Her eyes filled.
"That's not fair."
Cole frowned. "What isn't?"
"That it takes forty people. What happens to somebody who doesn't have forty people?"
That stopped him.
He had been expecting gratitude. Emily gave him a moral problem instead.
"Then maybe after we get you through this," he said slowly, "we figure out how to help the next person find forty people without needing a motorcycle shop first."
Emily looked at him.
There was the beginning of something in that answer. Not a solution yet. But a direction.
"Okay," she whispered.
Then the tears came.
Not the careful tears she wiped away before anyone could notice. These arrived from somewhere much older than the claim itself. They came from years of hearing hold music while her knee ached. From forms returned because one box was incomplete. From the humiliation of learning exactly how poor she could become while still being told to wait.
Cole caught one of her crutches before it fell and put an arm around her.
"Two years," she said against his shoulder. "I kept thinking if I just explained it clearly enough, somebody would understand."
"I know."
"I got so tired."
"I know."
"I thought stopping meant I failed."
Cole tightened his arm around her.
"No. It meant you were one person. There is a difference."
She cried until the pressure eased.
Cole did not hurry her.
When she finally pulled back, embarrassed, he looked at her with the complete lack of embarrassment that made it impossible for her to apologize.
"You done?"
She sniffed. "For now."
"Good. Get in the truck. You have surgery in six hours and Porter will blame me if you show up exhausted."
"I am exhausted."
"Then be more exhausted in a bed."
The surgery lasted a little more than four hours.
Cole sat in the waiting room for every minute.
He hated waiting rooms. They turned action into uselessness. There was nothing to repair, nobody to call, no door he could force open with persistence. There was only a clock on the wall and a woman behind a set of double doors doing the one thing he could not do for her.
Reese sat beside him reading the same motorcycle magazine for nearly an hour without turning a page. Cody paced until a nurse threatened to assign him a hallway farther away. Marcus brought sandwiches from a vending machine, took one bite, and apologized to everyone for buying them.
When Dr. Porter finally appeared, still in scrubs, Cole was on his feet before the surgeon reached the chairs.
"How is she?"
Porter pulled off his surgical cap. "She's good."
Cole did not breathe.
"The repair went the way I hoped. We addressed the chronic instability and the damaged tissue we discussed. There was degeneration from years of compensating, but not beyond what we can work with. If she follows the rehabilitation plan and does not decide she knows better than physical therapy-"
All four men looked at one another.
Porter sighed. "That reaction does not inspire confidence."
"She'll follow it," Cole said.
"No. She'll try to turn rehab into a competition. Your job is to stop her from doing twice the prescribed work because she thinks suffering faster means healing faster."
Reese nodded solemnly. "We can do that."
"Good. Then I expect her to regain stable function. It'll take time, but the goal is not simply less pain. The goal is for her to trust the leg again."
Cole lowered himself back into the chair.