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“The driver?”

“Not found.”

A deputy asks for my description. I give him what I saw and nothing I didn’t. Pale cap, safety glasses, tan shirt, right-handed. When he asks if it was Warren Vale, I tell him I didn’t see enough of the face.

Sofia’s eyes rest on me for a second. It’s warmer than approval should feel.

The clinician gives me a tetanus shot and a sheet of restrictions that forbids most of what I’ve done since I was nineteen. No ranch work. No lifting, running, riding. No driving tonight. Nothing that pulls the stitches.

“Repeat the part most likely to offend you,” she says.

“No ranch work and no driving.”

“The whole part.”

I repeat the whole part.

“He can learn,” Sofia says from the curtain.

“He can also reopen twelve centimeters of work if he decides pain is private information,” the clinician says.

“Eleven point six,” I tell her.

Both women look at me.

“It’s written on the tray.”

The clinician hands me crutches. “I’m adding unnecessary precision to the risk factors.”

Garrett calls Sofia’s phone while I figure out how much a fresh wound hates getting off a table. He offers the ranch guest house, with security on the roads.

“No,” Sofia says. “My house. The county already approved the route and a patrol. If you add a ranch truck, it stays at the county road turn. Nobody comes onto my property or touches a lock or a camera without my permission.”

“Agreed.”

“Cole isn’t security tonight. He’s hurt and he’s under my roof because I invited him.”

Garrett’s quiet a second. “Cole?”

I lean on the crutches and let the answer cost what it should. “Her house. Her terms.”

* * *

She drives. Her house sits behind a low wire fence off a paved county road. One story, pale stucco, a covered porch, ordinary dead bolts, and no gate grand enough to turn into a philosophy. She parks nose-out under the porch light and keeps the keys in her hand while I get out.

I count the front door, the back door, three windows, the county car beyond the fence, and the clear line from the kitchen to the hall before I make it over the threshold.

“You can stop counting my exits,” she says.

“I can stop saying them out loud.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

I look at her. “Two doors. Both yours.”

“Better.”

I don’t have a gun. My truck is at her clinic. I have a wallet, two keys, a discharge envelope, and nothing in this house that gives me authority over anything but my own bad decisions.