"Your dad is right about that."
I feel rather than see Austin's reaction to this. A slight shift. I don't look up.
"What made you want to be a doctor?" EJ asks.
"I watched someone do it when I was about your age and I thought, I want to be that person. Someone who helps."
"That's what the club does," he says simply. "Helps people."
I tie off the fourth stitch and reach for the fifth. "Yes," I say. "It is."
He's extraordinary. I notice this the way I notice things I didn't expect, involuntarily and with a kind of internal adjustment.
I glance up once and I see Austin looking at me. Not at EJ. At me. His face is doing something complicated and careful, something that's been building quietly since he walked in the door. I look away before I can identify what it is because identifying it isn’t something I can afford to do in this room right now.
"All done," I say, tying off the last stitch. "You were excellent."
"Yeah?"
"Completely. Most adults are worse."
He looks at Austin with the expression of a child who has just been given information he intends to deploy. "Dad is bad at needles," he tells me.
"I'm going to need that information kept confidential," Austin says.
"It's in his notes now," I say, writing nothing. "Can't help you."
EJ almost smiles. His color is better and his breathing is steady. He's going to be completely fine and the relief of that lands in my chest as it always does when a patient comes back from the edge of something worse.
Austin's Prezcomes through the door as I'm applying the dressing, along with Brick and two others I don't recognize.
"Is he okay, Sprog?"
"He's good," Austin says. "Thanks to the doctor," he says it with a tone in his voice I don't examine. "Sav, this is Razor. Our Prez."
Razor looks at me steadily. He's the kind of man who takes in a room all at once. "Thank you for what you did for our boy, Doctor."
"It's what I'm here for."
Brick steps forward. He's aged but he's still unmistakably Brick. There’s that same density, that same quality of occupying space more completely than other people. "Savannah. It's good to have you home."
"Brick." I hold his eyes for a second. "I'll need EJ to rest for forty-eight hours. He can go back to normal after that. The stitches come out in ten days."
"We'll bring him back here," Austin says.
"Dr. Foster can do it. Or the hospital."
"We'll bring him here."
I turn back to EJ's notes and don't respond to that.
"I'd love to take you to dinner," Austin says to the side of my face. "To say thank you."
I turn around and I look at him properly for the first time since he walked in, which I've been avoiding deliberately. He's built out in the last ten years, broader across the shoulders, and there are tattoos on his forearms that weren't there before. Dark ink running down from the sleeves he's rolled back. He's got his cut on, and his eyes are the same exact shade of blue I’ve been successfully not thinking about. But now I'm thinking about it.
"You don't need to thank me for doing my job," I say. "Take EJ's mother out for dinner."
Something moves across his face. "That's not a situation."