Jake came over. "Coach, I'm sorry. I didn't invite them. Hale sends them sometimes. To check on me, he says."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. They do that at the gym too. Pick on the new guys. Cole put a sixteen-year-old in the hospital last month in sparring. Broke his orbital bone. Hale said the kid should've kept his hands up."
Emma looked at the door where Cole had gone.
"Keep an eye on Noah," she said quietly.
Jake frowned. "Why?"
"Because Cole saw that it embarrassed you. And people like Cole remember where they can hurt you."
The leg got worse that month.
It had always been worse in winter. The cold settled into the old injury like water into a crack. But after the day she sprinted across the field with Noah in her arms last fall, something inside her knee had never quite gone back to where it belonged. Now there were mornings when she couldn't put weight on it until she had sat on the edge of the bed for ten minutes, breathing slowly, waiting.
She finally went to see the orthopedic surgeon at the county hospital. A soft-spoken woman named Dr. Alvarez, who studied the MRI on her screen for a long time without saying anything.
"Whoever patched this the first time did good work," Dr. Alvarez said at last. "Under the circumstances. Field surgery?"
"Something like that."
"There's shrapnel scarring here. And here." She pointed with her pen. "And the reconstruction has failed. The graft is torn. You've been walking on this for how long?"
"A while."
Dr. Alvarez looked at her over the top of her glasses. "You need surgery, Ms. Carter. Soon. If you keep going like this, you're going to lose more than the limp. You could lose the joint."
Emma nodded. She had known. She had known for months.
"How long is recovery?"
"Six weeks before you're walking without crutches. Maybe longer before you're running. And I'll be honest with you. Given the damage, there's a chance it doesn't fully work. There's a chance you'll walk with a limp for the rest of your life no matter what we do."
Emma looked at the gray picture of her own knee on the screen. The white flecks of old metal. The ghost of a night she still visited in her sleep.
"Schedule it," she said.
They set the date for the second week of March.