The memory settles into my body the way her shampoo lingers in my sheets and her voice lingers in my head.
"We move when the case is complete, not before," Rivera says.
The briefing adjourns. Griff catches my arm in the corridor outside.
"You good?"
"I put a man on the ground last night and sat next to the woman I'm sleeping with while she discovered that her aide has been psychologically torturing her patients. Define good."
"Fair." His eyes drop to my right hand and come back up without comment, because Griff has seen my hands after operations before and the commentary was never necessary. "Nox says the case is building. Rivera's moving at Rivera's pace."
"Rivera's pace is the right pace."
"I know. I'm telling you because Nox told me to tell you, and when Nox tells me to tell someone something, it's because she already considered not telling them and decided the information serves the objective."
The walk to the rehab center is short enough to be dangerous.
The operational edge from last night is still in my body, sitting in my muscles like a charge that hasn't fully dissipated, and I am not the patient, unhurried version of myself who has been running morning sessions for weeks. The man walking through these doors is the one who put an operative face-down on the asphalt at the base gate and held him there until Rivera's team arrived.
The difference is invisible. It's supposed to be. The effort required to keep it invisible is a weight I carry in my jaw, my shoulders, the deliberate looseness of my hands.
Falk is at station two when I arrive.
The distance between us is close enough that I could put her on the floor before she finished turning around, and the awareness of that geometry sits in my bruised knuckles the way a round sits in a chamber: present and loaded, held by a safety that is entirely deliberate.
She looks up, gives me the same professional nod she gives every morning, and asks about the session schedule.
"Ireland shifted Tanaka to the afternoon block." My voice comes out level and unhurried. The discipline required to produce that voice leaves a taste in my mouth like held breath. "Dawes is on time, Morrison at ten-thirty."
"Copy." She marks her tablet and returns to the machine.
My hands are open at my sides. Deliberately open, because closed would be fists, and fists would tell a story I'm not ready to tell in this room.
The bruised knuckles are visible, and I don't hide them because hiding them would draw more attention than the bruises themselves.
Falk's eyes tracked them when I walked in. She filed the information with the same quiet efficiency she brings to diluting medications and moving recovery goalposts to engineer the psychological collapse of the men and women in my care.
The notebook presses against my thigh through my cargo pocket, and my hand finds it and stays there.
The leather is warm from my body heat, the familiar corner digging into the pad of my thumb. The anchor of it is the only thing in this building keeping my hands at my sides instead of around the throat of the woman at station two.
My jaw aches from the pressure of keeping it loose. The muscles across my shoulders carry tension I am choosing not to discharge.
Eighteen years of operating beside people whose intentions I couldn't verify built the reflex, but the reflex is working harder than usual this morning.
The person I'm standing next to hasn't just compromised an operation or leaked intelligence. She has been breaking my patients from the inside, methodically, patiently, with the knowledge required to locate the exact psychological fracture point. The operational camouflage of asking about session schedules while she does it is something I would admire if it weren't directed at the people I've spent my career keeping alive.
Falk moves to the supply cabinet. My hand stays on the notebook. The safety holds.
Ireland comes through the treatment floor with files under her arm and the focused energy of a woman running on fury and too little sleep.
She drops a corrected chart on my workstation as she passes, and her fingers brush the back of my hand, a contact so brief that anyone watching would read it as incidental.
The heat that rolls through me at the touch lands low and immediate. My body doesn't distinguish between professional Ireland and the Ireland who was in my bed last night, and the collision of both versions in one person walking across a treatment floor in scrubs with her hair pulled back and her jaw set is no longer a problem I'm trying to solve. It's a condition I'm surviving.
"You're hovering, Aldridge."
"I'm reviewing charts."
