Okay, she whispered. Yeah, yeah, she laughed through the tears, a wet, broken sound. Okay, I'm not alone. I hear you. Good, Cole said, and his voice cracked right down the middle on the word.
And he didn't even try to hide it. Good. Now, let's get you home. You got surgery in the morning, and I'll be in that waiting room when you wake up, and so will every one of those idiots in there, and you're just going to have to get used to it.
She got in the truck and as Cody pulled out and the lights of Thunder Ridge Customs shrank behind them in the dark, Emily looked back at the shop where she'd been invisible for a year. The shop that had become in three impossible weeks. The first place in a very long time that had felt anything like home.
And for the first time since a bad day in a desert on the other side of the world, she let herself believe that the hardest part might finally be behind her. She was wrong about that, but not in the way she feared. The hardest part behind her was the carrying it alone part. What was still ahead of her was something she'd forgotten how to do. Something that would turn out to be harder than any deployment in any surgery in any 2-year fight with this system that didn't care. What was still ahead of her was letting herself be happy.
The surgery took 4 hours, and Cole Walker sat in that waiting room for every minute of it. He'd told her he would, and he'd meant it, but even he was a little surprised by how hard it hit him. The sitting, the waiting, the not being able to do a single thing. He was a man who fixed problems. He gave orders.
He made calls. He moved. And here he was stuck in a plastic chair with a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand. And there was nothing on earth he could do to help the one person he most wanted to help. And it was making him half crazy.
Reese sat on one side of him. Cody paced. Marcus had brought a bag of the terrible vending machine sandwiches nobody ate. And when the doors finally opened and Dr. Portoris came out still in his scrubs and pulled his mask down and said the surgery had gone well, better than well, and that everything he'd hoped to fix he'd been able to fix. Cole Walker put his face in his hands and did not lift it back up for a while.
"She's going to walk right for the first time in three years," Portoris said gently. It's going to take work, months of it, but she's going to walk right. Can we see her? She's still under. Give it an hour and listen.
Portoris put a hand on Cole's shoulder. When she wakes up, she's going to be groggy and she's going to be emotional. And people who've been holding themselves together as long as she has, sometimes when the pressure finally comes off, everything comes out at once. Don't be scared of it if it does. Just let her.
He was right. When Emily came out of it hours later and the anesthesia let go of her in pieces, the first thing she did was look around the room and the first thing she saw was every one of them still there. Cole in the chair, pulled right up to the bed, Reese by the window, Cody asleep, sitting up with his mouth open, Marcus standing guard by the door like he was afraid something might come take her.