Emily stared at him.
"No."
"Yes."
"You don't even know me."
Cole almost laughed, but there was no humor in it. "That's true. And I'm beginning to realize that is a problem with me, not with you."
The side door opened. Cody had pulled the crew-cab truck to the entrance.
Cole slipped one arm carefully behind Emily's back and the other beneath her knees.
"Don't," she said immediately.
"Your leg doesn't work."
"I can stand in a minute."
"You have been standing for a year. Apparently that was enough."
Before she could argue again, he lifted her.
Emily had spent years avoiding exactly this feeling: needing another person to carry her. The humiliation hit first, then the instinct to fight it. But Cole's grip was careful and matter-of-fact. Nobody laughed. Nobody looked away in embarrassment.
They simply made room.
As he carried her past the black Harley, Emily turned her head and listened once to the engine she had repaired. It idled deep and even, steady as a heartbeat.
For the first time all afternoon, she allowed herself a small smile.
"Sounds better," Cole said.
"It does."
"Good."
He carried her out into the Arizona heat.
Behind them, Reese picked up the stretched timing chain from the workbench. He turned it over in his hands, then looked toward Marcus.
"We had a master mechanic behind that counter for a year."
Marcus stared at the doorway through which Emily had disappeared.
"Yeah," he said quietly.
Reese set the chain down.
"And we called her the parts girl."
The drive to the clinic took forty-three minutes, and Cole hated nearly every one of them.
Emily sat across the back seat with her right leg stretched along the bench. Cody drove. Cole rode in front but kept twisting around every few minutes to look at her, especially whenever the truck crossed a seam in the highway and she drew in a breath through her teeth.
"You are staring," Emily said finally without opening her eyes.
"I'm checking that you haven't passed out."
"I'm not going to pass out."
"You keep saying things like that as if being used to pain makes the pain reasonable."
Emily opened her eyes. "It makes it familiar."
"That is not better."
She almost smiled. Almost.
Cody caught the exchange in the rearview mirror and wisely said nothing.
Marcus had found an orthopedic urgent-care center in Red Valley, but Cole had changed the plan halfway there. He called a physician named Dr. Samuel Porter, an orthopedic surgeon who had once treated Cole after a bad crash and who, according to Cole, had the useful quality of caring more about what was wrong than about whether someone looked respectable when they walked through the door.
Porter's clinic sat behind a small surgical center on the north side of town. He met them at a side entrance wearing blue scrubs beneath an old denim jacket, reading glasses pushed up into gray hair.
"You look older," Cole said.
"So do you. Mine is because I work for a living."
Porter glanced toward Emily. "This her?"
Cole nodded.
"Then stop blocking my door and bring her in."
Emily objected when Cole reached for her again, but the first attempt to put weight on the knee ended the argument. The joint shifted beneath her with a sickening instability that made her grab the truck frame. Cole caught her before she fell.