Chapter 5
Saoirse
I'm in trouble, and I've known it for at least two weeks, and I have done absolutely nothing productive about it besides buy a second pair of gardening gloves in a color I have decided, against all evidence, is not specifically chosen because I thought he'd like it.
"You're staring at gloves like they personally wronged you," Gemma said, appearing at my desk with her usual talent for terrible timing.
"I'm evaluating options."
"You're buying matching gloves for a man you have feelings for. There's no evaluating happening. That ship has sailed, docked, and started a small waterfront restaurant."
"That metaphor got away from you."
"Most of my metaphors do. Doesn't make me wrong.
" She perched on the edge of my desk, arms crossed, wearing the particular expression of a woman who's about to say something I don't want to hear because it's true.
"Saoirse. You know I love you. You also know I'm not going to pretend I haven't noticed you rearranging your whole calendar around a man's physical therapy sessions that, clinically speaking, don't need to happen in a garden. "
"The garden's therapeutically justified."
"The garden is absolutely therapeutically justified.
I'm not arguing the garden. I'm arguing the way you talk about him when you think nobody's paying attention.
" She softened, dropping the teasing. "You like him.
Actually like him. And I think you already know that's a problem, professionally speaking, which is probably why you haven't said a word about it to me until I forced the subject. "
I set the gloves down, because there was no point pretending anymore, not to Gemma, not really to myself.
"It's not pity," I said, because that was the thing I needed to say first, needed someone besides myself to hear it.
"It's not the wounded-warrior thing, whatever people assume happens in this line of work.
It's him. His humor, once you dig past the wall.
His hands — God, Gemma, the way that man handles a seedling like it's the most important thing in the world, careful and exact, the same care he probably used to hold together men who were dying under his hands, except now it's just — growing things. Alive things."
I pressed my palms against my eyes.
"He mentors the younger vets who come through the clinic. Talked one of them down from a full flashback last week, calm as anything, like it was nothing, like that kind of steadiness doesn't cost a person something every single time."
"So you like the whole package. The humor, the hands, the hero stuff he doesn't think counts as hero stuff."
"I like all of it. I like him. And it's a problem, because he's my patient, and I have spent my entire career being the person who does not let this happen, who watches for exactly this in other clinicians and quietly, professionally, makes sure it gets handled the right way.
" I looked up at her. "I know the right way.
I've counseled colleagues through this exact situation.
I know precisely what I'm supposed to do. "
"Which is?"
"Refer him out. Remove myself as his provider. Immediately, cleanly, before it becomes something that compromises his care or my license or, frankly, either of our hearts any further than they're already compromised."
Gemma was quiet for a moment, studying me with something gentler than her usual teasing.
"That's going to cost you something," she said. "Watching him get better under someone else's care instead of yours."
"It's going to cost me a lot of things." I picked the gloves back up, turning them over in my hands. "But it's the right call. It's the only call, actually, if I want there to be any chance of something real between us that isn't built on a foundation I'd have to be ashamed of."
The decision had been building for a while, if I was honest with myself, longer than the two weeks I'd admitted to Gemma. It had started, maybe, the day I watched him mentor Danny Ochoa.
Danny was nineteen, home from his first deployment eight weeks earlier, referred to the rehab wing for a shoulder injury that was, by every clinical measure, straightforward.
What wasn't straightforward was the panic that hit him mid-session that Tuesday — no warning, no clear trigger I could identify, just a sudden, full-body flashback that had him gripping the mat table so hard his knuckles went white, eyes gone somewhere far away and terrible.
I'd started my standard protocol — grounding techniques, calm voice, the careful choreography I'd trained years to execute — when Elias, waiting for his own session in the hallway, appeared in the doorway without being asked.
"Danny," he said, voice low and even, dropping to the kid's eye level without making it a production.
"Hey. Ochoa. You're at the clinic. Clover Ridge.
You're safe. Look at me — that's it, look at me, not at whatever you're seeing.
What's five things you can see in this room right now. Real things. Go."
Danny had latched onto Elias's voice like a lifeline, working through the grounding exercise with a medic's steadiness guiding him back, syllable by syllable, until his breathing evened out and his eyes came back into focus, present, exhausted, but present.
"There you go," Elias said, still crouched at his level. "You're okay. That happens. It doesn't mean anything's wrong with you. It means you survived something that leaves marks even when the marks don't show."
I'd stood in the doorway of my own treatment room, momentarily useless, watching a man who insisted he had nothing to offer anyone hold together a scared nineteen-year-old with more skill and more gentleness than half the clinicians I'd trained alongside.
That was the day I'd started admitting to myself that what I felt for him wasn't just attraction, and wasn't just professional admiration either.
It was something more complicated and more dangerous than either, something that had no business existing inside the walls of a treatment relationship, no matter how carefully I dressed it up as concern for his wellbeing.
I made the appointment with Dr. Reyes, the clinic's other PT specialist, a steady, competent woman with fifteen years of experience and none of my particular complications standing in the way of Elias's care.
I didn't do it lightly. I sat with the decision for two full days, running every angle, making certain I wasn't rationalizing my way toward keeping him in my orbit under the cover of professional necessity.
I wasn't. The decision was clean. That didn't make it easy.
I told him myself, the following Thursday, before we'd even made it to the garden gate.
"I need to talk to you about something," I said, and watched his face do the thing it always did when he braced for bad news — a subtle stiffening, an old habit from a life where bad news arrived often and without warning.
"Okay."
"I'm transferring your care to Dr. Reyes.
Effective next session." I said it as gently and as clearly as I could, because half-measures in a moment like this only make things worse.
"You're not being punished. Your recovery isn't in question.
This has nothing to do with your progress and everything to do with me. "
"I don't understand."
"I have feelings for you, Elias." I said it plainly, because he deserved plain, not clinical hedging, not a careful professional euphemism that let either of us pretend the ground under us hadn't shifted.
"I have for a while now. And I can't be your therapist and have those feelings at the same time — not honestly, not ethically, not in a way that protects your recovery the way it deserves to be protected.
So I'm removing myself from the equation.
Not from your life, necessarily. Just from the clinical part of it. "
He was quiet for a long moment, processing, and I watched something complicated move across his face — surprise, then something warmer, then a kind of careful hope he seemed almost afraid to let show fully.
"You have feelings for me," he repeated.
"I do."
"Since when?"
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to me." His eyes stayed steady on mine, none of the careful deflection I was used to seeing when a conversation got close to something real. "I'd like to know when I started mattering to you as more than a case file."
"The garden," I admitted. "That first session, if I'm honest. Watching you talk about your grandmother, watching something in you unlock that I don't think you'd let anyone see in months. I told myself it was professional satisfaction. It stopped being just that somewhere around the second week."
"And instead of just... not saying anything, you're blowing up your own treatment plan to tell me."
"I'm doing the responsible thing," I said, though a small, unprofessional part of me was fighting a smile at the disbelief in his voice. "Which, apparently, looks a lot like blowing up a treatment plan from the outside. From the inside it just looks like integrity."
"Saoirse." He said my name carefully, like he was testing the weight of it now that it might mean something different than it had five minutes ago.
"Thank you. For telling me. And for — " he gestured vaguely, encompassing the whole complicated shape of what I'd just done — "all of it.
The honesty. The refusal to just quietly disappear on me without an explanation. "
"I wasn't going to do that to you. You've had enough people disappear on you without explanation."
Something flickered across his face at that — recognition, maybe, or gratitude too large to say out loud — and for a moment neither of us said anything, just stood there in the space between the clinic and the garden gate, the ground between us entirely different than it had been ten minutes earlier.
I introduced him to Dr. Reyes myself, the following Monday, walking him down the hallway to her office with his chart tucked under my arm one last time.