Chapter 4: Best Hands in the City

On my fifth day in Harborcrest, my back locked up in the middle of a claims meeting.

I was holding a file about a flooded basement when the muscle below my ribs clenched and stayed clenched.

I put the file down very carefully.

Lindy leaned over from the next chair and read my face.

"How bad?" she whispered.

"I can't stand up."

"Okay. Don't stand up. I'm going to tell our manager you're having a medical event."

"Please don't use those words."

She used those words.

Forty minutes later I was walking, in a small stiff shuffle, into a clinic on the ground floor of the building across the street.

The sign over the door said HARBOR PHYSICAL THERAPY.

Lindy had walked me there with her arm through mine.

"Best hands in the city," she said. "Also he's single. Also don't tell him I said the second thing."

"I'm not looking for a second thing."

"That's what I said you'd say."

The man at the front desk stood up when we came in.

He was tall, with dark blond hair that needed a cut and a clinic polo with a coffee stain on the sleeve.

"Marlow?" he said. "I'm Cal. You're my twelve-thirty, and my twelve-thirty can't stand up. Perfect. Come on back."

He didn't take my arm.

He walked slowly in front of me, matching my shuffle, and held the door.

In the treatment room he put a paper chart on a clipboard and asked me where it hurt.

"Lower back," I said. "Right side, mostly."

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