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"Anything I should know before I go back in?" she asked.

Cal's jaw worked. His internal war was visible — what to say, what was his to say, where the line was between protecting Sage's privacy and giving Rowan what she needed. "She has nightmares," he said, finally. Low. Quiet enough that Betty couldn't hear from the desk. "Bad ones. She talks in her sleep." A pause that contained weight. "She says, ‘please stop.’"

Rowan's vision went white at the edges for exactly one second. Then the training took over — the years of surgical precision, of standing over open chests and making decisions that lasted forever, of keeping her hands steady when everything inside her was screaming.

"Okay," she said. The word came out level. Professional. Clean. The miracle of decades of practice at keeping her voice separated from her heart. "I've got her."

She turned back toward the exam room. Knocked twice. Heard a muffled "yeah," and went in.

Sage was on the exam table in the gown, and she was holding herself the way people hold themselves when they're pretending the vulnerability doesn't bother them — chin up, shoulders deliberately relaxed, one foot swinging slightly off the edge like this was boring and she was above it. The gown gaped slightly at the back. Her spine was visible, the knobs of each vertebra too pronounced.

And the scars, under the tattoos.

Rowan saw them in sequence because her brain couldn't process them all at once. It triaged, the way it had been trained to — most clinically significant first, then working outward, the terrible taxonomy of damage assessment.

The back. Linear scarring across the upper back and the backs of her thighs — parallel lines, slightly raised, the distinctive pattern of repeated strikes with a flat, flexible implement. Belt. The scars were white, old, layered — some had been struck over existing scar tissue, which meant whoever did this had done it often enough to run out of unmarked skin.

The wrists. Both of them. Thin, horizontal scars on the inner surface, left more prominent than right. Hesitation marks — shallow, closely spaced, the type of someone who had tried and couldn't finish. Healed. Maybe two years old.

She tried, Rowan thought, and the surgical breath wasn't enough. She took a second one. A third.

"Okay," she said. "I'm going to start with your back. Just going to palpate along your spine — checking alignment, any tenderness. You'll feel my hands. Tell me if anything hurts."

She started at the cervical spine, over the angel wing tattoos, and worked down, and the map revealed itself under her fingers like a document she was being forced to read.

More rib damage than she'd felt through the stethoscope — the sixth and eighth on the left she'd already found, plus a ninth on the right that had cracked and healed with a ridge she could feel through the skin. Three ribs. At least three. Possibly more that had cracked without fully breaking, the kind of microfractures that caused grinding pain for weeks and then healed invisibly.

Her nose. Even from behind, Rowan had noticed it — the slight asymmetry, the bridge deviating a few millimeters left. Nasal fracture, years old, never set. It had healed with a bump that was barely visible but that Rowan's eye caught the way it caught all structural irregularities.

"Any history of broken bones?" she asked, keeping her voice conversational, her hands gentle.

"I'm pretty fucking tough," Sage said. Which wasn't an answer.

"You seem like it." Rowan moved to her left hand, palpating the fingers. The fourth finger — ring finger — had a slight deviation at the proximal interphalangeal joint. Healed fracture. The kind that happened when a hand was stepped on or caught in a door or bent backward.

"I need to check your range of motion," Rowan said. "Can you raise your arms above your head for me?"

Sage did. And the gown shifted, and Rowan saw more of the map. The scarring extended further than she'd initially catalogued — faded marks on the upper arms, thin and pale, the kind of thing you'd miss unless the skin pulled taut the way it did now. Small crescents. Old nail-marks, healed over and gone silver with time, but never quite gone.

The kind of scars that came from being grabbed. Hard. Over and over, until the skin gave.

"Good. You can lower them."

Sage did. And then she said, with the forced casualness of someone who needed the silence to stop, "So what's the deal with Mr. Bear?"

Rowan paused, gloved hands on Sage's lower back. "The deal?"

"Like—" Sage gestured vaguely with one hand. "What's his story? Because he just appeared in my life like a... giant... gentleman ninja or something, and everyone in this town acts like he's a combination of God, Santa Claus, and eye candy, and I don't actually know anything about him except that he prays before meals, he cooks like he's competing on Top Chef, and he's incapable of letting me open my own fucking door."

Rowan resumed her palpation, and the corner of her mouth did something that was almost a smile. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything. Anything. Does he have a secret family? Is he in witness protection? Is he actually an alien who crash-landed and the government let him stay because he's really good at making pancakes?"

"The alien theory has some support in town," Rowan said. Her fingers found the junction of the lumbar and sacral spine. Normal. No damage here. "The rest is... complicated."

"Complicated how?"

Rowan considered what was hers to tell. Cal was a private man — the most private person she'd ever met, which was saying something given that she'd spent a decade in operating rooms full of surgeons who turned their entire personalities off the moment they scrubbed in. But this girl was staying in his house. Wearing his coat. And he'd brought her here with that look on his face, the one that said help her the way some men said please — like it cost them something, like they didn't do it often, like this mattered.