Page 10

“I will.” Maren gives me a second with that before she adds, “And I need to update Silas.”

Fuck.

My thumb stops.

“Lead with the plan.”

“Colt.”

“Referral. Imaging. Assessment. Then chronic. I’m not asking you to lie. Just put it in order.”

Her mouth almost gives. “Plan first.”

She writes the clinic number across the bottom and hands it back.

“You offered to hire somebody to avoid going Thursday.”

“I improved the available options.”

“You had one.”

Maren doesn’t laugh.

That one was funny.

I put Thursday in my phone, take my bag, and go.

Which is how I end up standing in a parking lot on Thursday morning with a referral I’ve read enough times to dislike the font, watching a red truck turn onto the access road.

The clinic is in a newer medical building with a stone front and tall glass doors designed to make everybody feel underdressed. I bought the G-Wagon on Tuesday from a man who kept calling me sir and couldn’t stop looking at my hands. Tan paint, black rims, new leather.

Some men process difficult news. I upgrade transportation.

I have more money than four generations of my family managed between them, and I have never found a problem it couldn’t make quieter.

I don’t hand it out. I handle things. There’s a difference and nobody has ever made me explain it, because nobody has ever told me no while they were still holding the problem.

I go inside.

A man by the door looks at me twice and then begins arranging his face. I know the whole sequence. First he’s sure, then he’s embarrassed about being sure, then he works out whether his wife will believe him, and somewhere in there he says big fan and I say appreciate it and we’re both relieved it’s over.

He settles for a nod.

Good man.

The air smells like coffee, disinfectant, and new rubber off the rehab floor. Through to the back there’s green turf, cable machines, treatment tables under bright ceiling panels. Clean enough to make the annex look like it was built by men with tape on their shoes.

The woman at reception has dark curls pinned up badly enough to suggest she gave up halfway, tortoiseshell glasses, gold hoops, and the settled face of somebody who has watched a lot of athletes come through that door and hasn’t been impressed by one of us yet.

She has a clipboard waiting.

“Colt Riley?”

“Depends how many pages.”

“Four.”

“Four.”