"You going to be there tomorrow?" she asked at last.
Cole looked almost offended by the question. "I said I would be there."
"I know. I just wanted to hear it again."
"Then hear it again. I'll be there when you go in, and I'll be there when they tell us how it went."
The answer followed her home. In bed that night, with a bag prepared beside the door and the medical instructions lying on her table, she still felt afraid. But the fear was different from the fear she had carried alone for years. It existed beside a promise she had allowed herself to believe, and she slept more peacefully than she expected.
The surgery lasted almost four hours. Cole spent the entire time in the waiting room with a paper cup of coffee he forgot to drink, discovering that patience was a different thing when there was no useful work for his hands. Reese sat beside him with a magazine he never opened. Cody paced between the vending machines and the windows, while Marcus brought sandwiches no one wanted and eventually set the bag aside.
Every so often Cole looked toward the doors leading to the operating rooms. He had spent his life believing that serious problems should be confronted directly, preferably by someone strong enough to force a solution. Yet nothing in his experience had prepared him for sitting still while people he barely knew tried to repair the knee of a woman he had somehow come to care about more than he was ready to admit. He understood the skill involved, respected the surgeons, and hated his own helplessness.
Reese watched him for a while before speaking. "She told me yesterday she thought you'd get bored and leave halfway through."
Cole turned. "She really said that?"
"Not quite like that. She asked if all of us had to come, then said it would be a long day and we probably had work to do."
Cole stared at the closed doors. It would have been easy to answer with irritation, to say that a promise was a promise and the woman should simply learn to trust it. But he recognized the question beneath her question. For years, help had been temporary, and people who said they would stand beside her had often disappeared into systems that treated her as someone else's responsibility.
"Then she'd better wake up and see we're still here," he said.
Portoris emerged later in scrubs, his mask hanging at his neck, and called Emily's name. Cole stood so quickly his knee struck the coffee table. The surgeon explained that the procedure had gone as planned, that the damaged structures had been addressed, and that the next stage would require careful protection and rehabilitation. He refused to promise a perfect result, but he sounded satisfied with what they had been able to accomplish.
"She'll need time," he said. "No heroic shortcuts, no deciding pain is something she can push through to prove a point. The rehabilitation plan matters as much as what we did today."