Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Leah
The boy is seventeen years old and he's seizing on my table.
His name is Tyler. I know this because his friend—the one who drove him here in a Honda Civic with a cracked windshield and terror on his face—screamed it through the ambulance bay doors when they half-carried, half-dragged him in.
"His name is Tyler, please, please help him, his name is Tyler and he won't stop shaking—"
Tyler won't stop shaking because Tyler took what he thought was crystal meth at a house party in Westover, and whatever was in that baggie is lighting up his nervous system like a shorted fuse box.
His whole body is rigid, every muscle firing at once, his back arching off the gurney so hard I'm afraid he's going to crack his own spine.
"Versed, two milligrams, IV push," Dr. Boggs calls out. I'm already holding Tyler down with one hand, checking his airway with the other. "And someone get that kid out of the waiting room before he passes out."
The friend. He's standing in the hallway, pressed against the wall, shaking almost as hard as Tyler.
He's maybe seventeen too. Just a kid.
A kid who watched his buddy drop and had the presence of mind to throw him in a car and drive, and that decision is probably going to save Tyler's life, and that kid has no idea he's a hero right now because all he can see is the blood on his friend's chin from where he bit through his own lip.
Dr. Boggs appears next to me. Steady as always, those mid-fifties hands already working. "Fentanyl?"
"Has to be. Same presentation as the others—seizure, hyperthermia, tachycardia. His temp is already at 104."
"Get cooling blankets. If the Versed doesn't break the seizure in two minutes, we're going to have to intubate."
The Versed works. Barely.
Tyler's body goes from full convulsion to a tremor to something that looks like sleep but isn't—it's the heavy, drugged stillness of a brain that just got yanked back from the edge by chemicals fighting chemicals.
His heart rate drops from 160 to 120 to something I can live with, and I stand there with my hands on his chest feeling it slow down beat by beat, and I breathe for what feels like the first time in ten minutes.
He's going to make it. Probably.
If his kidneys didn't take too much damage, if his brain wasn't oxygen-deprived for too long, if the fever didn't cook anything that can't be uncooked.
A lot of ifs for a seventeen-year-old who was at a party three hours ago.
I chart everything.
Vitals, meds, timeline.
My handwriting is steady because my handwriting is always steady, even when the rest of me is shaking so hard I have to lock my knees to stay upright.
Then I walk to the break room, close the door, sit down on the cracked vinyl couch, and put my head between my knees.
I don't cry. I don't scream.
I just sit there and shake the way I only let myself shake when no one can see—hands trembling, jaw tight, the adrenaline bleeding out of my system in waves that feel like nausea.
Tyler. Seventeen. House party.
Could have been Wrenleigh's classmate.
Could have been someone Sadie Jo knows in a year or two, because that's how fast it moves—from high school hallways to hospital gurneys in the space of one bad decision and one contaminated bag.
I give myself three minutes.
That's the rule—three minutes to fall apart, then you put yourself back together and you go back out there because the ER doesn't wait for you to process your feelings.
The ER doesn't care.
The ER has sixteen more patients and a waiting room full of people who need you to be steady whether you are or not.
I wash my face, drink a cup of coffee that tastes like fuel, and go back to work.
"I swear to God, if they put another cast on me, I'm filing a lawsuit.
" She's swinging through the main corridor on her crutches, heading toward orthopedics with the furious energy of a girl who's been trapped in plaster for six weeks and has reached her absolute limit.
"I looked it up. I can sue for emotional distress.
The cast is emotionally distressing me."
"You can't sue the hospital for putting a cast on a broken leg, Wrenleigh." Coin's voice. Low, steady, the verbal equivalent of a man who's had this conversation nine times today and will have it nine more.
"Watch me."
I'm coming off the tail end of my shift, still in my scrubs, badge on the lanyard, coffee in hand.
I should keep walking. I should go home, shower, eat something, sleep.
I should do literally anything except stop in this hallway and insert myself into an appointment that has nothing to do with me.
"Hey, Wrenleigh," I say, because apparently I have no survival instincts.
She spots me and her face lights up—not the way it lights up for most adults, which is somewhere between tolerant and dismissive, but with actual happiness. Like she's glad to see me. "Leah! Tell my dad I can sue the hospital."
"You absolutely cannot sue the hospital."
"You're supposed to be on my side."
"I work here. That would be a conflict of interest."
She grins—fierce, sharp, full of fight. Same grin she gave me the night of the four-wheeler accident.
This girl is going to be something when she grows up. She already is.
Coin is standing a step behind her, his cut hanging open over a dark t-shirt, hands in his pockets.
He looks at me the way he always looks at me, like he's taking in more than he's planning to say.
But something is different.
I can feel it before I can name it.
There's a tension in him that wasn't there the last time I saw him — at the clubhouse, in the kitchen, picking up Sadie Jo's laptop with that almost-smile.
Last time I saw him, he was tired the way he's always tired—the ten-years-of-doing-it-alone kind.
This is different.
It's sharper, closer to the surface. His jaw is tighter.
His eyes are doing that thing where they check every corner of the hallway before they land, and when they land on me, there's something behind them that he's actively working to keep hidden.
"Follow-up?" I ask, nodding toward ortho.
"Boot day," Wrenleigh announces, like it's a national holiday. "If they don't give me a boot today, I'm staging a protest."
"She's been counting down," Coin says. "There's a calendar on the fridge."
"There's a calendar on the fridge," Wrenleigh confirms, zero shame.
I fall into step beside them without deciding to.
My shift is over.
I have no reason to walk them to orthopedics.
But my feet are moving and Wrenleigh is talking and Coin is right there, close enough that I can smell leather, cedar, and something warm underneath that's just him.
We get to the ortho waiting room.
Wrenleigh checks in at the desk with the confidence of a girl who's been navigating medical bureaucracy for six weeks and has lost all patience for it.
Coin sits down in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs—elbows on his knees, hands clasped, the same posture he held in the surgical waiting room the night of the accident.
Same stillness. Same quiet intensity.
I really should leave. My shift is over and there is no clinical reason for me to be here.
So, why do I decide to sit down next to him?
"She seems good," I say, because I need to say something and that's the safest thing I've got.
"She's ready to burn the cast in the backyard. I told her plaster doesn't burn well. She googled it to prove me wrong." A pause. "She proved me wrong."
I almost laugh. "That sounds about right." I glance at him. "How are you?"
The question lands differently than I intend it to. Or maybe exactly how I intend it—I don't know anymore.
I'm asking because I can see the new tension in him, the extra weight, the jaw that's tighter than it was two weeks ago.
I'm asking because something changed. He's holding it down with both hands, and I recognize the posture because I do the same thing every single day.
"Fine," he says. The same way I say it. The same way every person who is absolutely not fine says it.
I don't push. I've learned not to.
But I hold his gaze for a beat longer than polite, and he knows I don't believe him, and I know he knows, and we leave it there. Two people sitting in plastic chairs not believing each other's lies.
They call Wrenleigh's name. She crutches toward the exam room, and Coin stands to follow.
He's close when he gets up.
Close enough that when he turns toward me, the scar through his left eyebrow is right there—eighteen inches away, maybe less.
Not across a clubhouse or down a hospital corridor. Right here.
A thin white line cutting through the dark hair, healed and old and settled into his skin like it's always been there.
It's the exact mirror of mine.
Same placement, same angle, same clean line through the brow.
His is shorter—stops at the eyebrow.
Mine keeps going, up through my forehead, into my hairline, because the beam that gave me mine was trying to kill me and his came from something else.
A fight, Garrett said once. When he was a teenager.
Different origins. Same mark.
My hand twitches toward my own scar.
I catch myself before I touch it, but he sees the movement.
Those blue-gray eyes track my hand, then move to my forehead, then back to my eyes, and for a second we're just two people standing in an orthopedic waiting room with matching wounds on our faces and no idea what to say about it.
"We match," I say.
It slips out. I don't plan it, don't think about it, don't run it through the filter that usually catches things before they leave my mouth.
It just falls out like something that was sitting on my tongue waiting for the right moment, and the right moment apparently is a Friday afternoon in an orthopedic waiting room while his daughter is ten feet away.
He goes still. Not tense—still. The way he goes still when something lands that he didn't expect, and he needs a second to file it somewhere.
Then his mouth does the thing. The almost-smile.
But this time it goes further, not a full smile, not even close, but more than I've ever seen from him.