"What's going on, Austin?" Meg asks.
These women. They've helped me raise EJ from the beginning, shown up in the middle of the night with pasta when I had no food in, just a screaming infant and no idea what I was doing. They've never once made me feel like I should have been doing it differently. I don't hide much from them.
"Sav's the new doctor. She's the one who patched EJ up."
They exchange a look that tells me this isn’t entirely news to them.
"You knew she was opening this week," I say.
"Rosie heard about it at the hospital," Meg says carefully. "We assumed you knew too."
"I knew she was back. I didn't know today was the day I was going to see her for the first time."
"Oh, Austin." Rosie puts her hand on my arm. "Walking in there like that, no warning, with EJ in your arms. That's a lot to land on you at once."
"Yeah."
"What was it like seeing her?" Meg asks. Meg is the practical one. She asks the actual question.
I sit down on one of the compound's mismatched chairs and I look at my hands. "Like no time had passed. I walked in there ready to demand she look after my son and then I saw her face and I wanted to put him down and just..." I stop. "She was calm. She was completely calm. She went straight to EJ and started working and she was kind to him, Meg. Not kind like you're being professional. Kind like she actually cared whether he was scared."
"She's a good person," Rosie says quietly.
"She is. She always was." I look up. "She said no when I asked her to dinner."
"You asked her to dinner?" Meg says.
"To say thank you for EJ. She told me to take EJ's mother out instead."
They both absorb this.
"She doesn't know there’s no EJ's mother," Rosie says. "Not anymore. She wouldn't know anything about what happened with Raven after she left."
"She assumed," I say. "I didn't correct her."
"Why not?"
Because I was standing in her surgery with my son bleeding on her table and her hands were shaking slightly, not from fear, from something else. I couldn't make myself say another word that wasn't about EJ.
"I don't know," I say.
Rosie and Meg look at each other over my head the way they do when they've already reached a conclusion and they're deciding who's going to say it.
"She's been back three weeks," Rosie says. "How many times have you driven past that corner?"
I don't answer.
"Austin."
"A few times."
"And you never went in."
"No."
"But today you walked straight through her door with EJ in your arms and she took care of him," Rosie says quietly. "And you watched her do it."
"She's good at what she does." The words come out rougher than I intend. "She's really good. I knew she would be but seeing it?" I stop again. "EJ was asking her questions the whole time she was stitching him up and she answered every single one. She treated him like he had every right to understand what was happening to him. He told me after that she was brilliant."