"I mean seven in ten days, Garrett. A sixteen-year-old died last week. A seventeen-year-old seized on my table this morning. Fentanyl-laced meth, same inconsistent batches, same out-of-nowhere spike. Something's happening and I can see it from the ER side, and I'm asking you if you can see it from yours."
He's quiet. The wrench turns once, twice.
He straightens up, wipes his hands on the rag hanging from his back pocket, and looks at me.
Club quiet. The kind of silence that has a locked door behind it.
"Leah—"
"Don't 'Leah' me. People are dying. Kids are dying. In my ER, on my shift, under my hands. I'm not asking about club business. I'm asking my brother if he knows why kids in Morgantown are dropping like flies."
His jaw tightens. The same jaw, the same clench, the same stubbornness that makes every Mercer in history impossible to argue with and impossible to live without.
"We know," he says finally. "And we're handling it."
"Handling it how?"
"Leah."
There it is. The wall. The line between his world and mine that he's drawn since the day he patched in—this far, no further, not my sister, not in this life.
I've hated that line since the day he put it there, and I hate it more tonight because seventeen-year-old Tyler is upstairs in the ICU and Garrett's standing here telling mewe're handling itlike that's supposed to be enough.
"Fine," I say. "Handle it. But whatever it is, it's getting worse, not better. And the next kid who comes through my doors might not make it."
He holds my gaze for a long moment.
Something moves behind his eyes—not guilt, not defensiveness. Something heavier. The weight of knowing something he can't share with the person he loves most in the world.
"I know," he says quietly. "That's why we're handling it."
He turns back to the engine. Conversation over. Wall up. Garrett on one side, me on the other, and Morgantown's kids dying in the space between.
I leave the garage.
I walk through the main room, where Vanna has fallen asleep on the couch with her hand resting on Waylon's car seat, and I don't wake her because she needs the rest more than anyone I know.
I drive home. I shower. I eat leftover Thai food standing at my kitchen counter in a towel because sitting down feels like too much commitment.
And I think about two things that have no business occupying the same space in my brain but are doing it anyway:
The way Tyler's body seized under my hands this morning, every muscle firing at once, his whole future balanced on whether or not the drugs in his system would let him live.
And the way Coin said my name like he'd been practicing it.
Both of them keep me awake for entirely different reasons.
I fall asleep sometime after two, with my hand on my scar and his almost-smile burned into the backs of my eyelids, and I dream about fire and matching wounds and a man who holds everything together so quietly that nobody notices he's breaking.
Nobody except me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Coin
We left through the garage this morning—rain, and Wrenleigh on a wet porch in that boot is an accident I don't need.
So, when I come back in through the front door after dropping the girls at school, that's when I see it.
