I should ask questions. I should demand answers. I should want to know who shot him and why and whether the shooter is going to walk through that door next. But I don't want to know. I want to stay in this small, sterile space where the only things that matter are my hands and his blood and the bullet that needs to come out.
So I talk.
"I grew up on a farm," I say, and the words come out like water from a tap—easy, endless, unstoppable. "In Pennsylvania. The middle of nowhere. Our nearest neighbor was a mile down the road, and our nearest grocery store was forty-five minutes away. We had cows. Chickens. A couple of pigs, one year, but my mother said they smelled too much and we never did it again."
The tweezers find the edge of the bullet. I press gently, feeling for the shape of it, the way it's wedged against the muscle.
"I was the youngest of four girls. My sisters are all married now. One of them lives in Ohio. One of them lives in Florida. Oneof them lives in the same town we grew up in, which I think is the saddest thing I've ever heard, but she seems happy, so what do I know."
The bullet shifts. He makes a sound—not a gasp, not a cry, just a small exhale, like he's letting go of something he's been holding.
"My mother taught me how to birth a calf when I was ten. Breech birth. My arms were small enough to fit inside the cow, and my mother talked me through it."
I hook the tweezers around the bullet and pull.
It comes out with a soft, wet sound—a small piece of metal, still warm, still glistening with something that might be blood or might be something else. I drop it onto the counter and reach for a clean towel, pressing it against the wound with firm, steady pressure.
He exhales. A long, slow breath, like he's been holding it for years.
"Monika," he says.
Not a question. A statement. Like he's tasting the word, like he's been saving it for this moment.
I look at his face. Grey eyes, steady as stone. Silver at the temples, threaded through dark hair like frost on winter fields. He's handsome in the way that old things are handsome—weathered, worn, carved by something that left marks. I don't know how old he is. Forty, maybe. Forty-five. Old enough to be my father, though I don't think about that. I don't think about anything.
He's still looking at my face.
"You have very steady hands, Monika."
The towel is red now. I press another one against it, and another, watching the blood slow from a weep to a seep to something that might, eventually, stop.
"You should still go to a hospital," I say. "The bullet's out, but I can't stitch this. I don't have the right supplies. And I don't know if there's internal damage."
"There isn't."
"You don't know that."
"I know my body." He says it like a fact. Like the weather. Like something that isn't up for discussion. "You've done enough. More than enough."
He reaches into his jacket—the one that's ruined now, stained with blood that will never come out—and pulls out a stack of bills. Hundreds. I can see the portrait of Benjamin Franklin peeking out from the top, and there are more underneath, a whole folded rectangle of them, thick as a deck of cards.
He presses them into my hand.
"I can't take this."
"You can. And you will."
His fingers close over mine, folding my palm around the money. His hand is warm. Warmer than it should be, after blood loss. His skin is rough in places—calluses, scars, the kind of texture that comes from work or violence or both.
"I don't even know your name," I say.
He smiles. Just a twitch of the lips, a small crack in that grey-stone face. It transforms him. Makes him almost human.
"No," he says. "You don't."
He stands. I watch him button his shirt over the wound—the blood will show through, impossible to hide, but he doesn't seem to care—and walk toward the door. He doesn't limp. He doesn't stagger. He moves like a man who has decided that pain is not going to slow him down, and his body has learned to obey.
At the door, he pauses.
