Same stillness. Same quiet intensity.
I really should leave. My shift is over and there isnoclinical reason for me to be here.
So, why do I decide to sit down next to him?
"She seems good," I say, because I need to say something and that's the safest thing I've got.
"She's ready to burn the cast in the backyard. I told her plaster doesn't burn well. She googled it to prove me wrong." A pause. "She proved me wrong."
I almost laugh. "That sounds about right." I glance at him. "How are you?"
The question lands differently than I intend it to. Or maybe exactly how I intend it—I don't know anymore.
I'm asking because I can see the new tension in him, the extra weight, the jaw that's tighter than it was two weeks ago.
I'm asking because something changed. He's holding it down with both hands, and I recognize the posture because I do the same thing every single day.
"Fine," he says. The same way I say it. The same way every person who is absolutely not fine says it.
I don't push. I've learned not to.
But I hold his gaze for a beat longer than polite, and he knows I don't believe him, and I know he knows, and we leave it there. Two people sitting in plastic chairs not believing each other's lies.
They call Wrenleigh's name. She crutches toward the exam room, and Coin stands to follow.
He's close when he gets up.
Close enough that when he turns toward me, the scar through his left eyebrow is right there—eighteen inches away, maybe less.
Not across a clubhouse or down a hospital corridor. Right here.
A thin white line cutting through the dark hair, healed and old and settled into his skin like it's always been there.
It's the exact mirror of mine.
Same placement, same angle, same clean line through the brow.
His is shorter—stops at the eyebrow.
Mine keeps going, up through my forehead, into my hairline, because the beam that gave me mine was trying to kill me and his came from something else.
A fight, Garrett said once. When he was a teenager.
Different origins. Same mark.
My hand twitches toward my own scar.
I catch myself before I touch it, but he sees the movement.
Those blue-gray eyes track my hand, then move to my forehead, then back to my eyes, and for a second we're just two people standing in an orthopedic waiting room with matching wounds on our faces and no idea what to say about it.
"We match," I say.
It slips out. I don't plan it, don't think about it, don't run it through the filter that usually catches things before they leave my mouth.
It just falls out like something that was sitting on my tongue waiting for the right moment, and the right moment apparently is a Friday afternoon in an orthopedic waiting room while his daughter is ten feet away.
He goes still. Not tense—still. The way he goes still when something lands that he didn't expect, and he needs a second to file it somewhere.
