Chapter Nineteen
Pain woke her.
Not the screaming, white-hot kind from the wall. This was duller, wider—a deep-tissue hum that had settled into every joint she owned while she slept and now announced itself as she surfaced.
Her wrist throbbed beneath something tight. Compression. Her knee was stiff and hot, locked at an angle she’d have to negotiate before it would bend. Her shoulders ached. Her hips ached. The muscles along her ribs felt like they’d been wrung out and hung up to dry.
She was in a bed she didn’t recognize.
A fragment surfaced. Isaac’s voice, low and close. His arms beneath her. Warmth: water, his chest against her back, the slow dissolution of pain into something she could survive.
That couldn’t be right. Isaac was in Austin. He couldn’t be here.
She opened her eyes.
But there he was sitting in a chair beside the bed. Close enough to touch. His shirt was wrinkled, his jaw dark with stubble, his eyes carrying the flat, spent look of a man whohadn’t closed them all night. A glass of water and a bottle of ibuprofen sat on the nightstand behind him.
He was watching her.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet. Measured.
“Hey.”
Her brain started buzzing. How had he found her? What had he seen? What had she said while she was in and out of consciousness?
He leaned forward. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a truck that backed up and hit me again.”
Not even so much as a hint of a smile. “Which joints are worst?”
“Wrist. Knee. Everything in between.”
He reached for the water and the ibuprofen. She tried to sit up and her core seized, every abdominal muscle locking against the movement. He was already there, one hand flat between her shoulder blades, easing her upright against the headboard. The pillow shifted behind her and he fixed it without being asked.
She took the pills. Drank the water. Her throat was raw.
“There’s food,” he said. “I found some things in the kitchen. Nothing impressive, but there’s crackers and peanut butter.”
“Maybe in a minute.”
He nodded. Didn’t push.
She looked at the compression wrap on her wrist. Even layers, no gaps, the tension consistent from palm to forearm. He’d done that while she was unconscious. Wrapped her wrist and arranged her knee and covered her with blankets and sat in that chair and waited for her to wake up.
“I need the bathroom,” she said.
He stood immediately. She eased her legs off the bed and tried to put weight on the left one. The knee held—barely. A deep, grinding resistance, the kneecap tracking in its groovewith the reluctance of something that remembered what had happened last time and didn’t trust the arrangement.
She could walk. It was ugly, but she could walk.
Isaac stayed beside her. Close enough that his arm brushed hers. He didn’t grab her, didn’t steer. Just matched her pace and stayed within reach. At the bathroom door, he stopped.
“I’ll be right here.”
She went in. Closed the door. Did what she needed to do slowly, carefully, each movement a conversation with joints that were cooperating under protest. When she came out, he was exactly where she’d left him, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
“Better?”
