The almost-smile gets a fraction wider. Then it fades, and something older settles into his face.
"I was fifteen," he says. "My mom had been gone a few years. My dad was... not around much. He was dealing with his own stuff—drinking, mostly. I was angry about everything and Ihad nowhere to put it." He turns the coin. "There was this kid at school. Bigger than me. Ran his mouth about my dad—said something I won't repeat. And I just... went at him. No plan, no strategy. Just fifteen years of not knowing what to do with the shit I was feeling, and this kid gave me a target."
"Did you win?"
"Depends on how you define winning. He went to the nurse's office with a broken nose. I went with this." He taps the scar through his eyebrow. "His class ring caught me. Split the skin right open. Bled everywhere. The school called my grandpa because my dad didn't answer the phone."
"Your grandpa." I glance at the coin in his hand.
"Yeah." His thumb runs across the surface. "He picked me up. Didn't say a word the whole drive home. Just handed me a rag for the blood and drove. When we got to his house, he sat me at the kitchen table and cleaned the cut himself—wouldn't take me to the hospital, said Adkins men don't need stitches for something that small." A pause. "Then he gave me this coin. Said his father gave it to him, and his father gave it to him before that. Said, 'Every time you want to hit something, hold this instead. Figure out what you're actually angry about before you swing.'"
"Did it work?"
"I'm sitting on this porch talking to you instead of in a cell somewhere, so I'd say it worked well enough."
I laugh.
A real one—quiet, but real.
And he looks at me when I do, and something in his face opens up the same way it did in the ortho waiting room when I saidwe match.That softening. That light through the cracks.
"You're cold," he says.
"I'm fine."
"Leah. You've been shivering for ten minutes."
"I have not been—" I stop. I have been shivering. I've been so focused on his voice and his story and the way the coin moves between his fingers that I didn't notice my own body temperature dropping. "Okay. Maybe a little."
He stands without a word, goes inside, and comes back with a flannel.
Not from a closet—from the back of a kitchen chair, which means it's the one he was wearing earlier, which means it's going to smell like him.
He holds it out. I take it and put it on.
It's warm from the house, too big in the shoulders, the sleeves hang past my hands and it smells like leather and cedar and that warm-skin scent underneath that I've been trying not to think about for weeks now.
I am now wearing Coin's flannel on his porch and I have made a series of choices tonight that I cannot undo.
"Thanks," I say, pulling the sleeves over my hands.
He sits back down, closer this time—not by much, but enough that I notice.
Enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him in the cold air, the solid presence of him next to me, the quiet weight of a man who just told me something real and is waiting to see what I do with it.
"I became a nurse because of the fire," I say. I don't plan to say it.
It just comes out—the way things keep coming out around this man, bypassing every filter I've built. "Garrett saved me. And I spent my whole childhood watching him carry that—the guilt of choosing me over our parents, the weight of being the one who survived and had to keep surviving. He saved me, and then he spent the rest of his life trying to save everyone else."
I pull the flannel tighter around me.
"I wanted to be like him. Not the club part—the saving part. I wanted to be the person who shows up when everything is falling apart and holds it together. So, I became a nurse. And I'm good at it. I'mreallygood at it." I pause. "But sometimes I think I got so good at taking care of other people that I forgot how to let anyone take care of me."
The words hang in the cold air between us. I can't believe I said them. I don't say things like that—not to anyone, not out loud.
I'm the one who holds it together.
I'm the one who doesn't need help.
