She's got her arms around his neck and her cast propped awkwardly against his side. She's too old and too big to be carried like this but she lets him because she's a teenager and she just had metal pins put in her leg. Sometimes even the toughest girls need their fathers.
Sadie Jo walks beside them, holding the crutches. Dark-haired and quiet and steady, her father's mirror image in miniature.
She keeps pace with him perfectly, never rushing, never falling behind.
I watch them move down the corridor.
The leather of his cut stretches across his back as he adjusts Wrenleigh's weight.
The Saint's Outlaws patch catches the light one more time.
Sadie Jo reaches up and holds the door open for him without being asked, and he murmurs something to her that I can't hear, and she nods.
A father holding his world together with scarred hands.
Two girls bracketing him like bookends—one blonde, one dark, one loud, one quiet.
All three of them bound by something that goes deeper than the blood that was on my gloves twenty minutes ago. Deeper than bone.
They disappear through the sliding doors and into the parking lot, and the ER goes back to being what it always is: fluorescent lights, beeping monitors, the low hum of lives being stitched together and sent home.
I stand at the nurses' station with his discharge paperwork still warm in my hands and a patient's father's blue-gray eyes still burned into the backs of mine, and I think…
Those girls don't know how lucky they are.
Then I finish my shift. I chart my patients.
I eat the rest of the quesoburrito, which has gone cold and sad.
I drive home to my empty apartment where I shower off the blood, the sweat, the antiseptic, and I stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a towel around my body and water dripping from my hair. I look at my scar.
I trace the line of it with one finger.
Eyebrow to forehead.
The place where a burning beam marked me as a little girl and made me who I am.
Then I think about a matching line through a dark eyebrow on a quiet man's face, and the way he held his daughter like the whole world would have to come through him first.
I shut off the light and go to bed.
I don't think about him again.
I can't.
CHAPTER ONE
Coin
The eggs are burning.
I can smell it before I see it—that sharp, acrid edge cutting through the kitchen—and I'm already reaching for the pan when Sadie Jo appears in the doorway behind me with her backpack half-zipped and her dark hair in a knot that looks like it lost a fight with a rubber band.
"Dad. The eggs."
"I see the eggs."
"They're burning."
