My eyes burn. I want to text back. I want to typeI'm in the ER and I'm scared and I need youbecause that's the truth, the raw ugly truth that lives under every performance I've ever given.
My phone's at fifteen percent. I'll need it for the Uber home. I'll pick up Ash's car later.
I turn it off.
I writeN/Aon the emergency contact line.
"Robin Martinez?"
I follow the nurse to a curtained bay. She whistles when she unwraps the towel. "That's a deep one. Definitely needs stitches."
"I figured."
She starts cleaning the wound and I have to breathe through it — slow, controlled, the way you breathe through a burn or a Gordon day or the specific pain of sitting in an ER alone at twenty-eight years old because you don't know how to let people help you.
"You here alone?"
"Yeah."
"No one to hold your hand?" She's gentle about it. Teasing but kind, the way nurses are when they've seen enough lonely people in enough curtained bays to know what it looks like.
"I'm tough."
She looks at me. Really looks — at my bloody jacket, my red eyes, the way I'm gripping the bed rail with my good hand hard enough to turn my knuckles white.
"Everyone needs someone to hold their hand sometimes," she says.
I don't cry. I don't. My eyes burn and my throat closes and something in my chest cracks, but I do not cry in front of this nurse, because I am tough and I am fine and I handle things myself.
The doctor comes in. Young, tired, matter-of-fact. Seven stitches. The local anesthetic helps but I can still feel the pull of the needle through my skin — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven — and each one is a tiny lightning strike. I grip the bed rail so hard my knuckles go numb.
"All done," she says. "Keep it dry forty-eight hours. Come back in ten days for removal. Watch for redness, swelling, streaking — signs of infection."
"I know the drill."
"Done this before?"
"Kitchens are dangerous." I almost laugh. Almost.
She writes me a prescription for antibiotics and a recommendation for occupational therapy if the range of motion doesn't come back fully. The wordsoccupational therapyhit me in a place I wasn't prepared for. My hand. My left hand. The hand I pipe with, roll fondant with, score bread with. The hand that makes beautiful things.
I take the prescription. I sign the discharge papers with my right hand, slow and clumsy.
In the waiting room, I sit with my phone off and my hand throbbing and my chest hollow. The bloody chef's jacket is stiff now, the blood dried brown. I should change. I should call someone. I should do a lot of things.
Instead I call an Uber.
The driver glances at me in the rearview — the jacket, the bandage, the face — and says nothing. He plays quiet music and I stare out the window at streets that look the same as they did this morning when I drove to work with a job and a future and the belief that I could hold it all together.
That was nine hours ago. Now I have seven stitches and no job and a prescription I can't open one-handed and a phone I turned off because I was too proud and too scared and too stupid to call the people who love me.
I'll go home. I'll shower. I'll turn my phone on when I look human again.
When I can present this as no big deal. When I can perform fine.
That's how it works.
That's how it's always worked.