“Thank you.” Nina’s voice cracks on the second word. She clears her throat, tries again. “Really.”
“There’s a bathroom down the hall. Go clean up, all three of you.” Callie’s tone softens. “I’ll be here when you get back. And I can check in with the nurses, see if there’s any update on his status.”
“Callie—”
“Go. You smell like a storm drain and you look worse.”
She heads toward the nurses’ station to ask about updates. Mason watches her go with something like resignation.
“She’s been like this the whole drive up,” he says. “Couldn’t talk her out of coming.”
“Would you have tried?” I ask.
“No.” He studies my face for a moment. “You okay?”
It’s a loaded question. I don’t have a simple answer.
“Getting there.”
He nods, accepting that.
Chris and I wash up at adjacent sinks, scrubbing dried mud and worse off our hands with paper towels and hospital soap.
“He apologized,” Chris says quietly. “Vicente. Right before the window blew.”
I know. I was there. But I don’t say that—Chris needs to process this out loud, and I know how to listen.
“I didn’t even know I needed to hear it.” He shakes his head. “And now I don’t know what to do with it.”
I turn off the faucet, grab a paper towel. “You buried it. That’s what men do. We’re conditioned to shove it down and keep moving, tell ourselves we’re fine, we’re past it. And then something cracks the lid and all that shit comes flooding back, and we don’t have the tools to deal with it because we were never supposed to need them.”
Chris glances at me. “That something Nina told you?”
“No. I started out in social work, actually. Right out of college. Worked with homeless veterans for a few years before I went into law enforcement.” I toss the paper towel in the trash. “Saw it all the time. Men who’d buried so much they didn’t even know what they were carrying anymore. My stepdad was the same way—career Army, two tours in Desert Storm, never talked about any of it.”
Chris is looking at me differently now. Reassessing. “I always assumed you were ex-military.”
“Just adjacent to it. Grew up on bases, but I never enlisted.” I shrug. “Figured I could do more good from the outside.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “We don’t really do this, do we? Talk about the shit that matters.”
“No. We don’t.”
“Maybe we should.”
“Maybe.”
We change into Mason’s sweats in silence. But it’s a different kind of silence than before. By the time we get back to the waiting room, Nina’s already there, dressed in Callie’s yoga pants and sweater, her hair twisted up in a loose bun with a few curls escaping at her temples. She’s washed her face, but the exhaustion is still there—shadows under her eyes, a tightness around her mouth that won’t quite ease.
I recognize that look. Almost eleven months ago, she wore the same expression sitting by my hospital bed after I took a bullet meant for someone else. Her face was the first thing I saw when I woke up—worried, sleepless, refusing to leave. My wound wasn’t critical, but she’d stayed anyway. Hadn’t slept until she knew I was okay.
Now she’s doing it again. Holding vigil for someone else she cares about, running on nothing but caffeine and stubbornness.
She looks between us, reading our faces the way she always does, and her expression shifts. Curious. Hopeful, maybe.
“Callie talked to the nurses,” she says. “They can’t let us in the room, but we can at least see him. Check how he’s doing.”
Chris’s shoulders tighten almost imperceptibly. But he nods.
