He looked toward Cody. "Bring the crew cab around. Reese, get her jacket. Marcus, find the nearest orthopedic urgent clinic that can image a knee today."
Marcus nodded quickly and pulled out his phone.
"And don't give me a cash price," Cole added. "Find the place with the best doctor. I'll deal with the rest."
Emily tightened her grip on his arm. "No."
Cole looked down at her.
"I cannot let you pay for this."
"You can."
"I won't."
"Emily, you just spent your own money on parts for my motorcycle."
"That was different."
"You fixed a machine that could have put me into the pavement at seventy miles an hour."
"I did what needed doing."
"So am I."
Her jaw tightened.
Cole held her gaze until something in her expression gave way, not surrender exactly, but fatigue. A deep kind of fatigue he had not noticed before because he had never bothered to look closely enough.
"Where did you learn engines?" he asked again, more gently this time.
Emily looked around at the men gathered near her. A year of silence stood between them. A year in which they had mistaken quiet for ignorance and restraint for emptiness.
She was tired of carrying that too.
"The Army," she said.
Cole went still.
"Eighteen years. Vehicle maintenance and recovery. Wheeled and tracked platforms. Generators."
She took a breath. "Hydraulics. Field repairs. Whatever had to move when somebody's life depended on it moving."
Marcus lowered his phone.
Reese slowly sat Emily's jacket on the counter as if it had become something important.
Cody whispered, "Eighteen years?"
Emily nodded once.
Cole's eyes went to her knee. "And that?"
"Last deployment."
The words changed the air again.
Emily looked down at her own hands. "A vehicle went down where it could not stay down. I got it moving. Everybody who needed it got out. I damaged the knee doing it and kept working because there wasn't another option at the time."
She paused.
"By the time I got home, it had become a paperwork problem instead of an emergency."
Cole did not speak.
Emily had not planned to say any of this. Once the first door opened, however, the rest was harder to keep shut.
"I filed for treatment. I sent records. I appealed. I spent two years sending the same documents to different offices. Appointments moved."
She swallowed. "Requests came back for things I thought I had already provided. I got tired. The knee got worse. The bills didn't stop. So I found work I could do and told myself it was enough."
"Behind my parts counter," Cole said quietly.
"Behind your parts counter."
He looked around the shop. For the first time, he saw it through her eyes. The stairs she climbed to the storage loft. The heavy boxes she carried because nobody had thought to ask whether the woman lifting them should have been lifting anything at all. The concrete floor. The distance between the counter and the loading bay.
Then he looked at the motorcycle idling perfectly twenty feet away.
"You fixed that on this knee."
Emily closed her eyes. "Yes."
Cole exhaled once, slowly.
"All right," he said. "Then here's what's going to happen. We're getting the knee looked at today. The job is not disappearing while you're gone. Your paycheck is not disappearing while you're gone. And whatever paperwork war you stopped fighting, we are reopening it."