"She's all set," I tell him, handing over the discharge instructions. "Cast for six weeks minimum, then we'll reassess. Follow-up appointment in ten days. She's going to want to push it—she seems like the type."
The corner of his mouth twitches.
On another man, it would mean nothing.
On a face this controlled, it's almost a smile. "She gets that from her mother."
The way he says it—flat, matter-of-fact, with the faintest edge of something sharp buried underneath—tells me everything I didn't already know. I knew there was no mother at the Sweet 16. No woman standing beside him during the toast. Just Coin and his girl and a club full of brothers filling in the gaps. Now I knowthe wound is old enough to have scarred over but deep enough that it still pulls when he moves wrong.
I don't ask. I've learned not to.
"The crutches are adjustable. She'll need to keep weight off the leg completely for the first two weeks. If she spikes a fever or the swelling doesn't go down, bring her straight back."
He takes the papers. Our fingers don't touch, but there's a moment where the space between his hand and mine feels charged, like the air before a storm in the mountains.
He smells like leather and engine grease and something underneath that's just warm skin, and I file that away the same way he filed me earlier—automatically, without permission, tucked into a place I'll pretend I can't access later.
"Thank you," he says. "For how you were with her. Both of them."
He means Sadie Jo too. The hot chocolate. The soft voice. The crouch to her level.
He noticed all of it.
Of course he did—this is a man who notices everything.
"It's my job," I say, which is true and also not the whole truth, and he knows it because those blue-gray eyes hold mine for a beat longer than necessary.
Then he turns to go get his girls.
That's when it catches me.
The scar.
A clean line cutting through his left eyebrow, bisecting the dark hair in a thin white ridge.
I've seen it before—across the clubhouse, in passing, never this close.
It's old. Healed. Settled. Part of him the way scars become part of you when you've carried them long enough.
And it sits in the exact same place as mine.
My hand moves without my permission, fingers brushing the raised line that starts above my own left eyebrow and runs up through my forehead and disappears into my hairline.
The scar I've carried since I was four years old.
The one from the fire that killed my parents and would have killed me too if my brother hadn't pulled me out from under a burning beam that cracked across my skull and left its mark on me forever.
I wear it every day. Most of the time I forget it's there.
Right now, watching the ghost of the same wound disappear down a hospital corridor on a quiet man's face, I feel it like it's fresh.
He doesn't turn around.
He doesn't see me touch my scar.
He walks down the hall and into the recovery room and a minute later he comes back out carrying Wrenleigh.
Carrying her. Because sherefusesto use the wheelchair.
