Emily blinked. "Head mechanic?" she repeated. He looked for just a second, almost sheepish, like the words had gotten out ahead of him. Then his face set because he'd decided and when Cole Walker decided a thing, it was decided.
"Yeah," he said. "Head mechanic. That's the job. Effective today. You want it or not?"
"I'm lying on a table. I can't even stand up."
"Wasn't the question. You want the job?" And Emily Carter, who three hours ago had been the parts girl that nobody in that building could name, lay on a doctor's table with her ruined leg and her cracked open heart, and looked up at a Hells Angel who was offering her the things she'd wanted her whole life, and had long since stopped letting herself hope for to be seen to be known to be worth something to somebody, and she couldn't answer because her throat had closed all the way up. So she just nodded.
Good, Cole said gruffly and turned toward the door quick, like maybe his own eyes had gotten a little full and he'd be damned if anybody was going to see it. Good. That's settled. Doc, what do we got to do to get this woman on your schedule?
That should have been the moment the story turned all the way toward the light. And in most ways, it was. But there was one more thing waiting. One more piece Emily hadn't told anybody. One more weight she'd been carrying so long she'd stopped feeling it as a separate thing at all. And it came out 3 days later in the worst possible way and it nearly undid everything.
It was Reese who found out first. Cole had put Reese in charge of what he was privately calling the paperwork war. Pulling every string, calling every contact, getting Emily's denied VA claim reopened and pushed through. Reese, it turned out, had a nephew who worked for a veterans advocacy outfit two states over, and the nephew had asked for Emily's records so he could see what they were dealing with. And Emily, reluctantly, only because Cole had asked her directly, had signed the release.
And when the file came back, Reese sat in the Thunder Ridge breakroom and read it. And about a third of the way through it, he stopped and set the pages down and did not pick them back up for a long time. Because Emily hadn't told them all of it. She'd told them about the leg. She'd told them about the unit she'd saved.
She had not told them what the report told them in the flat gray language of a military record that on the day she'd gotten that vehicle running under fire. She hadn't just heard her leg. She'd gone back.
The report said it plainly. After the vehicle was moving and the unit was clear with her leg already torn up beneath her, Emily Carter had gone back on foot for a soldier who'd been separated in the confusion. A 19-year-old kid first deployment and she'd found him and she'd brought him out. And the report noted in the same flat gray language that she had done this after being ordered not to.