‘No?’

‘Uh-huh. He’s got grit, I’ll give him that. I only wish my other clients would take a leaf out of his book. He’s the miracle, I keep telling him. He’s the One Guy, you know, the one in a million chance. He’s the One.’

‘And is he okay? Now, I mean?’ She gave a worried smile as he looked at her, a little confused. ‘It’s just that I was in my room just now and thought I heard something, and I saw him being carried –’

‘Ah yeah,’ Christer grinned, batting away her concern with a bear paw. ‘Don’t worry about that. Looks worse than it is. He often does that – works himself to his absolute limits.’

‘To the point of collapse?’

‘Yep. He just won’t stop.’

‘But surely you can make him?’

‘I can tell you’re new here,’ Christer laughed. ‘Listen, if there’s one thing you’ll find, it’s that no one can make Emil Von Greyers do anything he doesn’t want to do. He’s a stubborn bastard when he wants to be; but people need to understand that what might make him difficult to be around at times is also what helped him recover to this point. You can’t have one without the other.’ He shrugged.

‘He’s difficult – how?’

‘Well, not sleeping doesn’t help his general mood, for starters,’ he commented, rolling elastic bands around the mats to hold them in place as tubes.

‘He doesn’t sleep?’

‘Barely. Well, would you want to, after what he’s been through?’

She pulled a face. Maybe not.

‘And it would sure help if he could just eat something he can taste. He keeps losing weight because he doesn’t want to eat.’

‘He’s lost his sense of taste?’

‘And smell.’

‘Oh.’

He glanced across at her as he replaced the dumbbells onto the racks in weight order. ‘You didn’t know all this?’

She shook her head. ‘Not much beyond he was hit by a car and in a coma for seven years, to be honest.’

‘Pfft.’ Christer frowned. ‘Well, the poor guy’s had a lot more to deal with than just learning to get strong again, I can tell you that.’

‘Like what else?’ she prodded, and then, seeing his expression, added, ‘This isn’t nosiness. I’m Linus’s chaperone. I need to know what to expect so I can prepare Linus for it. The hospital visit immediately after Emil woke up went really badly. It did a lot of damage.’

‘Oh yeah, I heard about that incident from the nursing team.’

‘It was awful. He was shouting obscenities and thrashing and screaming.’

Christer watched her, hearing the judgement in her voice. ‘You know that’s an actual condition, right? Like, a medical thing, for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries?’

‘. . . No.’

‘Sure. Post-traumatic amnesia, it’s called. It’s common in post-coma patients waking up. They get very agitated, violent even, although they’re mainly a danger to themselves, of course. They don’t remember anything about it.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Usually the last couple of weeks before the injury, and the first few days of coming to, are completely wiped. Gone. No memory.’