Page 49 of Just One Little Bargain

“Evie.” His familiar smile puts me slightly more at ease. “What happened?”

“Twisted my ankle in a parking lot.”

“Let me guess. You tried to walk it off?”

“I was carried here, actually.”

His eyebrows lift and his attention shifts to Milo. Devereaux’s expression doesn’t change, but something sharpens behind the pleasantness.

“Friend of yours?” He pulls on latex gloves with a snap, rolling his stool over.

“Something like that.”

Devereaux’s attention lingers on Milo before returning to me, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Well, let’s have a look at that ankle.”

He unlaces my sneaker and works it off my foot. His fingers are cool even through the gloves. The sock comes off, and the swelling is worse than I expected. My ankle is puffy and flushed, the skin around the outer bone a deep, angry pink that’s already threatening to turn purple.

He stabilizes my heel with his hand. “I’m going to press along the bone and the ligament. Tell me where it hurts and how much. One is fine, ten is you want to punch me.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that.”

He presses along the outer ankle. “Here?”

I wince. “Five.”

“Here?” His thumb moves lower, tracing the tender line toward my foot.

“Three.”

“Good.” He shifts to the inside. “And here?”

“Two.”

Damien presses just below the outside ankle bone, into the soft tissue.

I suck air through my teeth. “Seven.”

“Sorry.” He lightens the pressure immediately. “The good news is I’m not feeling anything that suggests a fracture along the malleolus. The pain is concentrated in the soft tissue, which points more toward a ligament sprain than a break.”

“You can tell that from pressing on it?”

“I’ve been doing this for a very long time.” He chuckles. “I’m checking whether the pain is coming from the ligament or the harder structures around it. If it were directly on the bone, or if you couldn’t bear any weight at all, I’d send you for an X-ray in Millfield.”

Milo has drifted closer, standing at my right shoulder now with his body angled toward Damien. His eyes haven’t left the doctor’s hands. “So, not broken?”

Damien stands and grabs an elastic bandage from the supply cabinet. “Not broken,” he confirms, sitting back down and starting to wrap.

Thank God. A sprain I can work with. Milo’s hand settles at the small of my back, and I accept the contact without the instinctive recoil I should probably have toward someone still functionally a stranger.

“Here’s what I need you to do.” Damien leans back on his stool, ticking off points on his fingers. “Rest. Stay off it as much as humanly possible for the next three days. Ice for twenty minutes every few hours while awake. Keep it elevated above your heart when sitting or lying down. And a compression bandage will help with the swelling.”

“How long until I’m walking normally?”

“Two weeks minimum. You can start gentle range-of-motion exercises after the first few days, but nothing weight-bearing until the pain lets up.”

I nod, already calculating how to work around that. There’s no world in which I rest for two weeks. The Foxglove doesn’t run itself.

“Evie.” He fixes me with a look. “That face says you’re already planning how to ignore everything I just said.”