Rowan heard about the card piece by piece, the way you hear weather coming, and went on with her mornings at the clinic as if nothing unusual were being built around her name. That, more than any speech, was her preparation, and it had begun nine years earlier, on a mat in a different town, when she was twenty four and fast enough to believe that speed was the same thing as skill.
At twenty four Rowan Ellis had wrestled the way weather moves across open water, in gusts, all instinct and appetite. She had come to grappling from school wrestling and she brought its urgency with her: shoot first, think in the scramble, trust her legs to rescue any position her judgment had sold cheap. Coaches loved her for a season at a time. She won quickly or she lost quickly, and either way she was back on her feet before the lesson had time to settle. Her brother Leo, seventeen then and already taller than she was, used to sit in the third row with his homework unopened on his knees and shout advice she never took, and afterwards, in the car, she would be radiant or furious and he learned to judge which one by how she held the steering wheel.
The injury, when it came, was not dramatic, and Rowan would insist on that detail for the rest of her life, because the lack of drama was the hardest part of it to forgive. A training partner fell across her planted leg at an angle nobody intended. There was no malice and no great noise, only a wrong pressure and then a sound she felt rather than heard, deep in the joint, like a thick branch giving somewhere under snow. She sat down on the mat with great care, surprised at her own calm, and said she thought she should not stand up yet, and a teammate laughed, because Rowan not standing up was a kind of joke, until he saw her face.
The surgery was successful, which is a word, she learned, that belongs to surgeons and not to the people who live afterwards inside the result. Successful meant the joint was repaired. It did not mean it would ever again be a thing she could forget she owned. The first months of rehabilitation taught her a curriculum she had never enrolled in: how to ask for help carrying a laundry basket, how to sleep with a leg that ached in weather she could not yet feel coming, how to watch from a chair while other people did the thing that had organized her whole sense of herself, and how to bear the kindness of visitors who kept saying she would be back before she knew it, when before she knew it had already lasted longer than any season she had ever played.
She was, by her own later account, a terrible patient. She argued with timelines. She did secret extra exercises and set herself back a fortnight and then lied about how the setback had happened, once, to a physiotherapist with kind eyes, and the shame of that single lie stayed with her longer than the pain did. It was in the waiting room of that clinic, Greyhaven Rehab, the same low building with the salt-faded sign where she now worked, that she first properly met Ilya Sorin.
He was not her therapist. He was there, at seventy already but seeming older and younger at once, for his own shoulder, a rotator cuff worn thin by fifty years of judo and by a life, as he put it, of reaching for things on high shelves without asking. He sat two chairs away with a paper cup of water balanced on his knee, watching her attempt, for the third time in ten minutes, to rearrange her crutches into a position that would let her pretend she did not need them.
"You are negotiating with the furniture," he observed at last, in an accent that had softened at its edges from forty years in Maine but never left. "The furniture has already won. It is patient. You are not. That is its whole advantage."
"I am a patient," Rowan said. "That is literally what I am doing here."