And this this was this part that Emily had never said out loud to a single living soul. And she almost didn't say it now. And later she would never be entirely sure why she did. Maybe it was the pain. Maybe it was the tiredness. Maybe it was that for the first time in longer than she could remember, somebody was actually asking and actually waiting for the answer and looking at her like the answer mattered.
The paperwork, she said, and something broke a little in her voice for the first time. That's the part nobody tells you. You come home and the war is over for everybody else. But then there's this whole other war and it's all paper forms, appeals, claims that get denied for reasons nobody can explain. Insufficient documentation.
Unable to establish connection to service. I connected it to service. I was the service. But the system doesn't work like that. You wait months for an appointment and then it gets cancelled.
You send the same records four times. You sit on hold for 2 hours and then get told to call a different number and that number tells you to call the first one.
She wiped her face roughly with the back of her wrist. I fought it for 2 years. 2 years. And every month it didn't get better. The surgery got more expensive and I had less to pay for it with.
And eventually I just She shrugged a small broken motion. I stopped fighting. I found a job I could do standing behind a counter. I told myself it was fine. I told myself I could manage.
It's not that bad most days. It's really not. It's just some days it does this.
She looked up at Cole. So that's where I learned to fix your bike. She said, "That's the whole story. And I'd really, really appreciate it if we could not make it a big thing. I don't want people looking at me different. I've had enough of people looking at me different for one lifetime."
For a moment, Cole Walker couldn't speak. This man, this hell's angel, this chapter leader, this legend who'd buried brothers and stared down death more times than he could count, knelt on the floor of his own garage next to a woman who'd served 18 years. Who'd saved a whole unit who'd come home broken and gotten ground up by the very system that was supposed to catch her, who'd then quietly gone to work at a parts counter for a room full of men who called her sweetheart and never once asked her name and who had spent her own money and risked her own job to save the life of one of those very men without ever intending to say a word about it.
And what broke him in the end wasn't any one piece of it. It was that last part. I don't want to make it a big thing. I don't want people looking at me different. She'd carried all of it alone.