Chapter 3
Nina
The minotaur in exam room two has been waiting three hours, and his chart tells a whole ugly story.
Portland is four hours away. This man drove here with a dislocated shoulder, sat in a plastic chair that buckles under his weight, and listened to someone tell him he needed to drive four more hours because she couldn't bring herself to put her hands on him.
I flip the chart closed.
Jess looks up from the supply counter. She's organized like a woman who's seen too many night shifts fall apart over a missing IV kit: everything labeled, everything within arm's reach, and God help the person who puts the gauze back in the wrong drawer.
We've known each other since Wednesday and she's already let me shadow two patient intakes without hovering.
"Hector's been in there since seven," she says. She's handing me the information and letting me decide what to do with it.
"Three hours for a shoulder reduction?"
"Laura wouldn't touch him. Documented a refusal, said she'd call ortho in Portland." Jess pulls a splint tray from the cabinet and sets it on the counter between us. "Ortho never called back."
My wrist aches under the ACE bandage. I flex it, test the range—better than Saturday, but worse than I want. "I need you to assist. Counterweight on the scapula while I reduce."
Jess studies me. She already knows I can handle the medicine. What she needs to know is whether I'll flinch when I get my hands on a patient whose species makes other nurses cross the street.
Whatever she finds, it's enough. She nods and grabs the splint tray.
Hector fills the exam table like a man trying to fold himself into a shoebox.
His horns, shorter than Garrett's and curving tight against his skull, scrape the wall behind him every time he shifts.
His good hand grips the edge of the table, and his knuckles have gone pale beneath dark fur.
He's sweating. I can smell the pain on him, the same way it smelled on every patient I've ever treated who waited too long because no one would help.
"Hector." I pull the rolling stool up to the table and sit. Not looming over him, not standing at arm's length. "I'm Nina. I'm going to fix your shoulder."
His eyes track to Jess, then back to me. Looking for the exit. Waiting for the excuse: the referral, the paperwork, the regretful I'm not really qualified for this.
"I've reduced dislocated shoulders on patients bigger than you.
" Not quite true, but close enough. "Here's what's going to happen.
Jess is going to stabilize your scapula from behind.
I'm going to externally rotate your arm—slow, steady, you'll feel pressure but I need you to let me work through it—and the humeral head is going to slide back into the socket.
The whole thing takes about ninety seconds. I'll talk you through every step."
"The other nurse said—"
"The other nurse isn't here." I keep my voice even.
The voice I used with Mr. King when the morphine drip needed adjusting, his hands shook on the bed rails and his eyes went wide, not with pain but with the helplessness of being at someone else's mercy.
"I'm here. And I don't refer patients out for things I can fix in this room. "
Hector's grip on the table loosens.
Jess moves behind him without a word, her hands settling on his scapula, steady and sure. I take Hector's arm. The radius feels like a fencepost in my grip, dense and heavy, the bone mass of a species built to survive things that would kill me twice over, and I start the rotation.
"Tell me about that truck parked outside," I say. "The blue one with the lift kit."
His breath catches. "That's—mine."
"What year?"
"Eighty-nine." He grinds the word through his teeth. I'm rotating, steady, maintaining traction. "Chevy. K1500."
"Manual or automatic?"
"Manual. Found the transmission—" He hisses. I ease off the pressure half a degree and let the muscle release. "Found the transmission in a salvage yard."
"Rebuilt it yourself?"
"Yeah." His voice steadies as he follows the conversation instead of the pain. "Took me four months. Couldn't find the—right bell housing for—"
The humeral head catches, pops, and seats.
Hector stops talking. His entire body sags. The breath he releases sounds like it's been trapped in his lungs for hours, which it probably has, because holding your breath against pain becomes a reflex you don't notice until the pain ends.
I guide his arm into a resting position and reach for the sling on the tray. "Eighty-nine K1500 with a manual swap. That's a clean build."
He stares at me. Then at his shoulder. Then at me again, and his face cracks open into disbelief and gratitude, the look of a man who braced for one more rejection and got treated like a patient instead.
"You know trucks?"
"My brother Tomás rebuilds them." I fasten the sling strap, check the positioning. "He'd want to see that bell housing."
The corner of Hector's mouth lifts. Jess hands me the discharge paperwork and I fill it out while I run through the aftercare instructions: ice, anti-inflammatories, range-of-motion exercises starting day four, follow-up in a week.
He nods at each point. Takes the paperwork with his good hand.
At the door he stops, turns, and dips his head.
"Thank you, Nina."
Jess doesn't mention it for the rest of the morning.
We move through the patient queue: a human teenager with a sprained ankle from a skateboard trick gone wrong, an orc woman in her second trimester needing a routine check, an elderly man with a persistent cough that turns out to be bronchitis and a refusal to take antibiotics because he doesn't trust "the new nurse.
" I handle the bronchitis patient by calling his daughter from the front desk and letting her do the convincing while I prep the prescription, because some battles you win by knowing which hill isn't yours to die on.
At four o'clock, Jess finds me restocking the suture kits. She pulls a key from her pocket, single-cut brass on a plain ring, and holds it out.
"Supply closet."
I take it. The metal sits warm in my palm.
"Nobody gets that key their first week," she says. Her face gives me nothing. Jess Cooper has the best poker face I've ever encountered on a person who isn't holding cards.
"Thank you."
She nods once and walks away, and I close my hand around the key and feel the edges press into my fingers and think: I already like her. I already like all of them.
I've felt this before. Galveston, when the ER team threw me a birthday party with a grocery store sheet cake and I stood in the break room with frosting on my fingers feeling like I belonged. And then my contract ended, and I drove away, and the group text went quiet within a month.
Mami's voice in my head: You collect people, Mija. Like your abuela collected those little ceramic saints. Whole shelves full. And then you move and leave them behind and wonder why the shelf feels empty.
I shake my head, put the key in my pocket, and go back to the suture kits.
Betty's Diner sits at the end of Main Street, chrome and glass and the smell of coffee that's been on the burner since dawn. The lunch crowd has thinned by the time I push through the door. A few locals nursing cups, a construction crew in the corner booth finishing plates of meatloaf.
Betty appears before I reach the counter, coffeepot in one hand, mug in the other. "Nina! Sit, sit. You eat lunch yet? I got soup today, tomato bisque, homemade, none of that canned business."
"Coffee's fine." I slide onto a stool. "Thank you, Betty."
She pours like a woman who believes every problem starts with an empty cup. "You're too skinny. I'm bringing you soup."
She's already gone before I can argue.
The window beside me faces the street, and that's where I see him.
Garrett stands at the bed of a truck, two blocks up, stacking lumber with a leaner man in a Feral Sons cut—Dawson, maybe, from the way Jess described him over coffee yesterday.
The December light hits flat and gray, winter light that makes everything look like a photograph somebody forgot to color, and against it Garrett is the largest thing on the street.
Dawson—if that's who he is—passes boards up to him, and Garrett stacks them the way he does everything: measured, careful, each board placed where it balances best.
A woman turns the corner. Mid-forties, puffy jacket, shopping bags on her arm.
She sees him and changes course. Not a dramatic crossing, not a stumble or a gasp.
She angles toward the opposite sidewalk the way you step around a puddle, automatic, barely conscious.
An inconvenience in the shape of a person.
Garrett sees her.
I know he sees her because his hands pause on the lumber for a second.
Then he lifts the next board and places it with the same care, and his posture adjusts in a way I wouldn't catch if I hadn't spent less than a week in his cabin watching him move through spaces built for a body half his size.
He tucks his elbows in. Angles his horns away from the sidewalk.
Shrinks himself, as much as a seven-foot minotaur can shrink, into a smaller version of himself that takes up less space, draws less attention, gives the town fewer reasons to cross the street.
A man on the sidewalk pulls his daughter closer as they pass. The girl cranes her neck to look. The father tugs her forward without breaking his stride.
Garrett doesn't react. He lifts another board. Stacks it. Dawson says something to him, and Garrett nods, and they keep working, and nobody on Main Street looks at him for more than a second.
My throat tightens. I pick up my coffee and drink it too fast, and the burn gives me something to focus on besides the pressure behind my chest that has no business being there because I've known this man since Wednesday and I don't get to feel things about how the world treats him.