14
IRELAND
The rehab center smells the same way it always does, eucalyptus and antiseptic layered with the faint electrical heat of equipment warming up. It is the familiar olfactory signature of the building where I put people back together.
Today the smell carries a different weight.
My hands run the pre-session calibration check on the resistance station's control panel, the same sequence I have run every morning for the better part of a year.
The numbers track clean. The load profiles match the protocols. The hydraulic pressure on station four reads within normal range, and the secondary circuit that runs independently from the main breaker is doing exactly what it's designed to do.
Boone mapped the counter-procedure for that circuit last night at the kitchen table, his voice low while he traced the wiring schematic with the tip of a pen.
Kill the secondary breaker in the utility closet on the east wall.
He counted the steps from station four this morning at 0600, walking the distance twice, and the muscle memory of the route is in his body now the way the calibration sequence is in mine.
Welling is not here today. His second surgery with Gwen is scheduled for this afternoon, and the timing means the youngest, most vulnerable patient on my roster is safely out of the building.
The relief is a small, welcome gift.
Corporal Hewitt is on station two, working lower-body resistance with the gritted determination of a man whose knee reconstruction has been an exercise in patience he didn't come pre-loaded with.
Sergeant Okafor is on the parallel bars, rebuilding proprioception after a spinal decompression that left his balance recalibrated in ways his body is still learning to trust.
Staff Sergeant Reyes is in the therapy pool, running aquatic drills that take the gravity out of a hip replacement and let the joint remember how to move without fighting its own weight.
Three patients on three pieces of equipment, and every one of their lives depends on the plan Boone and I built at a kitchen table between bourbon glasses and schematics.
Falk arrives five minutes before her shift. She hangs her jacket in the staff closet, pulls on her clinic shoes, and crosses to the supply cabinet for the day's inventory check.
Her movements are efficient, unremarkable, calibrated to produce the same professional invisibility she has maintained since the first day she walked into my facility and became part of the furniture.
My greeting is professional. Her response is the same.
Rivera's team is in position. I can't see them, which is the point.
The predawn briefing placed agents in the administrative corridor behind the treatment floor and in the parking area. Rivera herself is in the observation room that overlooks the main floor through reinforced glass designed for monitoring patient sessions.
The glass looks like a mirror from the treatment side.
Falk has worked in front of that mirror for months without knowing that today it holds an NCIS agent with an arrest warrant.
Boone is at the medical station near the entrance, reviewing patient files on his tablet with his sleeves pushed to his elbows and his forearms braced against the counter in the casual posture of a man who is doing nothing unusual.
The position gives him a sightline across the full treatment floor and puts him a handful of strides from station four.
He counted those strides this morning.
The stillness in his posture reads as routine to anyone who doesn't know him. To me, it reads as the coiled readiness of a man who has spent eighteen years waiting for moments exactly like this one.
The controlled tension in his shoulders, the particular way the muscles in his forearms flex when his hands tighten on the tablet's edge, is doing something to the base of my spine that has no business happening while I'm running a scheduled session under federal surveillance.
The marks my nails left on those shoulders last night are under his shirt, and the awareness of them is a low, constant hum underneath the operational focus.
The morning proceeds with a normalcy that presses against my sternum like a held breath.
Hewitt grinds through his knee extensions with the commentary he always provides, a running monologue about the unfairness of ligaments, the cruelty of resistance bands, and the philosophical injustice of a body that used to do what it was told.
