Page 40 of What We Brave
He looks good. He looksfine.
I hate that he looks fine.
"Sweetheart?" Mrs. Delgado's voice pulls me back. Her eyes are kind, watching me with the sort of knowing patience that comes from seventy-three years of reading people. "You alright there?"
"Perfect." I force my attention back to the wound. To the work. "Just making sure I got all the debris out."
But my hands aren't quite steady anymore. The quiet in my head—that blessed, merciful silence I'd worked so hard to maintain—cracks at the edges.
Don't look up. Don't look up. Don't?—
I look up.
He's still there. Still talking. Still completely unaware that I'm twenty feet away, hiding behind a curtain like a coward with gauze in my hands and my heart doing something stupid in my chest.
"You have gentle hands," Mrs. Delgado says.
I blink, refocusing on her face. She's watching me with the knowing expression that older women seem to develop, the one that sees right through polite pretenses.
"Thank you."
"My husband was a firefighter. Forty-two years." She glances toward the hallway, toward Reid and Joyce. "Those boys are built different. I know that look."
"What look?"
"The one you're trying not to have." She pats my hand with her uninjured arm. "I looked at my husband that same way. It's okay, dear. These things are complicated."
Ma'am, you have no idea.
Things quiet down,but Reid doesn’t leave.
I watch him duck into the EMS room—the small space we keep stocked for paramedics between calls. Coffee, a table and chairs, a couch that's seen better days. He's probably restocking supplies. Finishing his run report. Doing any of the dozen legitimate things that would keep him here.
Or maybe he's waiting.
I should find Joyce, ask what's next, keep moving through the endless stream of patients that a night like this provides.
Instead, I find myself walking toward the EMS room.
The door is open. Reid sits at the small desk, laptop open in front of him, typing with two fingers in the way that always made me tease him about being secretly eighty years old. He looks up when my shadow falls across the doorway.
"Hey."
"Hey."
Silence stretches between us. The fluorescent lights hum overhead. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor beeps its steady rhythm.
"Hell of a case," he says finally.
"Yeah." I lean against the doorframe, arms crossed. "He's young. Good vitals when we sent him up. I think he'll make it."
He's studying my face like he's trying to read something written in a language he's still learning, and it's making me all kinds of self-conscious.
"Good. That's good. How have you been?" he asks. "Really, I mean. Not the polite version."
I consider giving him the polite version anyway.Fine, busy, you know how it is.The words are right there, easy and safe and meaningless.
But Reid asked for real. And after everything, I want to give him real.
