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That beam of light struck Rob’s black-and-white photo behind her, a perfect halo framing his face. Unmoving. Unyielding. Then it shifted, skimming across the room until it caught on someone else. Zorro.

He sat in silence in the front row, just as unyielding, but not unmoving.

Energy pulsed the moment their eyes met, and now her skin felt bare, hot, and unbearably alive.

The light burnished his skin, casting highlights through his dark hair, catching on the chain at his throat and turning it gold against the sharp line of his jaw.

Zorro illuminated in color and motion, and complicated decisions.

She stood between them. One in her past, still holding sway. The other in her present, so vividly present it ached. Suddenly she didn’t know which man she was facing…or which one she was still hiding from.

“Everyone. Your White Line Keynote, Dr. Everly Quinn.”

The applause ramped up as Everly swallowed, adjusted the folded notes in her hand, though she had long since memorized every word, and made her way through the parted curtain toward the low hum of conversation and the restless creak of chairs shifting in anticipation.

Her body knew exactly where he was. She could feel his eyes on her, thick, dark molasses with flecks of amber.

Before her eyes scanned the first row, before her gaze ticked past the surgical coordinators and the EU trauma reps, her nerve endings betrayed her.

Some deep, buried sense, ancient, primal, traitorous, had locked on.

Heat bloomed low and shameful as her pulse fluttered under her skin like something trying to escape.

He was there. Of course, he was there. He promised to attend.

Dressed like he hadn’t even tried, sprawled in his seat as if the row had been built around him, one boot was anchored on the leg of the chair in front, arms folded in a posture that pretended casual but could snap to alert in half a second.

All that readiness was just a part of him.

She had hated it once. Feared it. Revered it.

She wasn’t sure which feeling this was. Not anymore.

He looked the same. No. Worse. He looked like the dream. The one she couldn’t forget.

The one where he had murmured her name, hand sliding over her hip, breath hot and wicked in the hollow of her throat.

The one that had lingered so long afterward that she had stripped the sheets at 2 a.m. and stood under a freezing shower just to scrub the ache out of her skin.

But nothing had helped. Not the water. Not the lectures. Not the prayer.

She had already kissed him once. When he had been barely conscious. When he had no way to stop her. When he would never know.

Unless he did know because she had kissed him again in her room, after the collision, after her shower. Before meeting his wonderful family.

Applause continued, heated, embarrassing, uplifting. She stepped forward.

Behind her, the screen came to life. Rob

That half-smile. That conference polo with the lanyard twisted like always.

The surgical team gathered around him, wide-eyed and admiring.

He had never missed a photo op. Never missed a spotlight.

Madeline, who had arranged all of this, the one who had stood a little too close in every staff meeting, had done her job well.

The lighting was soft. The framing was reverent.

Hero of the White Line.

Everly’s body locked.

She did not falter. Did not hesitate. She walked to the mic as if her heart weren’t clawing its way up her ribs and cleared her throat.

"Good morning."

Her voice was steady. Her soul was not.

She made it through the opening with surgical precision, each word delivered like a suture, tight, controlled, meant to hold.

She spoke of innovation, of collaboration, of honoring those who had paid the highest price.

She did not name Rob. She did not need to.

He was there. Behind her. Oversized and immortal, while Zorro watched.

She could feel it.

A phantom pressure expanded in her cells, in her skin, bones, and soul.

This wasn’t the time, but her heart made it time.

Buried under an avalanche of jumbled-up emotions, she worked hard to keep her focus.

Zorro was always potent, now everything about him was tied up in her unfair treatment of him, and that crystal clear moment with that child in Niger.

Her perception had fractured there, just like the light.

She needed time, space, to breathe without holding this now impotent grief for a man she didn't truly know, for a man she wanted to know down to his very breath, but in this public forum, unraveling just wasn't possible.

When she finished speaking, hands went up, and she was caught off guard. She glanced at Madeline. This was just the opening. She didn’t realize she’d be fielding questions.

“Dr. Quinn will be attending several panels during the conference. There will be plenty of time to ask?—”

“Just a few?” someone shouted. More shouts rang out as people clamored. Madeline smiled then nodded toward Everly. “All right, a few.”

Another hand went up. Then another.

A French neurologist asked about polytrauma load ratios in isolated triage bays. An Israeli coordinator questioned her use of neuroplastic response over sedation in pediatric cases.

Everly answered each with the clipped clarity of someone who had lived inside the data and inside the wreckage. She cited field notes from Mindanao, named case clusters from Mosul.

She was answering a question about cross-border trauma care when Zorro lifted his hand.

She grasped the podium. “Yes?” she said, pointing to him.

"Dr. Quinn," he said, voice smooth, respectful, with that subtle cadence she couldn’t get enough of. "In regions where infrastructure is either compromised or actively hostile, how do you prioritize psychological stabilization when physical triage demands all resources?"

Everly stared at him and for one breathless moment, she forgot every word she had ever known.

That voice. That question. It was brilliant. It was piercing. It was Zorro, asking her something real. Her lips parted. Closed. Opened again.

“That’s…an excellent question,” she managed, then cleared her throat.

“I think the answer lies in the intersection of immediacy and dignity. Psychological trauma isn’t secondary.

It begins the moment the body recognizes threat.

We’ve begun to shift from a model of treat, then assess to one that acknowledges trauma’s presence even in the act of survival . ”

Zorro leaned forward slightly, his posture deceptively relaxed. “Would you say the assessment begins before physical treatment?”

Her brows lifted. “Ideally, yes. Pre-triage, if you’ve trained your corpsmen to recognize shock behavior, dissociation, protective aggression, and cognitive silence.”

“My teammates under my care already receive that kind of response. I don’t treat wounds. I treat the whole person.”

“Even in the midst of chaos, danger and active fire?”

“Yes, prioritize, but give them what they need to hold on to hope. A lot of experts think that’s a waste of time. I disagree.”

“So, you’ve already identified the first wound?”

A murmur passed through the audience.

Everly’s throat tightened but her voice held.

“We lost a little girl last year in Nigeria. No burns. No broken bones. Just too much terror. She never spoke again after the fire. She couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t sleep. Her vitals collapsed within forty-eight hours. Nothing else explains it but psychogenic shock. She died with no visible injury.”

“The boy who lived,” Zorro said softly. “The one who wouldn’t let go of me in that one corner away from chaos in Niamey after those terrorists burned their school to the ground without care for who they murdered. You remember?”

“How could I forget?” she whispered, a hush falling over the crowd, but all she could see was him. “You were the one who suggested we bring in a pediatric trauma specialist,” she said, almost disbelieving.

Zorro gave a quiet nod. “We patch the body because it bleeds. But if the mind’s torn open and we leave it untreated, it’ll bleed out, too. Just slower.”

The room was utterly still now.

Everly looked down at the podium, her fingers tight around the edge, as if it could anchor her in place.

Her voice dropped half a register, but the words were clear.

“You sang a lullaby to him. He was one of the few who healed faster than the others, but the results of bringing the specialist in saved the rest.”

No one moved. The air felt suspended.“We’re tracking long-term mental health deterioration in over seventy percent of pediatric conflict survivors in post-crisis zones.

Unseen trauma. Unheard grief. The data’s clear, and we’re still playing catch-up.

The psychological first response isn’t soft. It’s survival.”

Applause was immediate.

Zorro didn’t move. Just watched her with that maddening stillness as the room erupted around them. She took a step back, barely breathing, her eyes flicking toward the wings. Madeline was already in motion.

“That’s all the time we have for today. Thank you for coming. As I said, Dr. Quinn—” She nodded toward Zorro. “—and Petty Officer Mateo Martinez will both appear on panels this week. We hope you’ll join us.”

Everly didn’t smile. Couldn’t. As Madeline ushered her offstage, the sound of applause faded to a dull, pounding echo in her chest.

Somewhere beneath the applause, she was breaking open again.

Not for Rob.Not for the legacy she had tried so hard to uphold.

But for the man who had once handed a child back to her with blistered fingers and said, He won’t stop crying when I hold him, but he goes still when I sing.

She remembered thinking. He shouldn’t know how to do that.

But maybe the real question, the one she had never dared to ask, was this… Am I even worthy of such a man?

A man she had wronged with judgment. With fear. With grief she’d weaponized to protect herself from needing him. She bolted from the wings, the dream twisting inside her like fire.The kiss she had stolen. The kiss he might remember. The kiss she wanted again and again.

Now the questions bloomed, terrifying and insistent. Can you have him? Do I deserve him?

A hand caught her arm. Everly flinched until she looked up and saw Helen Buckard.

The trauma nurse she’d worked beside in the Philippines. Someone she hadn’t expected to see here. Someone who had seen too much of Everly at her worst, and now, possibly, her most exposed.

“Are you all right?” Helen asked softly.

She was dragging her father from the crowd surrounding Zorro, his attention split, his eyes flicking after Everly with open concern.

“I’m fine,” Everly lied. Her voice cracked. “Thank you.”

Then she bolted her heart thundering, throat tight, aching with a kind of pain she knew she wouldn’t be able to scrub out this time.

This wasn’t the pain of loss. This was something else. Something deeper. A scar forming not from grief, but from the slow, terrifying realization that everything she believed…about Rob, about herself…might not survive what came next.