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went down on her chart. “How’s the pain?” the woman asked.
    “Not good,” Teri muttered.
    “This’ll help.”
    Before she could ask what she was referring to, the nurse had given her an injection. Leaving to dispose of the needle, she returned with a starched hospital gown and deposited it on the bed.
    “Here, put this on. Someone’ll be here with you shortly.” With that, the woman promptly disappeared again.
    Teri pushed the gown onto the chair.
    “What are you doing?” Hawk asked.
    “There’s no way I’m putting one of those things on. If they want to see this wound, all I have to do is lift up my shirt and they can cut away the bandages the paramedic put on.” She saw he was about to say something and cut him off. “I won’t be reduced to something sitting on an assembly line table.”
    Color rose to her cheeks. In the nine months they’d been partnered, he didn’t remember ever seeing her get angry.
    Or was that fear doing it to her? “Try me.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You said you didn’t think I would understand why you’re afraid of hospitals. Try me.”
    Even as the words came out of his mouth, he wasn’t entirely sure just how they got there. He made his way through life not getting involved on any level with anything but the cases he was assigned, and then only in strictly a professional way. It was more than a matter of needing to be focused or possessing tunnel vision, he just didn’t care to have people’s lives touch his. It was cleaner that way. Neater.
    Getting involved in someone’s life wasn’t worth the effort or the trouble. That, too, had been a lesson he’d gleaned while raising himself in his parents’ rundown, rat-infested apartment.
    Yet there was something about Cavanaugh that reached out to him.
    Hawk was probably going to use this against her somehow, but since he asked, she felt she owed him an explanation. After all, he was still here, not turning his back and walking away.
    “My uncle died in a hospital. This hospital,” she added. “I was twelve.”
    Twelve.
    The same age as he’d been when everything in his life had changed for him.
    It felt odd having something beyond the police force in common with her. But then, having an uncle die in the line of duty wasn’t exactly the same thing as seeing your parents gunned down in front of youfor less money than some people spent for a week’s groceries.
    Restless, he shoved his hands into his pockets and wondered why he wasn’t leaving. “You and your uncle were close?”
    “Not as close as I am to my other uncle. Or my father,” she added.
    The time her father had been wounded in the line of duty, she thought her whole world had been shattering. She’d been so terrified, she couldn’t get herself to come to the hospital with the rest of her siblings, afraid that if she did, if she came, it would be the last time she would see her father alive.
    Just as it had been with her uncle.
    “My whole family’s close,” she told him. Her words echoed back to her. Because he had no family, would he take that the wrong way? Would he think she was gloating because she had such a wonderful support system and he had no one to turn to?
    Hawk made it seem as if he didn’t need anyone, she reminded herself. He liked being alone.
    Someone was paging a doctor to neurology. Hawk waited for the voice over the loudspeaker to fade away. “If you’re so close, why didn’t you want me to call one of them?”
    “Because I don’t want them to worry.” She could almost envision the lot of them, crowding around the bed, shooting questions at her, looking like a backup for a worried Greek chorus. She could deal much better with them once she was completely patched upand this was behind her. “You, on the other hand, won’t worry. You can just keep my mind off the fact that it hurts like a son of a gun.”
    His eyes narrowed. They both knew that she was responsible for ninety-nine percent of the conversations they did have.