Burn scars, old ones, the kind that heal into something smooth and shining and permanent, like candle wax that has set.

I have seen enough wounds in eleven years to read the story in a scar without asking, and the story in his hands was fire, a lot of it, a long time ago.

But even the scars were not the thing. The thing was the tremor.

His hands shook. Not violently — a fine, constant, low-frequency shudder in the fingers, the kind that does not stop when a person wills it to stop, because it is not coming from the person at all.

It was coming from somewhere deeper, from nerves that had been damaged or a system that had been left too long on high alert.

I watched his fingers tremble against the seam of his jacket and I did the math a nurse does automatically, the cold arithmetic of risk, and the answer frightened me.