Chapter 1 - The Scar Under His Shirt
The patient unbuttoned his shirt to the second button and pulled the fabric aside.
I stopped breathing.
Across the upper left side of his chest ran an old scar, narrow at the top and widening into a crooked pale line near his collarbone. I knew the mark better than I knew the map of my own childhood.
"I know that mark," I said.
He looked at my badge. EVA SLOAN, PA-C.
"You don't," he replied.
His voice was deeper than the one I remembered, and there was gray at his temples. He was thirty-four now, according to the chart. Seventeen years earlier he'd been a frightened boy trying to pretend he wasn't scared of anything.
"You lifted me over a fence when we ran," I said. "The wire cut through your shirt. I tried to tie it with my sweater, but you said we couldn't stop."
His hand froze against the open collar.
"Eva?"
I nodded. "You left me at the bus station."
The examination room became impossibly small. Behind me, a vent clicked on, pushing cool air across a paper-covered bed. In the hall someone laughed at a harmless joke. My pulse was loud enough to drown out the rest.
"I was taken," Damian Rios said. "I couldn't come back."
I stepped away from the exam table. I was a physician assistant at a community clinic in Cincinnati, not the fifteen-year-old girl who'd waited under a flickering bus-station sign until sunrise. I needed to remain the clinician in the room, even if my hands had forgotten how to hold a chart.
"You need someone else to complete this visit," I said. "I know you personally, and I can't do a proper examination right now."
He looked down at the medical paperwork, then back at me. His appointment was for persistent shoulder pain after a workplace strain. The scar was unrelated, he'd said while checking in.
"I didn't come to make this difficult," he said.
"Did you know I worked here?"
He hesitated.
"I saw your name on the clinic website. I had a real reason to be seen, and I hoped—"
A knock interrupted him.
"Eva?" my colleague Mara called through the door. "Dr. Patel needs to know whether you can take the next patient."
I closed my eyes. For years I'd imagined finding Damian in a crowd, shouting at him, demanding an explanation so complete it would make the abandoned girl inside me finally stop waiting. I had never imagined that when it happened, somebody would be asking about appointment schedules.
"I need a handoff," I said through the door. "Please ask Dr. Patel to take this patient."
Mara said she would handle it.
Damian reached toward me, then stopped before his fingers touched my sleeve.
"I looked for you," he said.
"I looked for you too."
"They told me you didn't want to hear from me."
I felt a wave of nausea. Someone had told me exactly the same thing about him.
"Who told you that?"
His jaw tightened. "A caseworker named Miriam Hale. She had a letter with your name on it."
May you like
I stared at him.
I had never written Damian a letter saying goodbye.
