At the truck, he stopped her. "I got something to tell you," he said. "And I need you to not fight me on it, cuz I'm too tired to fight you tonight, and so are you."
"Okay," Emily said wearily. "The claim," he said it carefully. "Your VA claim, the one you gave up on." He watched her face.
We got movement on it. Real movement. There's people looking at it now who couldn't ignore it if they wanted to.
And from what the lawyer says, Emily, it's going to go through. Not just the surgery, the back pay, everything you were owed and never got for 2 years. It's going to go through. Emily stared at him. For a moment, she didn't understand.
And then she did, and her face did something complicated. And Cole braced himself for her to argue, to deflect, to say he shouldn't have, that it was too much that she couldn't accept it.
She didn't. She started to cry. Not the quiet, controlled, blinked back kind she'd been fighting all afternoon 3 weeks ago in the garage. The real kind. The kind that comes up out of a place a person has kept locked for years.
The kind that doubles you over. And Cole caught her crutch as it slipped and got an arm around her and just held her up right there in the parking lot while she came apart against his shoulder for the second time in three weeks.
Two years, she kept saying. Two years I fought that. Two years and they wouldn't. And you 3 weeks. You did it in 3 weeks.
We did it, Cole said gruffly over her head. And it ain't cuz we're better than you. It's because there was 40 of us and one of you. That's all. That's the only thing that was ever different. You were fighting it alone.
He pulled back just enough to look at her and his own eyes were wet and he didn't care. You're not alone anymore. That's the whole thing I've been trying to get through your thick head for 3 weeks. You are not alone anymore. And Emily Carter standing in a dark parking lot on one good leg held up by a Hells Angel with a shop full of men behind her who 3 weeks ago hadn't known her name and would now every last one of them have gone through a wall for her finally completely stopped fighting it.