“What’s your name?”
“Bridget.”
“Bridget, I’m Sarah. I’m going to check you, and you’re going to keep your eyes on me.”
Her voice was steady enough for me to hold on to.
She checked my pulse.
She touched my shoulder.
She asked where I hurt.
When Harold stepped closer, Sarah lifted one hand without looking at him.
“Back up.”
“I sit on the hospital board,” he said.
Sarah did not blink.
“Then you know better than to interfere with my scene. Move, or I will have police move you.”
For the first time in my life, my father had no answer.
Sarah touched my legs in three places.
Once near my ankle.
Once at my shin.
Once above my knee.
I felt nothing.
Her expression did not change, and somehow that scared me more than if it had.
She looked at my face, not at my parents, not at Tyler, not at the guests.
“Bridget, can you tell me how you fell?”
Tyler came down the stairs then.
Lauren followed him, still holding Mason close.
Tyler gripped Lauren’s arm so hard I saw her wince.
Diane started crying in the loud, public way she saved for witnesses.
“My daughter is confused,” she said. “She hit her head. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
Harold said my name like a warning.
“Bridget.”
Sarah’s fingers stayed steady on my wrist.
For years, I had swallowed words because the cost of saying them felt too high.
But pain has a strange mercy.
It burns away politeness first.
“My brother pushed me,” I said.
The yard went silent in a way even money could not fix.
Harold started shouting.
Diane cried that I was lying.
Tyler tried to look wounded, but his eyes kept cutting toward the house, toward Marcus, toward the security panel.
Sarah glanced at her partner and made one quiet signal.
Police were on the way.