Cole managed a nod. The relief arrived so abruptly that it left him feeling weak, and he sat back down before anyone could notice. Reese leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor, while Cody finally stopped pacing.
An hour later, Emily woke in recovery with a dry mouth, a heavy leg, and the unpleasant uncertainty of anesthesia fading away. Her first clear thought was that something important had happened while she had been unable to see it. Her second was that she had forgotten a task she was supposed to complete, a reflex left over from years of being the person who had to make sure everyone else got home. She turned her head and found Cole sitting beside her bed.
"You're awake," he said. "Doctor says it went well."
She looked past him and saw Reese by the window, Cody half-asleep in a chair, and Marcus standing near the door holding a plastic cup of water. The sight confused her more than the medical equipment. All four men had been present when she went into surgery, and somehow all four remained.
"You stayed," she said.
"Where else were we going?"
She tried to answer, but her thoughts drifted through memories she had spent years avoiding. There had been another waiting area once, long after she returned from overseas, where she sat holding a packet of records while appointments were postponed and letters told her to submit information she had already provided. There had been mornings when she imagined a friend might call, then remembered she had stopped telling people what was happening because she did not want to hear herself explain it again.
"People go home," she murmured. "They finish what they came for."
Cole leaned closer. "We've still got something to do here."
"What?"
"Make sure you heal. And then get you back to telling all of us we're wrong about motorcycles."
A tired laugh escaped her. It changed almost immediately into tears, and she covered her face with the hand not connected to a monitor. Cole did not ask her to stop. He simply sat beside her while the others pretended to be occupied with ordinary things, giving her the dignity of being emotional without turning it into a performance.
Recovery was harder than she expected, and not always for the reasons the doctors had warned her about. The physical discomfort was familiar enough; she had spent years making plans around it and could tolerate carefully managed pain. What unsettled her was the sudden loss of the routines that had defined her life. There was no shipment to unpack, no parts invoice to reconcile, no workbench to inspect, and no reason to rise at dawn except habit.
She stayed in her apartment for the first days after discharge, with assistance arranged by the clinic and short visits from people who had volunteered to help. Cole did not insist she move into the garage immediately, and that restraint mattered to her. He offered a ground-floor room in a small guest cottage behind Thunder Ridge, where she could avoid her apartment stairs during recovery. She toured it with her therapist's approval, considered the arrangement, and chose to accept because she wanted to rather than because she had been told what was best for her.