Black-Belt Cop Choked a Nurse in Sparring — Then Her Navy SEAL Past Made Him Regret It
Chapter 32
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She nodded to herself. "And Wills?""He's entered a formal cooperation agreement. He'll testify before the board and answer questions from the review panel. His attorney negotiated reduced professional sanctions in exchange for full disclosure." A pause. "He's not walking away from this, Savannah. None of them are."After she hung up, she sat for another few minutes. Then she poured the cold coffee into the sink, made fresh, and called Priya."Wednesday," she said when Priya answered."I'm taking the morning off," Priya said immediately. "Don't argue with me.""I wasn't going to.""Are you okay?""Getting closer," Savannah said.She went to work Monday and Tuesday and did her job with the same precision she always brought to it, because the shift didn't care about her personal situation and the patients didn't either, which was something she'd always found grounding rather than depressing. In a trauma bay, the stakes were immediate and concrete, and that concreteness was its own kind of relief: you knew exactly what you were dealing with; you knew what the tools were; you knew what success looked like. She preferred clarity to ambiguity; she always had.On Tuesday evening, Quinn met her in the Foundry Athletics parking lot. She'd asked him to specifically, because she wasn't going to let the photograph be the last association she had with that place. And they trained for an hour: no discussion of the hearing, no strategy, just drilling, movement—the physical vocabulary of two people who'd been learning each other's habits for months.At the end, sitting on the mat with water and the quiet of an emptying gym, he said, "How's your neck?"The neck he'd asked about was the one Dale had cranked during the drilling round back in November. She'd had some residual stiffness for three weeks after that, which she'd managed and hadn't mentioned to anyone."Fine," she said. "Mostly."He nodded. "You should have told me when it happened.""I know." She looked at her water bottle. "I was still trying to manage things quietly at that point.""Yeah." He looked at his hands for a moment. "For what it's worth... I was doing the same thing for longer than I should have."She looked at him."The situation with Garrett," he said. "I knew something was wrong with the way the gym was run before I knew what it was. I could have pushed sooner, gotten to Sandoval sooner." He wasn't making excuses; he was cataloging a fact about himself with the same flatness he brought to everything. "It would have mattered.""It mattered when you did it," she said."Maybe.""It mattered," she repeated, because she meant it, and because he was the kind of person who needed things said plainly rather than generously.He looked at her. "You're better than when you started.""I know," she said. "At the gym.""Also generally."She thought about that: about the woman who'd driven past this building six times before stopping, about the two-inch scar on her forearm and the flinching at raised voices and the nine-year architecture of careful smallness she'd built and lived inside."Yeah," she said. "I know that, too."