Cole climbed into the front seat and turned toward her. "You said you're not anybody's problem," he told her. "We're going to talk about that after we know your knee's okay."
"There's nothing to talk about," Emily replied, trying for a smile.
"Then it'll be a short conversation," he said.
Cody started the truck and eased onto the highway. Emily watched Thunder Ridge recede in the side mirror, the metal sign shrinking against the desert hills, and wondered whether she had just lost her job. She had gone into that morning hoping to fix a motorcycle quietly enough that no one would notice. Now she was leaving in the owner's truck, with her old military life exposed and the future she had so carefully made small beginning to open in directions she could not control.
The drive across Red Valley took forty minutes, and Emily counted nearly every uneven place in the road. Cody kept the truck at a steady speed, avoiding potholes when he could, while Cole turned in his seat every few minutes to check whether she needed anything. She wanted to tell him to stop looking at her, but she had no energy left for pretending that the pain was small. Instead she watched the desert pass the windows and tried to remember the last time anyone had rearranged an entire afternoon because she needed help.
It had been a long time. When her car broke down the previous winter, she had called a towing service rather than anyone she knew because paying a stranger felt easier than asking a friend. She had taken a bus to work for six days, refusing Sandra's offer of a ride because she was embarrassed by the thought of needing it twice. Her life had become a collection of arrangements designed to eliminate obligations to other people, and until that day she had considered the system efficient.
"You keep checking on me," she told Cole as he turned around again. "I'm not going to vanish out of the back seat."
"I know," he said. "I'm checking because I should have been paying attention earlier."
"You didn't know."
"I didn't ask. There is a difference."
The answer silenced her. She had been prepared to hear him excuse himself or accuse her of hiding too much, and she could have agreed with either explanation. Instead he had put responsibility somewhere she was not accustomed to seeing it placed. She looked out at the highway and felt how unsettling it was to share a problem without being told that she had caused it by needing help.
Dr. Samuel Portoris practiced at a modest orthopedic clinic outside the center of town. He was an old friend of Cole's, a wiry man in his sixties who wore his reading glasses on a cord and spoke in the patient, plain language of someone who had long ago decided that medical words were useful only when patients understood them. Years earlier he had treated a rider injured in a highway accident and refused to treat the man's reputation as a diagnosis. Cole remembered the kindness because he remembered how rare it had seemed at the time.