The Ice Between Us

First, Do No Harm

I didn't sleep, which is fine; I'm great at not sleeping. I've made it my whole personality since October.

What I did instead was lie on the mattress in my front room doing the thing I do, which is run the numbers, except last night the numbers had a new line in them and the new line was a photograph loading on a four-thousand-dollar phone. I kept seeing the little spinning circle. By 3 a.m. I'd convinced myself the rental place had no record of me, because Priya rented the dress under her name, Priya did me that solid eight months ago and has never once let me forget it. By 4 a.m. I'd convinced myself they absolutely had a record and Reznik was already in my building's lobby. By 5 I gave up and made coffee and looked at the brass pin sitting in the dish by my keys where I'd put it after I got home, because apparently I'm a person who unzips her coat pocket to look at a luck charm from a man she's lying to. Healthy. Normal.

The thing I keep coming back to is: I could quit.

I could walk in this morning, hand it back to Daniel, say it's not a good fit, and disappear, and Sasha Volkov would have a half-finished hip and a mystery woman he'll eventually stop paying to find. That's the smart move. That's what a person who isn't an i***t does.

But there's the small matter of the forty-one thousand dollars, which I haven't been paid yet, which I only get if I finish the three months, and there's the smaller, stupider matter that lives lower down where I don't look at it, which is that I don't want to.

I want to fix him. It's the one thing I've never once been wrong about, my hands. The league took my name and my license and the doctor who actually forged that form is still working playoff games on television, and the only thing that didn't get taken, the only thing nobody could prove was a lie, is that I am very, very good at making broken bodies work again. That's mine. Volkov's hip is the most interesting problem I've touched in two years and I am not, it turns out, strong enough to walk away from the one thing I still get to be good at.

So I go in.

Daniel's waiting in the corridor with two coffees, same as yesterday, and the sight of him is genuinely a relief, which surprises me. He's just easy. He's got this stillness, like a guy who's never once raised his voice and never once needed to.

"You came back," he says, handing me mine. "I had a small bet with myself."

"Which side?"

"That you'd come back. I'd have been disappointed in both of us if I'd been wrong." He starts walking and I fall in beside him. "How was he?"

"Insufferable. Guarding an adhesion above the left hip that nobody's touched since a hernia repair when he was nineteen, which is half his actual problem and not in a single note any of your three surgeons wrote down."

Daniel stops walking.

It's small. He covers it well, takes a sip of his coffee, but I clock it because clocking the body is what I do. Something moved across his face and got put away.

"You found that in one session," he says.

"It's literally my job."

"No, I know." He's looking at me a little differently now. "It's just that's exactly the kind of thing they missed with you, isn't it. The thing that doesn't photograph."

And the coffee goes sour in my mouth, because I never told him that. I said that yesterday, to Volkov, in a treatment room with the door shut. You only believe in what photographs. I said it to a patient. I did not say it to Daniel Cho.

"What do you mean, with me," I say. Careful, light. The voice I used on Volkov when he asked about the gala.

Daniel realizes it the same second I do. I watch him reach for a save. "The scandal," he says, and he says it gently, like he's setting something down so it won't break. "The Brennan case. I followed it when it happened. I always thought they hung the wrong person."

Now, here's the thing. The Brennan case is what they called it in the trade papers, because Dr. Eli Brennan was the team physician and I was just the rehab specialist whose signature ended up on a therapeutic-use exemption I never filled out. To the public, it was the Eleanor Quinn case, my name, my face, my nine-second search result. The Brennan case is what you call it if you were inside the sport, if you knew who actually held the pen.

"Most people call it the Quinn case," I say.

"Do they?" He smiles, but it doesn't reach all the way up, and he changes the subject so smoothly that if I weren't already not-sleeping and paranoid, I'd have let it go. "He's in room two. Try not to let him talk you into doing too much; his pain tolerance is a liability, not an asset."

He puts his palm on the door reader, and the lock sighs open, and I walk in, still chewing on it, the Brennan case, and I don't have time to chew long because Sasha Volkov is sitting on the edge of the table looking at me like I'm a sentence he started yesterday and means to finish.

"You came back," he says.

"Everyone keeps saying that. I work here. It's where I'd be."

I start at the hip, the adhesion, the deep slow work, and he goes quiet the way men do when the pain takes their words, and for a while it's just breathing and the sound of the heater and my thumbs finding the wrong in him.

And then he says it. His eyes are closed, his guard's gone, the pain's pulled it down, and it comes out of him like it's been sitting just under the surface for eight months waiting for a body to be relaxed enough to let it.

"You look like you need some."

My hands stop.

It's the gala. It's the exact thing he said in the dark when he pressed the pin into my palm, for luck, you look like you need some, and he's saying it now half-asleep with my hands on his hip, and for one horrible second I think he knows, I think this is a trap, I think he's been playing me this whole time.

His eyes are still closed.

"What did you just say?" My voice has gone somewhere thin.

"Hm?" He surfaces, blinks at the ceiling, and frowns. "Did I say something? Sorry. I do that. Float off." He rubs his face with one hand. "What did I say?"

He doesn't know. He doesn't even know he said it. It just lives in him now, that night, the way the adhesion lives in his hip, a thing he's carried so long he can't feel it anymore, and he handed it to me without knowing and went back to floating.

I look down at my own hands on his skin. They're shaking, just slightly, and I press them flat against him so he won't feel it, and I think: I cannot do this for three months. I will not survive three months of this.

That's when his phone goes again on the side table.

Face up. I told him no phones, but Daniel must have set it there. It lights up and I look, the way I always look, the way that's going to kill me one day, and it's not Reznik this time.

It's a text. One line, no contact name, just a number, and I can read it upside down from where I'm standing because I've gotten very good at reading bad news upside down:

She's there. In the building. Right now. Don't let her leave.