"Manual or automatic?"
"Manual. Found the transmission—" He hisses. I ease off the pressure half a degree and let the muscle release. "Found the transmission in a salvage yard."
"Rebuilt it yourself?"
"Yeah." His voice steadies as he follows the conversation instead of the pain. "Took me four months. Couldn't find the—right bell housing for—"
The humeral head catches, pops, and seats.
Hector stops talking. His entire body sags. The breath he releases sounds like it's been trapped in his lungs for hours, which it probably has, because holding your breath against pain becomes a reflex you don't notice until the pain ends.
I guide his arm into a resting position and reach for the sling on the tray. "Eighty-nine K1500 with a manual swap. That's a clean build."
He stares at me. Then at his shoulder. Then at me again, and his face cracks open into disbelief and gratitude, the look of a man who braced for one more rejection and got treated like a patient instead.
"You know trucks?"
"My brother Tomás rebuilds them." I fasten the sling strap, check the positioning. "He'd want to see that bell housing."
The corner of Hector's mouth lifts. Jess hands me the discharge paperwork and I fill it out while I run through the aftercare instructions: ice, anti-inflammatories, range-of-motion exercises starting day four, follow-up in a week. He nodsat each point. Takes the paperwork with his good hand. At the door he stops, turns, and dips his head.
"Thank you, Nina."
Jess doesn't mention it for the rest of the morning. We move through the patient queue: a human teenager with a sprained ankle from a skateboard trick gone wrong, an orc woman in her second trimester needing a routine check, an elderly man with a persistent cough that turns out to be bronchitis and a refusal to take antibiotics because he doesn't trust "the new nurse." I handle the bronchitis patient by calling his daughter from the front desk and letting her do the convincing while I prep the prescription, because some battles you win by knowing which hill isn't yours to die on.
At four o'clock, Jess finds me restocking the suture kits. She pulls a key from her pocket, single-cut brass on a plain ring, and holds it out.
"Supply closet."
I take it. The metal sits warm in my palm.
"Nobody gets that key their first week," she says. Her face gives me nothing. Jess Cooper has the best poker face I've ever encountered on a person who isn't holding cards.
"Thank you."
She nods once and walks away, and I close my hand around the key and feel the edges press into my fingers and think:I already like her. I already like all of them.
I've felt this before. Galveston, when the ER team threw me a birthday party with a grocery store sheet cake and I stood in the break room with frosting on my fingers feeling like I belonged. And then my contract ended, and I drove away, and the group text went quiet within a month.
Mami's voice in my head:You collect people, Mija. Like your abuela collected those little ceramic saints. Whole shelves full. And then you move and leave them behind and wonder why the shelf feels empty.
I shake my head, put the key in my pocket, and go back to the suture kits.
Betty's Diner sits at the end of Main Street, chrome and glass and the smell of coffee that's been on the burner since dawn. The lunch crowd has thinned by the time I push through the door. A few locals nursing cups, a construction crew in the corner booth finishing plates of meatloaf.
Betty appears before I reach the counter, coffeepot in one hand, mug in the other. "Nina! Sit, sit. You eat lunch yet? I got soup today, tomato bisque, homemade, none of that canned business."
"Coffee's fine." I slide onto a stool. "Thank you, Betty."
She pours like a woman who believes every problem starts with an empty cup. "You're too skinny. I'm bringing you soup."
She's already gone before I can argue.
The window beside me faces the street, and that's where I see him.
Garrett stands at the bed of a truck, two blocks up, stacking lumber with a leaner man in a Feral Sons cut—Dawson, maybe, from the way Jess described him over coffee yesterday. The December light hits flat and gray, winter light that makes everything look like a photograph somebody forgot to color, and against it Garrett is the largest thing on the street. Dawson—if that's who he is—passes boards up to him, and Garrett stacks them the way he does everything: measured, careful, each board placed where it balances best.
A woman turns the corner. Mid-forties, puffy jacket, shopping bags on her arm. She sees him and changes course. Not a dramatic crossing, not a stumble or a gasp. She angles toward the opposite sidewalk the way you step around a puddle, automatic, barely conscious. An inconvenience in the shape of a person.
