-Roxy Delgado:
The silence after Dr. Sloane Pierce left hung heavy in the room, the door clicking shut like a final note in a song no one knew how to end. For a long moment no one moved. No one breathed.
The monitor beside my bed kept its steady, indifferent rhythm—beep, breath, beep—an unromantic metronome for whatever stupid play I was staging.
I watched the door as if it might open again. When it didn’t I let the corner of my mouth curl up. A small smirk, barely there, but enough to feel like armor.
Of course she’d walked out like that. Cold. Distant. Pretending she wasn’t rattled when it was obvious she had been—her jaw tight, thumb worrying her pen, that half-step she kept taking away from the doorway.
She could lie to herself all she wanted. She couldn’t lie to me. Not about small things like the way someone’s shoulders fold when something unexpected brushes against them.
Not about the tug I’d seen in her eyes when she’d looked at my leg. Not about the way her voice had gone softer, like she’d almost let something through and then shut the hatch again.
I leaned back into my pillows, ignoring the dull, constant ache in my ribs and the phantom prickle up my spine where nerves remembered how to protest.
The pain was there—always there—like a tenant who paid rent in small, sharp reminders. Fine. Let it be there. I could make plans with pain as long as I kept the rest of the house under control.
"Don’t start," Mateo muttered, rubbing at the bridge of his nose as if he could massage the thought away.
"What?" I asked with angelic innocence, widening my eyes. I let them shine a little, like a knife catching on light.
"Don’t play games, Roxy," Kyle snapped, voice taut in the chair in the corner. His hands were fists, knuckles white against denim. "She is your doctor. Not one of your little bar conquests. You don’t flirt with your surgeon, for Christ’s sake."
"Why not?" I tilted my head, lashes lowering. It was performative—the tilt, the playful edge—but under it the desire was steady, not a flutter but a reckoning. "Did you see her? She’s gorgeous."
Kyle and my other brothers groaned as he tipped his head back like he was trying to dislodge the entire idea from his thoughts. Mateo muttered something under his breath about me being insane.
I let them stew while I enjoyed the way the air tasted—clean and sharply antiseptic, with a faint hint of coffee from the nurses’ station.
The sunlight had slipped through the blinds and painted the room in thin, impatient bars, and for a moment I let the light trace across the scar along my thigh, a pale river I’d learned to own.
Then I let the smirk sharpen. "I want her."
Silence, then heavier than before, like someone had stacked more plates on the table and dared them to break.
They were trained to expect grandiosity from me—impulses that took the form of expensive cars, last-minute trips, theatrical tantrums—but this felt different to them. It felt like leverage.
"You’re out of your mind," Mateo said finally, flat and exhausted.
"Maybe," I shrugged, because maybe I was. Maybe I’d always been two parts danger to one part sense. "Doesn’t change the fact."
"Roxy—" Kyle started, but I cut him off, dropping my voice into a tone I reserved for negotiations and orders: soft, cold, and unquestionable.
"I want her as my physical therapist."
Their mouths all dropped like a synchronized gag. For a moment the room sounded like a bad sitcom—oblivious, ridiculous, unable to take the joke.
"You can’t be serious," Mateo said.
"Oh, I’m dead serious." I turned my head to look at them both and the grin I’d worn as a shield dissolved into something harder. "I don’t give a fuck if she’s a surgeon. I don’t care what her degree says. I need her."
Mateo leaned forward, elbows digging into his knees. "She just told you no. Did you miss that part? She flat-out said it’s not happening because it’s possible."
I waved it away like smoke. "That’s because she doesn’t know me yet. She will."
Kyle paced, the sound of his steps a staccato that matched the monitor. "Christ, Rox, you can’t make her your therapist. You can’t just decide that."
"Yes, I can. I just did."
"No, you can’t," Mateo barked, the edge of his patience breaking. "You cannot turn a brain surgeon into a fucking physiotherapist just because you’ve got a crush."
I stiffened. "It’s not a crush."
"Then what is it?" Mateo demanded.
I didn’t answer because the truth tasted like something private and sharp. If it was a crush, then the crush was caught in a net of requirements and need: someone who wouldn’t let me quit, someone who would be blunt and exact and stubborn enough to bodily drag me back to whatever semblance of myself could be repaired. It was a selfish calculus, but necessary. "That’s none of your business," I said finally, shorter than intended.
"The hell it isn’t—"
"Do it," I cut in, voice like glass. "Just do it for me. Stop asking questions. Find a way. Make her mine. Because I am not accepting anyone else. You got that?"
My mother shook, small and precise in the chair beside my father, her hands pleating and twisting like she was knitting a worry into a fabric that had no pattern. "Baby," she began, sharp and flat, the way she used to say my name when I’d done something reckless as a teenager. She’d always had a way of making panic sound like a reprimand.
My father only sighed, that tired, Spanish-simmered exhale that carried the weight of a man who’d already given the world two of his sons and half his breath. Under his breath he muttered the kind of prayer I’d learned to ignore because it never stopped the things I wanted.
"You’re spoiled," Mateo muttered. He stood now, the chair protesting, and for a moment I allowed the memory of being the only girl with seven brothers to swell—the way every hallway bend had been a battlefield I’d won with noise and force.
"Of course I’m spoiled," I said, voice light and unapologetic. "That’s what happens when you’re the only girl. Everyone gives you what you want. You made me this way."
"But this is insane," Kyle said.
"No," I said, the sudden hardness in my voice dropping into place like armor. "What would be insane is letting some stranger decide whether I walk again. She’s the one who saved my life. Do you want someone who won’t fight for me? Someone who’ll fold when I push? No. I’ll fire them in a day. But Sloane—" I savored her name. It felt clean and dangerous in my mouth. "Sloane won’t let me quit."
"You can’t just buy people, Roxy." Mateo snapped.
I laughed. It was low and short and dangerous. "Watch me."
"Will money even matter?" Kyle asked, the practical question cutting through the theatrics. "Maybe she’s not interested for personal reasons. Maybe she doesn’t want the case."
"That’ll be her problem," I said. "Find out what she makes. Every cent. Her salary, her bonuses, everything. I’ll pay her double. Triple. Whatever. Money has a way of re-prioritizing things."
Mateo’s jaw worked. "You sound... unhinged."
"I am unhinged," I admitted, smiling because my chaos had always been splendid and useful. "And that’s why I get what I want."
My mother’s gasp turned into a small, frantic hand over her mouth. My father’s gaze softened for half a beat, the man behind him who’d taught me how to bargain with the world. "Dios nos ayude," he muttered under his breath, the same words he’d said when I’d jumped off the back porch at fourteen and landed on my feet because I was stubborn and young.
"And if she doesn’t accept?" Kyle asked.
"Then I won’t walk again." I said it calm, a flat ultimatum laid like a card on the table. "Simple as that. No Sloane, no therapy. You want me crippled? Fine. But if you want me on my bike again, if you want me to be strong, then it’s her or nothing."
The beeping of the monitor steadied like a held breath. For a long time no one spoke. Mateo pinched the bridge of his nose; Kyle’s hands were tight in his pockets; my mother’s fingers were white-rimmed in her lap. The room smelled like lemon-scented disinfectant and coffee gone cold and the faint, human smell of worry.
"You’re blackmailing your own family now?" Mateo finally said, disbelief softening into something like resignation.
I shrugged. "It’s not blackmail if it’s the truth."
There was a beat—then another—and eventually my father’s voice broke, not in command but in the small, weary sound of a man numbering his options. "We’ll see what we can do."
It was the most useless promise and the most honest one. I knew what it meant: they’d try. They would call favors and dig up contacts and find out where Dr. Pierce had parked her conscience.
They would move like I did—indirectly, efficiently, with the right amount of pressure. They would try to make the world bend to my stubbornness because in the end, family bent for me; it always had.
I let the silence stretch then, parted it with a slow, deliberate smile. "You guys are the best family in the world," I said. The words were a jab and a benediction rolled into one.
They looked at me with exasperation, love, and the terrible, honest knowledge that they would do anything to see the fire back in my eyes when I climbed onto a bike again. Maybe they were afraid of what my plan would cost.
Maybe I was too. But the cost was a distance I’d been preparing to pay my whole life.
The sun slipped a little further across the floor and the monitor kept its indifferent beat—beep, breath, beep—while I pictured Dr. Sloane Pierce in my head: efficient, composed, the kind of woman who kept her hands steady and her decisions steadier. The image pinched at something raw and bright in me—possibility dressed as a person.
I closed my eyes for a second and let the memory of the way she’d hesitated, just for a half-beat, play across my mind like a looped film. That was enough. The rest I would make happen.
When I opened them, my grin had returned—wider, more dangerous, the grin that had always gotten me out of tight spots and into trouble. "Okay," I said, softer now. "Start making calls."
My brothers moved—reluctant, resigned, already cataloguing strategies—because they always did when I gave them an order. My mother’s lips pressed together like she was preparing for a storm. My father’s eyes were tired but steady.
And somewhere, beyond the door and the hallway and the antiseptic light, Dr. Sloane Pierce was probably driving home, unaware that a patient with too much pride and too much money had decided she was destiny.
I grinned into the sterile light and let the silence fill with plans.