"Okay," Joe said. "It's probably not broken. We'll get you to the health center tomorrow to be sure. for tonight. Keep the ice on it 20 minutes at a time."
True to her word, Joe walked Paige to the campus health center the following morning before their first class, waiting through the whole appointment in the small lobby with its outdated magazines and quiet humming fluorescent lights. The doctor confirmed what Joe had already suspected, a sprain, not a break, though the bruising along Paige's forearm would take a week or two to fully fade.
"Do you want to report what happened?" the doctor asked gently. Once the wrap had been fitted around Paige's wrist, "We can connect you with campus security if you'd like to file something."
Paige glanced at Joe, uncertain, and Joe gave the smallest nod, not pushing, simply letting her know the choice was hers to make. "Not yet," Paige said quietly. "I'm not ready yet."
"That's all right," the doctor said. "The option stays open whenever you are."
They walked back across campus together afterward, slower than usual. Paige cradling her wrapped wrist against her chest and Joe matching her pace without comment. "The way you walk beside someone who needs the world to slow down for a while."
"I'm scared to go back to that breezeway," Paige admitted somewhere around the halfway point.
"Then don't go that way alone," Joe said simply. "Take the long way or text me and I'll walk with you."
"You can't walk me everywhere, Joe."
"I can walk you most places," Joe said. And something in her voice, quiet and certain, made Paige laugh despite everything. a small surprised laugh that eased some of the tightness in her chest for the first time in two days.
Her voice was calm the entire time, steady, almost clinical. It was only after Paige had settled, only after the immediate fear had eased from the room, that something in Joe's face changed, something that had nothing to do with calm at all. It was very quiet, whatever it was. But it was there.
"I'm sorry this happened because of me," Joe said finally.
"It's not your fault," Paige said quickly. "It's theirs. All of it."
Joe did not answer right away. She sat with that for a long moment, her jaw tight, her hands very still in her lap. She thought of her father again the way she often did in moments that mattered most. She thought of the mornings on the mat, the quiet lessons that had never once been about winning. "Fighting is not about winning." He had told her once, "It is about not losing something you can't get back."
She understood, sitting there beside her frightened friend, exactly what he had meant all those years ago, in a way she had never fully understood it before. There were things worth protecting, and there was a moment, sometimes when protecting them stopped being a choice and became simply the only thing left to do. She was not there yet. Not entirely. But she was closer than she had been that morning.
Later that same week, Joe found herself walking past the athletic complex just as the evening shift of maintenance staff was locking up for the night. Earl Witcom was there, coiling an extension cord near the loading dock, the fluorescent lights overhead humming faintly in the quiet. He looked up as she passed, and something in his face told her he had been waiting in some quiet way for this exact moment.
"You got a minute?" he asked.
Joe stopped. "Sure."
He set the cord down, wiping his hands on his workpants, and studied her for a moment before speaking. "The way a man studies something he has waited a long time to finally say out loud." "Your last name," he said. "Callaway. Your father was his name Daniel."
Joe went very still. "Yes," she said carefully. "How did you know that?"
Earl let out a long breath, the kind that seemed to come from somewhere much deeper than his lungs. "I served with him," he said. "A long time ago, Fort Benning, mostly combatives training. Your father taught half the soldiers who came through that program how to fall, how to move, how to stay calm when things went sideways, including me."
Joe's eyes filled fast, unexpectedly before she could stop them. She blinked hard, embarrassed, but Earl did not look away. Did not make her feel foolish for it.