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"Mom's oatmeal tastes like carpet."

"Take the medicine with the carpet."

Tommy grinned.

He was missing two front teeth and the grin was devastating and Rowan felt the thing she always felt with kids — the warm ache that was equal parts love, grief, and hunger so old she'd stopped examining it.

She tore the prescription off the pad and handed it to his mother, Diane, who was watching from the corner chair with the tired tolerant expression of a mother who had been up since five and was holding it together through willpower and coffee.

"Twice a day, ten days, with food," Rowan said to Diane. "If the fever comes back or he starts pulling at his ears again, call me. My cell, not the office line."

"Dr. Hale, you don't have to —"

"My cell," Rowan repeated. Gently. Non negotiable. "I sleep with it. You won't wake me."

She lied about sleeping. She barely slept anymore. But the phone stayed charged and within arm’s reach, because that was the deal she’d made with herself five years ago when she’d stayed in this town, opened this clinic, and decided that saving children was the one thing she could still do without breaking.

Diane gathered Tommy up. The boy waved from the doorway. Rowan waved back, and then the exam room was empty and quiet and she stood in it for a long moment, letting the silence settle over her like a second skin.

Two-fifteen on a Wednesday. Three patients left, then charts, then the drive home to the tidy little house on Pine Street where dinner would probably be leftovers or toast or whatever she could throw together while standing at the counter with a glass of wine she told herself was purely medicinal.

The house would be clean—because that was who she was and because that was the way she kept everything. Discipline was the only reliable defense against the things she couldn’t control.

The house would also be empty.

She pulled off her gloves and washed her hands—twenty seconds, warm water, methodical—the ingrained ritual of someone who had scrubbed in for open-heart surgeries more times than she could count and would do the same for a simple ear infection. Her hands were good hands. Strong. Calloused at the fingertips from years of sutures and scalpels. Nails short, clean, unpolished. She looked at them under the running water and refused to remember her father’s hands—also calloused, from the factory floor—and how they’d felt in hers the day of the accident.

She didn’t think about it. She just washed her hands.

A soft, two-knuckle knock at the exam room door. Betty Nguyen, no question. After five years, Rowan could read her nurse’s knocks like a private language—this one felt conspiratorial.

Rowan dried her hands. “Come in, Betty.”

The door eased open. Betty stood there, compact and immaculate in her scrubs, reading glasses perched in her salt-and-pepper hair. Fifty-six, unflappable, and wearing an expression that suggested Rowan might wanna sit down.

“Cal Meridian’s here,” Betty said.

Rowan’s hands stilled on the towel for a beat. Maybe two.

She kept drying. “Okay.”

“Walk-in. No appointment.”

“Okay.”

Betty hesitated for half a second. “He brought a girl with him.”

Something in her tone made Rowan look up. Betty’s eyebrows had that familiar lift—the one she got when she was biting back a whole paragraph of opinion. Whatever she’d seen in the waiting room had clearly left an impression.

“A girl,” Rowan echoed.

"Young. Eighteen, maybe. Very pretty. Looks like she hasn't eaten properly in a bit." Betty paused. "She's wearing new clothes and a brand-new duster that I guarantee came from Hallie's, and Cal Meridian is standing behind her like if she moves more than three feet away from him he’ll call out the National Guard"

Rowan folded the towel. Set it on the counter. Aligned it with the edge — a gesture so habitual she didn't notice she did it. Alignment. Order. The small, compulsive acts where she had learned that controlled environments meant controlled outcomes, and that controlled outcomes meant nobody died.

"Is he hurt?" she asked.

"He doesn't look hurt."