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She drew the blood. Labeled the vials. Gave Sage privacy to dress.

Then she stepped out into the hallway.

Bear was standing four feet from the exam room door, which was significantly closer than the waiting room where she'd left him. His arms were at his sides. His expression was carefully, deliberately neutral. But his eyes — those gray eyes that saw everything and gave away nothing — were locked on the exam room door like it was the only thing in the building that mattered.

"She's fine," Rowan said.

She walked past him. Three steps. Then she stopped.

Her back was to him. She couldn't see his face. That was, she realized, why she'd turned away — because what she was about to say required a face that didn't have to be managed.

"She needs to gain weight. Vitamins. Iron. Consistent meals. Follow-up in two weeks." Clinical. Efficient. The standard post-exam briefing.

Then her voice did something it was not supposed to do.

It caught.

A small thing — barely audible, a hitch in the exhalation between two weeks and the next breath. Like something that had been held very tightly for the last thirty minutes had slipped, just a fraction, just enough to be heard by a man who had spent twenty years listening for the sounds that people tried not to make.

Cal went still.

"Cal." She didn't turn around. “She…you've only known her for one day?”

“Yeah. Why?”

The hallway was quiet. Fluorescent lights humming. A child laughing somewhere in the waiting room. The distant sound of Betty's pen scratching on paper.

Rowan pressed her lips together.

"Okay," she said. Steady again. The surgeon's mask back in place. "Take care of her."

"Always," he said. Quiet. The word that was not a word — that was a covenant, a commitment, an oath that would hold regardless of what came after.

Rowan walked down the hallway. She turned the corner into the supply room. She closed the door. She put both hands flat on the counter and bowed her head and breathed — hard, ragged, the kind of breathing that was two inches from crying and held the line through sheer, practiced, clinical will.

Her grandmother's voice, from somewhere deep and permanent: You're smart, baby. You can save people.

I'm trying Mema, Rowan thought. She pressed her palms against the counter until the trembling stopped.

Then she washed her face. Straightened her coat. Went back to being Dr. Hale.

13

ROWAN / SAGE

The door opened. Sage emerged, dressed, her new duster buttoned up like a shield, the clipboard tucked under her arm. She paused for half a second, shoulders lifting with a slow inhale, then let the breath out and stepped forward.

“Still alive,” she announced, voice bright and slightly brittle. "No thanks to either of you conspirators."

She handed Rowan the clipboard and the signed paperwork, knuckles pale where she gripped it — the release form, the intake forms, all of it signed in that careful handwriting. Rowan glanced at the signature. Sage Elizabeth Thompson. Eighteen years old. No emergency contact listed.

Her middle name was Elizabeth.

Rowan put the clipboard down before her hands could do anything that her face wasn't doing.

"You're all set. Betty will have your prescriptions at the front desk."

Sage nodded, her jaw tightening for a split second before she smoothed it away. Then she turned and looked at the hallway—at the wall of glass jars on the shelf by the reception window.