Once the wrap had been fitted around Paige's wrist, "We can connect you with campus security if you'd like to file something." Paige glanced at Joe, uncertain, and Joe gave the smallest nod, not pushing, simply letting her know the choice was hers to make. "Not yet," Paige said quietly. "I'm not ready yet. That's all right," the doctor said.
"The option stays open whenever you are." They walked back across campus together afterward, slower than usual. Paige cradling her wrapped wrist against her chest and Joe matching her pace without comment. "The way you walk beside someone who needs the world to slow down for a while. I'm scared to go back to that breezeway," Paige admitted somewhere around the halfway point.
"Then don't go that way alone," Joe said simply. "Take the long way or text me and I'll walk with you." "You can't walk me everywhere, Joe. I can walk you most places," Joe said. And something in her voice, quiet and certain, made Paige laugh despite everything. a small surprised laugh that eased some of the tightness in her chest for the first time in two days.
Her voice was calm the entire time, steady, almost clinical. It was only after Paige had settled, only after the immediate fear had eased from the room, that something in Joe's face changed, something that had nothing to do with calm at all. It was very quiet, whatever it was. But it was there. "I'm sorry this happened because of me," Joe said finally.
"It's not your fault," Paige said quickly. "It's theirs. All of it." Joe did not answer right away. She sat with that for a long moment, her jaw tight, her hands very still in her lap.
She thought of her father again the way she often did in moments that mattered most. She thought of the mornings on the mat, the quiet lessons that had never once been about winning. Fighting is not about winning. It is about not losing something you can't get back. She understood, sitting there beside her frightened friend, exactly what he had meant all those years ago, in a way she had never fully understood it before.
There were things worth protecting, and there was a moment, sometimes when protecting them stopped being a choice and became simply the only thing left to do. She was not there yet. Not entirely. But she was closer than she had been that morning. Later that same week, Joe found herself walking past the athletic complex just as the evening shift of maintenance staff was locking up for the night.