“If she had arrived at five in the afternoon — a twenty-five minute drive, no helicopter, the small hospital in Jasper — she would have had a closed reduction and probably a rod, and a fasciotomy if she needed one, and she would have been in a cast for ten weeks and she would have been fine.

That is the likeliest outcome by a considerable margin.

“I can’t promise you that.

Nobody honest can.

What I can tell you is that the reason we are having this conversation is not the truck.”

Then she told me the rest of it.

The deep peroneal nerve had been compressed long enough to sustain permanent damage.

What that means in practice is that Wren cannot dorsiflex her left foot — she cannot lift the front of it — and that she has reduced sensation across the top of the foot, and that she has chronic pain that is managed and is not gone.