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“Cali.”
She gave my hand a quick shake before tucking a clipboard under her arm.
“Sorry, we don’t have balloons or a welcome committee.” She grinned. “We’re short two nurses, one tech called in sick, and the coffee tastes like regret.”
I laughed. “So . . . business as usual?”
“You catch on fast.” Lacy casually anchored a hand on her hip. “This is your workstation. The supply room is over there. Pyxis is around the corner. If you need respiratory support, just yell louder than everyone else.”
“I can manage that.”
“Oh, and don’t trust room three’s privacy curtain,” she continued.
I gave the curtain a double take. One side sagged several inches lower than the other.
“It gave up sometime during the Clinton administration.”
I snorted.
“I’ll remember that.” Before I could ask another question, an overhead tone chimed.
“Incoming laceration,” the radio crackled. “Male, sixties. Farm injury. ETA three minutes.”
Lacy was already moving. She handed me a trauma gown with one hand while reaching for the chart rack with the other. The ambulance doors swung open before the bay had fully cleared.
A gray-haired man climbed down under his own power, one hand wrapped in a blood-soaked towel.
“I told ’em I didn’t need the ambulance,” he grumbled to no one in particular. “Waste of good diesel.” The paramedic grinned as if this wasn’t the first time he’d heard this complaint.
“You tell her that.” He pointed at me.
The farmer looked me up and down, his expression landing somewhere between suspicion and annoyance.
“You the provider?”
“I am.”
He lifted the towel to an extent for me to catch a glimpse. A deep laceration with jagged edges and plenty of dirt mixed in with a lot of blood. It looked worse than it was, but it still needed prompt attention.
“I just need stitches.” He walked toward the bed. “I’ve got hay on the ground.”
“You might.” I pulled on a pair of gloves. “But first I’m going to make sure you didn’t cut anything you’ll miss tomorrow.”
“My fingers work fine.” He wiggled them for emphasis.
“They usually do until they don’t.” That earned me the ghost of a smile and a half-hearted humph.
“Just stitch it up and send me home,” he muttered.
“I’ll stitch it,” I said calmly. “After we irrigate it, assess tendon involvement, and make sure you don’t lose function in your hand.”
He grumbled but let me work.
My brain shifted into clinical mode, the place where everything made sense. I focused on the rhythm of it—gloves snapping into place, saline flushing out dirt, the precise pull of sutures through skin. The cut had missed the radial artery by less than a centimeter. Here, I knew what to do. Here, I wasn’t the girl who’d fled town. I was competent, capable, and essential—damn good at my job. I gave him a small list of instructions so that healing would go as easily as possible.
“Where’d you go to school?” he asked eventually, watching me with dark brown eyes under eyebrows that hadn’t seen a tweezer lately.
“Austin, Texas.”
