Page 97 of Run Wild Omega

I set the clipboard down.

I don’t touch myself.

I sit in the quiet room and I breathe and I wait for the ache to fade, and when it finally does—reluctantly, like it’s being dragged away—I gather my crutches and go to find Mara in the kitchen.

Because if I stay in this room alone for one more minute, I won’t be responsible for what I do.

Miles

The imaging center at Glenwood Springs Hospital is quieter than it was two weeks ago. The chaos of the storm has receded, the ER is back to its normal pace, and the satellite trucks have thinned to a single persistent vehicle from a Denver station that seems to have made a permanent home in the parking lot.

Tess is on the X-ray table, her cast propped on a foam wedge, the technician positioning the machine above her tibia. I stand in the hallway outside the lead-lined door, watching through the window. My hands are in my pockets. My posture is relaxed. Outwardly, I am a man waiting patiently for a routine medical appointment.

Inwardly, I am running calculations on the structural integrity of surgical titanium rods under compressive loading, because it’s the only thing that keeps me from thinking about the fact that I was alone with Tess in my car for forty-five minutes and the inside of it almost certainly still smells like her.

The technician comes out. “Dr. Patel will review the images and be out to discuss them in about twenty minutes.”

“Thank you.”

I go back in. Tess is sitting up on the table, swinging her legs carefully, the cast a white cylinder that runs from mid-thigh down. Her expression is neutral, but I can see the tension in her jaw—the way she always clenches it when she’s anticipating bad news.

“Twenty minutes,” I tell her.

“That’s fast.”

“Fast is good. Fast means they’re not concerned enough to take their time.”

She huffs a laugh. “That’s a very you way to look at it.”

“I’m a very me kind of person.”

She smiles. It’s small and brief and gone almost as soon as it appears, but I file it away with all the other small smiles I’ve been collecting over the past two weeks. A growing dataset. An archive of moments that I review at night, in the shower, with my hand wrapped around myself and my forehead pressed against the tile.

Dr. Patel is young, probably early thirties, with a neat beard and wire-rimmed glasses and the calm demeanor of someone who chose orthopedics because bones are predictable in a way that people aren’t.

“The rod alignment is excellent,” he says, pulling up the X-rays on a lightbox. “See here—the hardware is positioned perfectly along the medullary canal. No shift, no loosening, no signs of stress on the surrounding bone.”

I study the image. The rod is a thin white line running through the center of the tibia, flanked by the screw sites—small, precise circles of metal that hold the bone fragments in place. It looks like engineering. Clean, functional, sound.

“The bone is showing early callus formation,” Dr. Patel continues, pointing to a fuzzy area at the fracture site. “That’s new bone growth. It means the healing is progressing on schedule.”

“And the cast?” Tess asks.

“Still necessary, I’m afraid. Fourteen days is good, but we need a minimum of six weeks before we can consider removing it. The bone needs time to consolidate. I know that’s not what you want to hear.”

“It’s what I expected.”

“We can adjust the cast, though. The initial swelling has resolved significantly, which means the cast is looser than it should be. A tighter fit provides better immobilization, which means better healing. I can have a tech redo it now if you have the time.”

Tess looks at me, and I check my watch. “We have time.”

The tech removes the old cast with a small oscillating saw. The sound makes Tess wince, and her hand finds the edge of the table and grips it hard. Underneath, her leg is thinner than I expected, the muscle already atrophying from two weeks of immobility. The surgical incisions are healing—thin red lines with neat stitches, clean and uninfected. The bruising has faded from purple to a yellowish-green that still looks painful.

The new cast goes on in layers—stockinette, then padding, then fiberglass, each one wrapped with familiar care. When it’s done, the cast is snugger, lighter, and shorter, ending below the knee instead of mid-thigh, which means she can finally bend her leg.

“That’s better,” she says, flexing her knee experimentally.

“Keep the weight off it,” Dr. Patel says. “Crutches only. And I want to see you again in four weeks for the next follow-up.”