Chapter 4 #2
The corners of his eyes soften. Something behind the wall shifts, just enough for me to see light through the cracks.
"Guess we do," he says.
Three words. Low, quiet, with a warmth underneath them that has no business making my chest feel like this.
Wrenleigh appears in the exam room doorway.
Her eyes narrow.
She's sixteen, she's sharp, and she's her father's daughter, which means she misses nothing.
"Cool," she says, in a tone that suggests she has filed this interaction away for future interrogation of her father. "Can we go in now? Please?"
The moment breaks.
Coin straightens up, the wall rebuilds itself. "I'll be right there."
Wrenleigh disappears back into the exam room.
Coin looks at me one more time. "Thank you, Leah."
Not thanks or appreciate it.
My name. He's said it before — in passing, at the clubhouse, the way you say anyone's name. This doesn't sound like that.
It makes me forget for a second that I'm standing in a hallway that smells like antiseptic and fluorescent lighting.
"You're welcome," I say, and somehow manage not to sound like a woman whose entire circulatory system just rerouted itself.
He nods, turns and walks into the exam room with his daughter.
I stand there for a good ten seconds after he's gone, holding a cold coffee and staring at a closed door like it's going to explain to me what just happened.
I go to the clubhouse after my shift because apparently that's just what I do now.
That's my thing.
Twelve-hour shift, near-death teenager, confusing moment with a man I have no business having confusing moments with, and then straight to my brother's biker compound for dinner.
Totally normal. Very well-adjusted.
Vanna's in the main room with Waylon asleep in the car seat next to her.
She's folding tiny onesies and watching something on her phone with the volume low.
The picture of domesticity, wrapped in a flannel and sitting in a motorcycle club.
"How's your day?" she asks, like we're coworkers at a normal office.
"A seventeen-year-old almost died on my table and I told Coin we have matching scars. So. You know. Average."
She puts down the onesie. "I'm sorry, you did what?"
"I said 'we match.' Out loud. To his face. In front of his daughter."
Vanna's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. "Leah Mercer."
"I know."
"You flirted with him."
"I did not flirt. It was an observation. A factual, medically adjacent observation about our shared scar placement."
"That's the most Leah way to flirt I've ever heard, and I love it."
"I hate you."
"You love me. What did he do?"
I pause. Because what he did—that almost-smile that went further than I'd ever seen it go, those three words in that low voice, the softening around his eyes—feels too big to hand over casually, even to Vanna.
It feels like something I should keep for a while. Hold it up to the light in private and figure out what I'm looking at before I let someone else see it.
"He smiled," I say. "Sort of."
"Coin smiled?"
"Sort of."
"That man hasn't smiled since the Steelers won the Superbowl against the Cardinals, and that was in 2009."
"It was more of a... mouth thing."
"A mouth thing." Vanna picks up the onesie again. She's grinning so wide it's a miracle Waylon doesn't wake up from the sheer force of it. "Okay. Sure. A mouth thing."
"I'm going to find Garrett now."
"You do that. Tell your brother about the mouth thing."
"I will absolutely not be doing that."
I find Garrett in the garage, because that's where Garrett always is when the world is too much—elbow-deep in some engine, grease up his forearms, working through whatever's in his head with his hands instead of his words.
He's under the hood of a Dyna that's seen better years, and he doesn't look up when I lean against the workbench next to him.
"Hey."
"Hey."
I let him work for a minute.
The garage smells like oil and metal and the cold October air coming through the open bay door.
There's something comforting about it—the rhythm of Garrett's hands, the clink of tools, the way he moves through mechanical problems the same way he moves through everything else.
Methodically. Completely. One step at a time until it's fixed.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
"You're going to whether I say yes or not."
"The ODs. At Ruby Memorial. You know about them, don't you?"
His hands slow on the engine. They don't stop—just slow. "What do you mean?"
"I mean seven in ten days, Garrett. A sixteen-year-old died last week.
A seventeen-year-old seized on my table this morning.
Fentanyl-laced meth, same inconsistent batches, same out-of-nowhere spike.
Something's happening and I can see it from the ER side, and I'm asking you if you can see it from yours. "
He's quiet. The wrench turns once, twice.
He straightens up, wipes his hands on the rag hanging from his back pocket, and looks at me.
Club quiet. The kind of silence that has a locked door behind it.
"Leah—"
"Don't 'Leah' me. People are dying. Kids are dying. In my ER, on my shift, under my hands. I'm not asking about club business. I'm asking my brother if he knows why kids in Morgantown are dropping like flies."
His jaw tightens. The same jaw, the same clench, the same stubbornness that makes every Mercer in history impossible to argue with and impossible to live without.
"We know," he says finally. "And we're handling it."
"Handling it how?"
"Leah."
There it is. The wall. The line between his world and mine that he's drawn since the day he patched in—this far, no further, not my sister, not in this life.
I've hated that line since the day he put it there, and I hate it more tonight because seventeen-year-old Tyler is upstairs in the ICU and Garrett's standing here telling me we're handling it like that's supposed to be enough.
"Fine," I say. "Handle it. But whatever it is, it's getting worse, not better. And the next kid who comes through my doors might not make it."
He holds my gaze for a long moment.
Something moves behind his eyes—not guilt, not defensiveness. Something heavier. The weight of knowing something he can't share with the person he loves most in the world.
"I know," he says quietly. "That's why we're handling it."
He turns back to the engine. Conversation over. Wall up. Garrett on one side, me on the other, and Morgantown's kids dying in the space between.
I leave the garage.
I walk through the main room, where Vanna has fallen asleep on the couch with her hand resting on Waylon's car seat, and I don't wake her because she needs the rest more than anyone I know.
I drive home. I shower. I eat leftover Thai food standing at my kitchen counter in a towel because sitting down feels like too much commitment.
And I think about two things that have no business occupying the same space in my brain but are doing it anyway:
The way Tyler's body seized under my hands this morning, every muscle firing at once, his whole future balanced on whether or not the drugs in his system would let him live.
And the way Coin said my name like he'd been practicing it.
Both of them keep me awake for entirely different reasons.
I fall asleep sometime after two, with my hand on my scar and his almost-smile burned into the backs of my eyelids, and I dream about fire and matching wounds and a man who holds everything together so quietly that nobody notices he's breaking.
Nobody except me.