My phone buzzes, It’s Nox who sends a text only.
Falk badge access, rehab center. Third after-hours entry this week. Logging for Rivera.
Falk walked into the rehab center a few minutes after Griff left. I save the message and set the phone face-down on the deck rail.
The kitchen door opens twenty minutes later, and Ireland steps onto the deck.
She's changed into leggings and one of my T-shirts, the grey one that hangs past her hips and turns a thirty-year-old physical therapist with an athlete's body into a problem I'm not interested in solving because I'd rather have the problem.
The cotton is thin enough that the outline of her bra shows through, and when she curls into the second chair with her feet tucked under her and a glass of bourbon, the hem rides up her thigh, and I stop pretending I'm looking at the water.
Her hair is down. The scent of her shampoo carries from the other chair, citrus and something underneath it that makes me want to put my face in her neck and stay there until the investigation resolves itself.
"Griff looked pleased with himself when he left," she says.
"Griff is always pleased with himself. It's his default setting."
"He told me the chair was a good sign. Then he told me that if I needed dirt on you, he's got years of material and can be bribed with bourbon."
"Griff's loyalty has a price point. It's distressingly low."
She laughs, quiet and real, and the sound carries across the deck the way the tide carries against the shore.
I lean forward in the chair, take the glass from her hand, drink, and hand it back. Her fingers brush mine on the glass, and the contact holds a beat longer than the mechanics require.
"I've got Nox's update," I say.
The laughter fades. She tucks her legs closer and watches me, and the shift from ease to focus is the same shift I've seen in the rehab center when she moves from banter to clinical assessment.
I tell her about the badge correlations, the narrowing pool, the communication signature that connects the rehab center to the handler's infrastructure. And the text from Nox that arrivedalmost immediately after Griff left. Falk badged into the rehab center after regular hours for the third time this week.
She listens without interrupting, her fingers wrapped around the glass, her eyes on the water.
When I finish, the silence holds the weight of what the data means: Falk is the primary suspect, the net is closing, and the woman who has been working beside Ireland for months is almost certainly the person hurting her patients.
"I knew," Ireland says quietly. "Not the forensics. The feeling. She's too precise. Too present at the right times. The competence felt earned until it started feeling performed."
"Trust your instinct on that."
"My instinct wants to walk into the rehab center tomorrow and fire her on the spot. Rivera's process is the right one. The methodical approach is the right one. But the cost of waiting is real." She turns to look at me, and her eyes in the low light are dark blue and direct. "How do you do it? Work next to someone you know is causing harm and keep your face neutral. I watched you today. You stood three feet from Falk and handed her a chart and nothing on your face moved."
"Eighteen years of practice."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer." I lean back in the chair. "My first deployment, I treated a local medic who'd been feeding patrol routes to the insurgents. He came through my aid station with a GSW to the thigh and I stabilized him and packed the wound and called for evac. Found out two days later that the intel he passed got three Marines killed at a checkpoint."
Her body goes still in the chair. Full attention. The clinical listening that makes her exceptional with patients, turned on me.
"I asked my senior chief how he worked on someone like that. How you put your hands on a body and do the work whenthe body belongs to a person who used their access to kill people you're responsible for."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'Aldridge, your hands don't have opinions. Your hands do the work. Save the opinions for after.' And he was right. The hands do the work. The fury, the judgment, the need to act, that lives somewhere else. Somewhere you can access it when the time comes, but not while the work is in front of you."
"Your hands don't have opinions," she repeats, and the curve of her mouth is faint and knowing. "I feel like that philosophy extends beyond medicine."
"Meaning?"
