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The map got worse.
Vaginal scarring. Not recent — healed, years old, specific tissue changes that resulted from repeated forcible penetration beginning at an age when the body wasn't developed enough to accommodate it without tearing. The scarring was extensive. Multiple incidents. Multiple years.
Anal scarring. Worse. A tear that had healed with thick, irregular scar tissue — the kind that happened when the damage was significant and never treated. Never seen by a doctor. Never stitched. Just left to heal on its own while a girl bore the pain in silence because there was no one to tell and nowhere to go.
Rowan's hands didn't shake. They had never shaken — not in surgery, not when the little boy's heart stopped under her fingers, not in the bathroom in Bozeman when she'd cut off her hair and watched it fall around her feet like something being shed.
They didn't shake now.
But something in her heart— broke. Quietly. The way load-bearing walls crack when the weight exceeds specification.
My God, what this girl must have gone through.
She finished the exam. Removed the gloves with a practiced snap, deposited them in the biohazard bin, and turned to the sink. Washed her hands for twenty seconds. Warm water. Methodical.
Her vision blurred for exactly two seconds.
She blinked it clear. Dried her hands. Turned back to Sage with the chart and a face that revealed absolutely nothing except competence and care.
"Okay," she said. "All done. You can get dressed."
Sage sat up. Her expression was flat — the post-exam blankness of someone who had left her body for a while and was still in the process of returning to it. But she was returning. Rowan could see it — the blue eyes coming back online, the personality surfacing through the static.
"So what's the damage, Doc?" Sage asked. Aiming for casual. Almost making it.
Rowan sat on the stool. She had her list. She had her diagnosis. She had the clinical language for everything she'd found — malnutrition, dehydration, vitamin deficiency, old fractures, scarring consistent with prolonged physical and sexual abuse, evidence of self-harm, post-viral fatigue. She could have read the list. It was accurate and complete and it reduced six years of damage to a column of medical terminology that fit neatly on a chart.
She didn't read the list.
"You're strong," she said. "Your heart is excellent. Your lungs are clear. You're fighting off whatever you caught and winning. You need to eat more — regularly, not just when you can — and you need vitamins and iron and probably six months of consistent nutrition before your body trusts that food is coming and stops running in emergency mode." She paused. "Some of the things I found are old. Healed. They tell a story, and it's your story, and I'm not going to ask you to tell it today or any other day. But I want you to know that I see it. And I can help. Whenever you're ready."
Sage's throat worked. Her eyes were very bright.
"You're not going to ask?" Her voice came out smaller than she intended. Rowan heard the wonder in it — the disbelief of someone who had been waiting for the interrogation, for “the who did this to you,” for the demand to explain and justify and perform her damage for a stranger's assessment.
"No," Rowan said. "I'm going to give you vitamins, iron supplements, a meal plan, and my personal cell number. When you want to talk about any of it, I'll be here." She looked at Sage evenly. "And I mean that. Three in the morning, doesn't matter. That's the deal."
Sage stared at her. Something was happening behind those blue eyes — something tectonic, something that had to do with the fact that no one since Felicity had looked at the wreckage of her and responded not with horror or pity or the urgent need to fix it, but simply with, “I see it. I'll help. Whenever you're ready.”
"I'd like to be your doctor," Rowan said. "If you'll let me."
"Yeah." Sage's voice cracked. She cleared her throat. "Yeah, okay. I mean, I might not be here that long because…well you know.”
"Good." Rowan pulled out a sheaf of forms. "These make it official. You're eighteen, so it's all yours — no one else's consent needed, no one else's access unless you grant it. Sign where it's marked."
Sage signed. She didn't read the forms carefully — she was eighteen and overwhelmed and signing medical paperwork wasn't the thing her brain was prioritizing. She signed where Rowan pointed and Rowan watched her do it with the quiet knowledge that those forms included a medical records release, and that somewhere in the system, in the digital trail that every body left behind it, there would be ER visits and clinic notes and the documented evidence of what had been done to this girl.
Rowan would find that information eventually. Not today. But she would find it, because she was thorough and because she was incapable of not looking, and when she did, she would sit in her empty house with a glass of wine and read the clinical documentation of Sage Thompson's childhood, and she would grieve for a young girl who had suffered alone.
That was later.
Right now, she stood up. "Get dressed. Take your time. I'm going to go talk to your grumpy bodyguard before he wears a hole in my waiting room floor."
Sage looked at her. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
"Thank you,” she said.
And the words landed in Rowan's chest right next to every other thing that had landed there in the past twenty minutes, in the growing pile of things she was going to have to deal with later, alone, probably with wine, probably crying.
