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I stood back against the wall and let him work, and I would be lying if I said my pulse was where I liked it.

He peeled the dressing. It lifted clean. No adhesion, no fresh blood. Two closed incisions underneath, suture lines pink and slightly raised, the drain running out of the inferior margin.

He palpated the tissue margins with two fingers and looked at the ceiling instead of the wound, which is what you do when you’re reading something with your hands and your eyes are just in the way.

He checked the drain placement. Ran his thumb along the tubing. Measured the output.

Twenty milliliters. Down from yesterday.

Then he looked up, and his face gave away exactly nothing, and I understood that I was about to be told what my work was worth by the only person on this compound qualified to tell me.

“Whoever closed this knew exactly what they were doing.”

Flat. Matter-of-fact. Not a compliment. A finding.

Something in my chest came loose and I had to look at the floor for a second.

“That’d be her,” Freak said, gesturing at me with his good arm like he was presenting Exhibit A. “Vet tech. And the part where she told me to stop moving? Tone of voice suggested she’d said it to larger and more dangerous things than me. Which, fair. I’ve met her cat.”

Dread’s gaze came to me and stayed. “Drain angle?” he said.

Not a compliment either. A question, and a specific one, and I understood that this was the actual test and the previous sentence had merely been the courtesy.

“Thirty degrees inferior,” I said. “Cavity depth was about four centimeters at the deepest point. I went conservative.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a shoulder, he’s right-handed, and he was going to move it whether I told him not to or not. Steeper angle and he’d have pulled it out in his sleep on night two.”

Dread looked at me a moment longer.

“Leave that dressing alone until tomorrow.” Even though he spoke to Freak, he didn’t break eye contact with me. “If it’s under five in the morning, it comes out, and she does it, and you don’t touch it before then with any part of your hand for any reason.”

“I wasn’t going to --”

“You were considering it.” Dread still hadn’t looked at him. “Another week on the sling after that.”

He stripped the gloves inside out and put them in a bag he’d brought himself, and zipped his own bag, and stood.

“I’d like to talk to you,” he said. To me.

“All right.”

Patch hadn’t moved from the doorway the whole time. I glanced over and found him already watching at me. His face was doing the same nothing it always does, and I had learned enough by then to know that the nothing is where he keeps everything.

He stepped aside and let us pass.

* * *

The common room smelled like last night’s beer and this morning’s coffee. I sat at the long table with a mug going cold between my palms and Dana Whitlock’s card face-up in front of me, because I had gotten as far as reading the number four times and no further.

Calling her meant saying the first sentence. I had the first sentence. I’d had it for days. What I didn’t have was the second one.

I had slept in the east townhome. Woken to the quiet of a place that wasn’t mine and wasn’t not mine. The mattress was thin. The ceiling was beige. I had counted the water stains twice and then stopped counting because the numbers didn’t matter.

Dread found me there. He pulled out the chair across from me without asking. Sat. Set his bag on the floor beside him. The bag was leather. Worn at the edges.

His hands rested on the table. Long-fingered. Steady. Hands that had been holding lives together longer than I had been holding anything.