Mom stepped in before I could answer. “He tripped. They were arguing and he tripped.”
The PA gave her a flat look, then left to get the doctor.
I sat on the paper-covered table, hands trembling in my lap. The room smelled like antiseptic and bleach. My head pulsed with every heartbeat. In the bright fluorescent light, the whole evening replayed too clearly: Logan’s face red and wild, the shattered picture frame on the floor, my own voice snapping back for once, and then his hand fisting in the back of my hoodie and driving me sideways into the hallway wall hard enough to make the family photos jump.
I remembered the crack. I remembered dropping to my knees.
I remembered Mom screaming his name, but not because I was bleeding.
Because he had finally done something no one could explain away.
The doctor came in a minute later, a woman in navy scrubs with silver hair pulled into a severe knot. Her badge said Dr. Hannah Reeves. She examined the wound without wasting words, irrigated it, then injected numbing medicine that made me flinch so hard my fingers clawed the paper sheet.
“You’re going to need staples,” she said.
Mom tried again. “Doctor, it was an accident. My son would never—”
Dr. Reeves looked up then, really looked at me. Not at my mother, not at the chart. At me.
There was something steady in her expression that made my throat tighten.
“He didn’t mean to,” Mom said again, weaker this time. “Please. Don’t make this bigger than it is.”
Dr. Reeves cleaned the blood from my temple, met my eyes, and said quietly, “We’re not covering for him this time.”
My breath caught.
I had not spoken. I had not nodded. I had barely let myself think the words.
But before I could even move, she stepped back, pulled the curtain partly closed, and told the nurse at the station, clear enough for both of us to hear, “Call hospital security and notify the police. Possible domestic assault.”
Mom went white.
I felt the room drop into a silence so sharp it seemed to ring.
Then she turned to me, and for the first time that night, she looked afraid of what would happen next.
