Reluctant disbelieving dragged out of him against his will, but real. "You do it again," he repeated. "Yes, sir."
He let out a long breath and shook his head, and he looked down at the old timing chain in his hand, and then back at her, and something in his eyes had changed for good. He was not looking at the parts girl anymore. He would never look at the parts girl again. He was looking at whoever this actually was. This quiet, steady, unshakable woman who had been standing 30 feet away from him for a year while he never once bothered to learn her name.
"Where did you learn to do that?" Cole said. And it was the exact question everyone in the room was thinking. And Emily opened her mouth to answer it and her leg gave out.
It happened with no more warning than it ever did. One heartbeat she was standing straight meeting Cole's eyes and the next her right knee simply stopped being there the way you'd feel if the floor dropped an inch beneath one foot. She grabbed for the counter. She missed. Her hand caught the edge and slid.
And a cry tore out of her that she'd spent months learning how to swallow. And this time she couldn't swallow it and she went down.
She hit the concrete hard. For a second nobody moved because nobody could believe it. The woman who'd just been standing there like a stone unbreakable, saying, "I'd do it again." To Cole Walker's face was suddenly folded on the floor with both hands wrapped around her knee and her whole body rigid with a pain so big it had stopped making a sound.
Then Cole was moving. For a big man, for a man his age, he covered that 30 feet faster than any of them had ever seen him move. And he was down on one knee beside her before Reese had even gotten his feet under him. Hey, hey, easy, easy, Cole said and his voice had changed completely. All the roughness had gone out of it.
I got you. Don't move. What is it? What happened?
It's fine, Emily gasped, which was the most obvious lie any of them had ever heard because she was white as a sheet and shaking. And there were tears standing in her eyes that she was furiously blinking back. It's It's my leg. It does this. It'll pass.
Just Just give me a second. It always passes. It does this.