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I didn’t answer.

“That wasn’t a question.” He didn’t seem bothered. “There is a man with a hole in his arm that has been there since yesterday and is going the wrong way. He is worth a considerable amount to me and he is going to be worth nothing at all by tomorrow, and the nearest person who could do something about that is forty minutes from here and would want a name.”

“Take him to a hospital.”

“No.” Still pleasant.

The overhead light hummed. My hands were in my lap and they had started moving without asking me. Index finger against my thigh. Thumb into the pad of my palm.

He watched them do it. Didn’t disguise the watching. His gaze dropped to my lap, held there three seconds, four, and his expression never changed at all. “What are you doing?”

Genuine curiosity. His head tilted slightly, which was the first real movement I had seen out of him since they put me in that room.

“Counting,” I said.

“Counting what?”

“Whatever’s in front of me. It’s a habit. It’s how I don’t panic.”

He considered that. Then he nodded, once, and let it go, and letting it go was worse than pressing would have been, because pressing would have meant I was worth the effort of an argument.

“And after,” I said. “When I’ve done it. What happens then?”

“That is a separate question.” He didn’t blink. “Do the first part.”

* * *

The heavy one moved through the kitchen doorway with the economy of somebody who had been in worse rooms. Thick through the chest. Badly set nose. Heavy hands that knew their own weight. He wore a canvas jacket that had seen weather. His boots left prints on the laminate.

He set a glass of water on the coffee table near my knee. Didn’t look at me. Didn’t explain himself. The glass was clean. Water to the rim. Condensation already forming. He turned and walked back to the kitchen. Leaned against the counter with his arms crossed. His eyes found the middle distance and stayed there.

I didn’t thank him. Didn’t touch the glass. But I filed it, because water meant somebody had decided I was worth keeping upright, and upright was the only condition I had any interest in being in.

That was the whole of what I had. So I held on to it the way you hold pressure on a wound. Steadily, without looking at it, because looking doesn’t help and letting go does harm.

I held that knowledge still. Didn’t examine it. Didn’t reach for the hope or the plan or any of the things that came after.

The back door opened.

Sound first. Hinges that needed oil. Then the smell. Copper and salt and something underneath. Sour, bacterial, the tang of a wound that had been sitting too long. A man came through the kitchen doorway holding his left arm against his ribs. Canvas jacket. Blood soaked through the sleeve from elbow to wrist. Dark. Drying at the edges. Fresh in the center.

Forearm. Not arterial, or he’d have been on the floor and not standing in a doorway. Somebody had wrapped it, and whoever it was had wrapped it wrong, because the blood had gone sideways under the dressing instead of through it.

I looked at the heavy one. Two seconds. His eyes met mine across the kitchen. Heavy. Assessing. The regard of a man translating a problem into a language he understood.

“Where’s the first-aid kit?”

The heavy one didn’t answer. He pushed off the counter. Crossed to the sink. Reached underneath. Came back with a green plastic box. He set it on the coffee table beside the water glass. Didn’t comment. Didn’t watch me open it.

I did.

Gauze. Rolled, not packaged. Medical tape. The cheap kind that left residue. A pair of trauma shears with dull blades. No lidocaine. No antiseptic beyond a half-empty bottle of hydrogen peroxide that had probably expired two years ago. Basic. Functional. A kit that said somebody expected bleeding and didn’t expect to call for help.

“I need access from wrist to shoulder.” I said it to the room. To nobody. To whoever was listening. The wounded man looked at me like I’d spoken a language he hadn’t expected to hear. Then he shrugged the jacket off his left shoulder. Held his arm out.

Second human being in nine days. Before that, none. Not one, not ever, not in six years.

The anatomy is close enough. That’s the thing nobody tells you. A dog’s shoulder and a man’s shoulder are the same argument in a different accent, and everything I know about tissue and drainage and what infection looks like when it’s getting ahead of you, I learned on animals who couldn’t tell me where it hurt.