Page 52

"Is she?"

Betty's expression shifted. Subtle, but Rowan saw it — a brief tightening around Betty's eyes that meant yes, but not in a way I can chart from the front desk.

"I think he brought her here for you," Betty said quietly.

Rowan felt that feeling that she didn't have a name for…that she didn’t want to name. The same feeling she had for five years whenever Cal Meridian walked into her clinic. Which wasn’t too often, because the man had a pain tolerance of a wolf that could chew its own leg off and keep walking. No, the issue was whenever he visited (which was code for his mama sent him here) Rowan didn’t feel like a doctor. She felt like a woman.

Damn it Cal.

Rowan sighed.

She had made peace with it. That was the point. She had taken the inconvenient, embarrassing, thoroughly unprofessional fact of her feelings for Cal Meridian and she had stuffed them in the same place where she kept the little boy's face who died and the sound of her grandmother's voice saying you're smart, baby, you can be more than this — the place marked for things that are real but cannot help you. She left those things there and had gone on treating children and eating cereal for dinner and sleeping alone in a house with good bones and four very empty rooms.

"Give me five minutes," Rowan said. "Send them back to exam two."

Betty nodded. Paused in the doorway. "Rowan."

"Mm."

"He pulled me aside. While the girl was doing paperwork. He asked to speak to me." Betty's voice was careful and slow. A voice she used when she was delivering information that was important. "He said she'd been running a fever of 103, that she hadn't been eating, and that she'd been living in her car. He said to be careful with her."

Rowan looked at Betty who looked concerned and upset.

“What?”

“…he said, 'Please look at everything.'"

She froze. Four words.

Please look at everything. It meant I think it’s bad.

Coming from Cal, that phrase was like a bullet. This was a man who had survived things that would break everyone else twice over. A man whose personal threshold for “bad” existed on a scale that would terrify anyone who truly understood it. When Cal Meridian said something was bad—when he asked someone to look at everything—it wasn’t alarmism. It was a measured, terrifying assessment from someone who had seen the absolute worst the world could offer and had chosen, every single day since, to keep walking anyway.

Rowan felt it settle heavy in her chest, right alongside the other complicated things she kept locked away whenever he walked through her door.

"Five minutes," Rowan said again.

Betty left.

Rowan stood in the empty exam room and breathed. One breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

The way she breathed before surgery — before she scrubbed in, before the lights came up, before she opened a chest and held a heart in her hands and made decisions that would determine whether a young child would go home to their family⁠—

No! No, I don’t do that anymore.

She treated ear infections and gave vaccinations and set broken fingers and told mothers their children were going to be fine. She did the small work. The manageable work. The work that let her sleep most nights without seeing that six-year-old boy's face going still under surgical lights while her hands froze and the monitors screamed and the thing she'd been built to do — the one thing she was revered as one of the best in the world— failed her.

She breathed.

Then she pulled her white coat straight, touched the stethoscope around her neck, and walked down the hallway toward exam room two.

The door opened.

He came through first, one shoulder angled slightly, eyes sweeping the space with what she assumed was some sort of involuntary tactical scan he probably didn't realize he still did and always made Rowan feel both safe and slightly flushed.

His head nearly brushed the doorframe as he ducked under it. "Doc." The greeting he always gave. Low, warm, single syllable.

"Cal." The greeting she always returned. Measured, professional, the version of his name she'd trained herself to use because ‘Bear’ was what people who loved him called him, and she was a doctor, and there was a line, and she stayed behind it.