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"What did you break this time?"

"Nothing." He stepped aside, and the girl came through the door behind him.

Rowan's diagnostic brain engaged before automatically. Eighteen, maybe. Five-three, five-four. One sixty, one sixty-five — should be more for her frame. Hyperpigmentation under the eyes — chronic fatigue, not just a bad night. Dry lips, mild cheilitis. Nail beds? — no, she's wearing polish, can't assess. Hair thick but dull at the ends, thinning slightly at the temples. Malnutrition. Not acute — chronic, intermittent. This girl has been underfed for years, not weeks.

New clothes. Canvas tote bag. No purse, no phone visible.

Posture — shoulders forward, chin slightly down, classic guarding position. She's standing so nothing's behind her. She chose that position instinctively. She doesn't even know she did it.

All of that in three seconds. Maybe four.

Then the social brain caught up, and Rowan saw the rest: the sharp eyes taking in the exam room. The full mouth set in an expression that was trying very hard to be unimpressed. The beauty of her — striking, the kind of face that would stop people in their tracks, all blue eyes and high cheekbones and a body that curved in ways she seemed to be simultaneously hiding and daring people to notice.

The piercings. Multiple ear piercings — industrial, tragus, several hoops. A small nose stud. Rowan caught the edge of ink at her collarbone above the flannel's neckline — the beginning of something larger, disappearing beneath fabric.

Reclamation, Rowan thought. And something in her pulled tight, because she recognized the impulse.

The tattoo on Rowan’s own left shoulder blade — the anatomical heart, rendered in precise surgical detail, every valve and vessel perfect — had been inked three weeks after she'd walked out of her last operating room. She'd sat for four hours and hadn't flinched once, because the needle was a pain she'd chosen, and chosen pain was a different type than the kind that found you. She'd bet money that this girl understood that distinction.

"Cal?" The girl looked up at him with an expression of slow-dawning realization and the incensed betrayal of someone who had just figured out a magic trick. "This isn't your appointment.”

“I have a checkup," Cal said. Calmly. With the untroubled demeanor of a man who was lying transparently and felt no particular obligation to do it well.

"You're not even sick!"

"I might be."

"You lifted me last night with one hand! You're not sick."

"Preventative care is important."

"I will end you!”

Rowan watched this exchange from three feet away with the expression she reserved for situations requiring clinical neutrality, which was the same expression she used when children told her elaborate lies about how the marble got into their nose.

Something was happening in her. Something she didn't have time to examine because her diagnostic brain was still running, was always running, and it had landed on a secondary data set: Cal.

Cal, who was watching the girl with an expression Rowan had never seen on him. Not in five years of treating his wounds, weathering his deflections, and privately cataloguing every rare half-smile she'd earned like they were surgical breakthroughs. She knew his expressions — the patient one, the amused one, the one he wore when he was in pain and just didn’t care, the one that meant I've decided this conversation is over with a finality that could close doors across a room.

This one was new.

Soft. Open. The enormous, scarred planes of his face arranged in a way that could only be described as gentle concern, directed at this curvy, furious, beautiful girl who was currently threatening him in a pediatrician's office, and it changed the angles of everything Rowan thought she understood about this man.

Something flickered. Brief, hot, ugly. Jealousy — the word arrived with its own shame attached, and she shut both down with ease since she had been shutting things down efficiently for a long time.

Stop it. You're her doctor now. Be her doctor.

"I'm Dr. Hale," she said, and extended her hand.

The girl looked at Rowan's hand. Then at Rowan. The assessment was quick — Rowan felt herself being measured and weighed, which was novel, since she was usually the one doing the measuring — and whatever the girl found must have passed some threshold, because she took it.

"Sage." The handshake was brief and surprisingly firm. "And I'm not sick either."

"She had a 103 fever last night," Cal said, behind her.

Sage's head whipped around.

"Traitor."