Updated Apr 10, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 4: Assistant PT
Lucas
Three weeks into the protocol, Helen called at nine forty-seven on a Tuesday morning.
Lucas was mid-session — calf raises, slow and controlled, the kind of exercise that would have taken him thirty seconds at normal speed and was currently taking three minutes per set because Zoe had told him to count four beats down and four beats up and to not, under any circumstances, rush the bottom of the movement. He was not rushing the bottom of the movement. He was, however, doing the thing he always did when the exercise was boring, which was having an interior monologue about things that were more interesting, and the interior monologue had been circling around the conversation they’d had last week — the way she’d sat on the stool and talked to him about ligamentization with the focus of someone who was genuinely trying to get through to him, not just perform care. He’d thought about it more than was professionally appropriate. He was aware of this.
His phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at it. Helen.
“I need to take this,” he said.
Zoe, who was making notes on the whiteboard, said, “One minute,” which he understood to mean his timer was still running.
He answered. Helen’s voice was apologetic and strained in a way that meant she’d been trying not to call him and had lost the argument with herself. Her sister had fallen — nothing serious, she thought, but she needed to be with her, she’d already called the school, Mia was there waiting to be picked up, she was so sorry, she knew the timing was terrible—
“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Is your sister alright?”
“She thinks so. She’s being stubborn about the hospital.”
“Go be with her. I’ll get Mia.”
He hung up. He looked at his watch — forty minutes left in the session, and the school was twelve minutes away, and Mia would sit in the front office with her backpack and Pelé Jr. (she had taken the ball to school today, he remembered now, in the tote bag he’d specifically designated for carrying Pelé Jr. because full-size soccer balls did not fit in regular backpacks and Mia had a system) and she would wait, patiently, because Mia understood emergencies, but he didn’t want her waiting long.
He looked at Zoe. “I have a childcare situation. My daughter’s at school — I need to pick her up.”
Zoe looked at him. He had mentioned Mia twice in passing over the past three weeks and had gotten the impression that Zoe had filed this information away with the careful neutrality she applied to most things, but he hadn’t discussed her in any detail. “How old,” she said.
“Seven.”
A brief pause. Something moved through Zoe’s expression — not quite calculation, more like problem-solving. “How long to get her and get back.”
“Twenty-five minutes. Maybe thirty.”
“Can she sit quietly for forty minutes?”
“She can sit quietly for forty minutes if she has something to do. She’ll also ask you questions. She asks a lot of questions.”
“So do you.” Zoe uncapped the whiteboard marker and wrote something. “Go get her. We’ll finish the session when you’re back. I’ve got paperwork.”
He went. He drove to the school, signed Mia out at the front office, found her sitting in the administrator’s orange plastic chair with Pelé Jr. in her lap, having an apparently earnest conversation with the secretary about the relative merits of different grass surfaces for ball control. The secretary looked mildly overwhelmed. Mia looked delighted. She spotted him in the doorway and said “Dad!” with the particular enthusiasm she deployed when something she’d been waiting for had arrived, and stood up, and then said, with the tone of someone who has been conducting a professional discussion that she takes seriously: “This is my dad. He has a poorly knee.”
“I know who your dad is,” the secretary said, with a smile that Lucas recognized as the particular smile of someone who worked adjacent to professional sports and was trying to be appropriate about it.
Mia took his hand. In the car she told him about the morning and about something her teacher had said about fractions that was interesting, Mia said, because if you thought about it in terms of dividing a football pitch into zones — and he listened and drove and thought about the way she processed everything through the single lens of football, which was something she had done since she was approximately four years old, and which delighted him every time.
“Where are we going,” she said, when the route diverged from the one that went home.
“My physio session. I’ve got forty minutes left. You’re going to sit very nicely.”
“Can I watch?”
“Quietly.”
“I watch quietly.”
“You watched quietly at the optician last year and asked the optician if he had ever considered that glasses were like glasses for your eyes, like the word glasses meant the same thing twice.”
Mia considered this. “That was an interesting observation, though.”
“It was,” he agreed. “But you said it four times.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I’ll watch quietly,” she said, and he believed her approximately forty percent.
The PT suite’s particular combination of antiseptic and pine and rubber hit him now the way it always hit him — grounding in a way he hadn’t expected, a space he’d associated with frustration in the first week that had shifted into something else. He didn’t examine what else. He pushed the door open and let Mia in ahead of him.
Zoe was at her desk, looking at what turned out to be patient files, and she looked up when they came in.
Mia looked at the room. The room looked back at Mia, in the way that rooms that are full of interesting equipment do to seven-year-olds.
“Mia,” Lucas said, before she could begin an assessment of the machinery, “this is Zoe, who is in charge of my knee.”
Mia regarded Zoe with the serious dark eyes. “Did you look at the pictures of his bones?”
“I did,” Zoe said. “The MRI.”
“Do bones look like bones in the pictures or do they look different?”
“They look like — ” Zoe paused, seemed to consider. “Have you ever seen an X-ray?”
“At the dentist. My teeth looked very white.”
“Bones in an MRI look similar. Bright, where the tissue is dense. Dark, where it’s not.”
Mia absorbed this. “Is Dad’s knee bright or dark.”
“Parts of it are healing, which is going to look different as we go.” Zoe stood, moved toward the supply area, opened a drawer, and — without apparent deliberation — produced a resistance band in bright orange, which she handed to Mia. “Do you know what this is?”
“A stretchy band.”
“It’s a resistance band. We use it for exercises. Can you hold it like this — ” She demonstrated a loop, hands a shoulder-width apart, applied gentle tension. “And keep the tension even. Don’t let it snap. It’s the same principle as a lot of your dad’s exercises, which means you can be assistant PT today, if you take the job seriously.”
Mia took the resistance band with an expression of profound seriousness. She put her backpack on the chair that Zoe had placed near the wall — how it got there, Lucas couldn’t say; it had simply been there when they walked in, at a height that made sense for a seven-year-old — and she put Pelé Jr. beside it and she sat with the resistance band across her knees and her feet flat on the floor and her posture excellent.
“Ready,” Mia said.
The rest of the session was — not what he’d expected, though he couldn’t have said what he’d expected instead. Mia watched with the focused attention she gave to things she’d decided were important. She passed Zoe things when asked — the foam roller, the small yellow resistance ball, at one point the pen from Zoe’s pocket when Zoe needed to make a note and both her hands were occupied — and she asked questions in a steady, methodical stream, and Zoe answered every one of them, directly and in appropriate detail, without the slight adjustment in register that adults usually used with children, without the talking-down-to-you tone that Mia, who noticed everything, found insulting. Zoe talked to her like she was a colleague. Mia, visibly, loved this.
“Why does the tissue hurt when it’s healing,” Mia asked.
“Because the body is rebuilding it, and the building process involves inflammation — swelling and heat — which puts pressure on the nerve endings.”
“Is that why Dad makes a face sometimes.”
“Probably, yes.”
“He doesn’t say ouch.”
“Athletes usually don’t.”
“I say ouch,” Mia said. “When I fall.” She considered. “But I say it privately.”
Lucas watched Zoe’s expression do something small and involuntary — the flicker of something genuine behind the clinical neutrality. She turned back to his knee before it developed into anything.
On the way out, Mia held his hand in the corridor and looked up at him with the particular quality of assessment she used when she had arrived at a conclusion she was ready to share.
“She’s your girlfriend,” Mia said.
“She’s my physiotherapist.”
“She could be both.”
“She’s not, Mia.”
“Not yet,” Mia said, with the serene certainty of a child who has decided how a story ends and is simply waiting for the other participants to catch up.
He thought about telling her it was more complicated than that. He thought about explaining professional dynamics, the realities of his situation, the several good reasons why the idea was impractical and inadvisable. He looked down at his daughter, who was swinging Pelé Jr. in the tote bag, humming something, entirely unbothered by the complications of adult life.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going to get chips on the way home.”
“Can I get the big ones.”
“You can get the big ones.”
She skipped two steps, satisfied. He looked back at the door to the PT suite — closed now, Zoe presumably back at her files — and thought about the way she had handled Mia without hesitation, without making a production of it, without any of the self-consciousness that a lot of adults showed around children they hadn’t encountered before. Like it was just a thing that needed doing and she was the person present to do it.
He thought about this for considerably longer than was practical, and he did not say anything to anyone about it, which was, he thought, probably the wisest decision he’d made all week.
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