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She’d have found it without the form. The muscle on the left of Carly’s spine sat higher and harder than the right, bunched round the old injury like sandbags round a breach. Years of it. The body had decided once that it would never be caught out again, and nobody had ever given it the order to stand down.

Lauren eased into it slowly.

“Can I tell you something about your hamstring?” she asked.

“Is it bad?”

“No. It’s loyal.” She pressed along the bunched ridge, gently. “Your back’s been holding itself rigid on this side for years. Protecting the old fracture. Your hamstring’s been helping it. That’s why it’s tight on the left and not the right. It isn’t football. Football just asked it to do one more job than it had room for.”

Carly didn’t answer straight away. Under Lauren’s hands, the muscle twitched, as if it had heard.

“Six years,” Carly said eventually.

“Bodies remember.” Lauren kept her hands moving. “You don’t have to tell me what happened. But it’d help me to know how long it took to get back from it.”

The silence went on long enough that Lauren thought that was the end of it. Then Carly breathed out into the face cradle.

“Eight months,” she said. “We were on exercise in Estonia. February. The track had frozen over and nobody had gritted it, and the ground went out from under the back wheels on a bend. The truck went over on its side into a ditch. I was strapped in. That’s why it was my back and not my head.”

Lauren’s hands didn’t stop. That felt important. “Eight months is a long time.”

“It was the first three months that were the problem. They said I might be medically downgraded. Desk jobs. No deployments.” Carly said it like a convoy schedule. “So I did everything. Every rehab session, every exercise, every stupid resistance band. I did my physio homework at five in the morning before anyone else was awake, because I didn’t want anyone to see how hard it was. I passed my fitness test with a week to spare. Got signed off fully fit. Went straight back to driving.”

“That’s…” Lauren hunted for a word that wasn’t impressive, which Carly would hate. “That’s a lot of fight.”

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I wanted to keep that job.” Something eased in her voice, almost pride. “And I kept it. I was better at it when I came back than before I went over. The back was done. It was behind me.”

Lauren waited. She could feel a but gathering in the muscle under her hands.

“Then my dad went to the GP about his hand,” Carly said. “He kept dropping his keys. Couldn’t do his buttons up. We all thought it was arthritis.”

Lauren’s thumbs slowed.

“A frozen track in Estonia couldn’t get me out. Eight months of rehab couldn’t get me out. And then a neurologist I’d never met said three words to my dad in a hospital side room, and that was it. Over.” Carly’s voice didn’t rise. It went flat. “I’d spent all that time making sure nothing could take it from me. It never occurred to me it would be him.”

Lauren thought of her kitchen, the orange squash and the shortcake, and Carly snapping I didn’t have to do anything. I wanted to help. She’d heard a closed door that night. She heard something else now.

“Nobody made me,” Carly added, as if she’d heard the thought. “I could have stayed. Samantha had the girls, and Beth was… Beth. Somebody had to be there.” Her shoulders lifted a fraction, then settled. “It was the right decision. I’d make it again.”

“You can make the right decision and still miss what it cost.”

Under her hands, Carly didn’t tense. She just went quiet.

“I still wake up at six,” Carly said. “Every day. Even weekends. Body still thinks someone’s going to need me on parade.” Her mouth twisted. “I’m a civilian who gets up for a parade that doesn’t exist.”

Lauren didn’t try to fix it. She didn’t say the gym was a kind of service too, or any of the other things that rose up in her mouth. She just kept working, steady and slow, along the ridge of muscle that had spent six years refusing to forget.

Gradually, the shoulders dropped half an inch. The breathing lengthened. She’d felt clients stand down a thousand times. It had never caught in her throat before.

“Your turn,” Carly said into the face cradle, her voice muffled.

“My turn for what?”

“I just told you something I don’t tell people. So. How did you end up here? In this room.”

Lauren kept her hands moving. It was easier to answer things that way.

“Slowly,” she said. “I qualified in my twenties, after the worst of… everything. Did the course in the evenings around a nine-to-five I won’t bore you with. Spent years doing house calls out of a bag. Kitchen tables, people’s front rooms, a lot of towels on Paige’s living room floor. Then this room came up, and the rent was just about possible, so I jumped.”