their chatter than my thoughts.
Somewhere in the distance, a name was called out.
It wasn’t mine.
I opened my eyes and stared at the walls again. Beige this time, not black. My brain didn’t care about paint colors—it always found a way to make everything darker; drag me back to places I’d rather forget.
The thumping in my chest wasn’t real. Not in the way it felt.
I glanced at the clock on the wall.
Ten minutes.
Maybe fifteen.
Not quite long enough to lose control, but long enough for everything to start feeling hazy in my peripheral, as if the world were tipping sideways and I was the only one noticing. Usually took twenty before things got worse.
So I still had five minutes.
Five minutes to pretend I had things handled.
Someone coughed a few chairs over. Another patient shifting in his seat, probably counting his own breaths, his own seconds.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I didn’t pull it out. I already knew who it was.
Remy.
The name would be glowing onscreen, insistent, just like the man himself.
He’d call again. He always did.
Another name echoed down the hallway. Still not mine.
I rubbed the ache in my left shoulder, the joint relentlessly stiff no matter how I moved. It wasn’t the worst pain I’d felt. Hell, it barely registered most days. But lately, it had been harder to ignore.
The phone buzzed again. Still, I didn’t answer.
“Grey?”
I glanced up to see a nurse standing in the doorway, her clear clipboard tucked against her chest.
“Marco Grey?” She smiled at me. “Room three,” she said when I nodded. “You can follow me.”
The exam room smelled sterile. It always did. It clung to my clothes, crawled up my nose, and sank into my skin. Years of it had conditioned me to loathe this place, and yet here I was again, walking the same damn halls, enduring the same damn routine.
The knee was acting up worse than usual. Felt like a hot knife stabbing into the joint every time I took a step. Not that I was going to complain. Complaints didn’t fix anything. They just made you sound weak.
I moved stiffly down the hallway ignoring sympathetic glances from the staff. I knew what they saw when they looked at me. I was a busted-up vet who didn’t know when to quit. Maybethey thought they saw some kind of hero, some tragic figure worth pitying.
They were wrong. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t anything worth their looks or their concern.
The VA wasn’t a place where you came to get better. It was a place where men like me came to manage what was left.
The exam room was the same as last time. Tiny and suffocating. Then the door opened, and she stepped in.
