shredded after a visit to the nearest urgent care clinic with Zelda.
It'd started long before this point but it went downhill when I tried to grab my luggage from baggage claim. I was certain I'd heard bone scraping against bone when reaching for the handle and pulling the suitcase off the belt. It sounded awful and felt a thousand times worse, but I didn't have to tell Zelda any of that. No, crying out and dropping the item on my foot was plenty of an announcement.
She was good enough to gather me up, busted shoulder, sore foot, nasty mood and all, and cart us and the sum of our luggage out of the terminal. She poured me into a car and pointed the driver in the direction of the clinic while I grumbled about my terrible day.
Then, I hadn't objected when she followed me into the exam room. I should have. I should've instructed her to stay in the waiting room but I didn't. I told myself I allowed her to join because I wasn't thinking clearly. I wasn't myself. The whiskey—what a terrible idea—and my shoulder and the entirety of this day. And I let myself believe that.
I believed it when Zelda helped me out of my shirt and while she chattered on about nonsensical things between the doctor's exam and X-ray. She only stopped talking about whatever it was for brief moments. There was never enough silence for me to take stock of these events. It was probably better that way. I'd experienced enough reality for one day.
"Oh, this is going to be fine," Zelda said as the door closed behind the doctor. He'd gone to collect the supplies necessary to reduce my shoulder without worsening the hairline fracture to my collarbone, which was a technical way of saying he intended to manipulate my bones back into their proper places in a manner that sounded remarkably medieval.
"We must've heard different things because I heard 'intense pain and pressure,'" I replied.
"'Intense but brief pressure and pain."
"Yeah. That makes it so much better," I answered. "The only way this could be more intense would be if this guy rips my fucking arm off."
Zelda sat back in the chair beside the exam table, crossed her legs and folded her arms over her torso. "Riddle me this, boss. How did you sit through that entire flight with a bone halfway out of the socket? Because you were as pleasant as a peach, or, you know, as pleasant as you get. Not until we landed did I realize things were amiss in Ashville."
I ran my palm over my chest, suddenly aware I was half naked with a relative stranger by my side. The morning was a distant, misshapen memory. I couldn't remember where I was supposed to be this evening or what I'd meant to accomplish today. It wasn't this. It wasn't hiring an archaeologist as an auditing assistant and it wasn't dislocating bones. And I was annoyed about all that, annoyed about losing the day—and my watch. Annoyed about reverting back to some helpless infant version of myself. Annoyed about the entire disaster. "Whiskey," I answered. "A large volume of it."
She hummed in response, bounced her leg, and then, "Does that happen often?"
I glanced over at Zelda and found her worrying a spot on her jeans with her fingernail. "Which part?"
She didn't look away from her jeans. "All of it. Any of it. Whatever."
I continued watching as she worked her nail against the fabric. As far as I could tell, there was nothing there but she had a way of seeing things everyone else missed. Maybe it was that she saw the things no one wanted seen. Or some of both.
"No. Not often," I said.
Zelda bobbed her head a bit. "What does often mean to you?"
"It means there's usually only beer in my fridge when my brother buys it," I answered. "It means an expensive bottle of Scotch has been in my office for at least two years, since whenever I wrapped up the Hudson-Bolton audit, and it's only half empty."
"No more self-medicating, okay? I don't like being around that kind of behavior and it's not how I'm going to run this office. I won't have any of the Don Draper routine from you."
I leaned back on my good arm, peered at her. "Why do I have the impression I've hired the Mary Poppins of tax and audit?"
Zelda hit me with a slight smirk. "Not sure if I'm practically perfect in every