The honesty altered the room. Cole looked down at the worn tensioner and imagined the memorial ride, hundreds of miles of road, heat shimmering above the asphalt, and the possibility of the engine failing somewhere isolated. It was not certain that a serious failure would have caused an accident, and Emily had not claimed that it was. But the damaged components were real, and the risk had been real enough to deserve attention.
"Where did you learn this?" he asked, the anger gone from his voice.
Emily opened her mouth. Her right leg chose that moment to stop holding her.
The first sensation was not pain but absence, a sudden loss of support where support should have been. Her hand slipped on the counter as she reached for it, and her body dropped sideways before she could find a stable surface. She landed on the concrete with a sharp cry she had not intended to make, her knee twisting beneath her in a way that made the room spin. For an instant she could not hear anything beyond the rushing sound of her own pulse.
Cole reached her first. He had been standing close enough to see the strength leave her leg, and the change from anger to concern happened too quickly for anyone to question it. He lowered himself beside her without trying to move the injured knee and told Cody to clear the space. Reese brought a folded jacket for her head while Marcus reached for his phone.
"Don't touch the knee," Emily gasped. "Please. Just give me a second."
"You hurt yourself working on the bike?" Cole asked.
"No. I mean, not today. This happens. It has happened before."
"How many times?"
"I don't know. A lot."
Her attempt to make it sound ordinary frightened him more than the pain itself. He saw her hands shaking and the effort it took her to keep her breathing under control. The woman who had faced him without flinching a moment earlier was trying to disappear again, this time inside a body that was unmistakably asking for help.
"Call for medical advice," Cole said to Cody. "Tell them we have a woman with a serious knee injury who fell and can't stand."
Emily caught Cole's wrist. "Please don't call an ambulance unless it's necessary. I can't pay for another emergency bill."
Cole went still. "Another?"
"I have bills already. I can't do another one."
The words were harder for him to understand than the mechanical explanation she had just given. Thunder Ridge had equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Cole had personally spent money on things that would have seemed ridiculous to Emily. He was not a man who struggled to picture a repair invoice, but he had never imagined that the employee who stood behind his counter every morning might be measuring each medical decision against the possibility of losing her apartment.