Watchmaker
Copyright© 2025 by Heel
Chapter 1: The Call
Dr. Samuel Kopp had been on vacation when the call came.
Three days of quiet — a rented cabin by a lake, a stack of books he would never finish, and the comfort of silence unbroken by the hum of hospital corridors. He had promised himself rest. But the message from the trauma unit was brief and insistent: complex calcaneal fracture, multiple displacements, we need you.
He packed without hesitation.
Dr. Kopp was a man most people forgot within moments of meeting. His face carried the quiet fatigue of middle age — pale, creased, with thinning hair and a habit of peering over his glasses instead of through them. He had long accepted that he was neither handsome nor particularly charming; his gift lay in his hands, in the precise world of bone and metal and the fine edge between ruin and recovery.
When they brought her in, he hesitated.
Her name was Elise Vanoli — twenty-eight, a ballet dancer of some renown. The accident hadn’t happened onstage or in rehearsal, but on a cold, rain-slicked street one early morning. She had been returning from a charity gala, exhausted.
A delivery van had come around the corner too fast. It didn’t hit her directly — the driver swerved at the last moment — but she stumbled back off the curb, her shoe catching between two cobblestones. Her full weight fell on that trapped foot.
They said the sound was worse than the fall itself — a dry, splintering crack that silenced the few pedestrians nearby. By the time the paramedics arrived, her ankle and heel were grotesquely swollen, her toes already mottled with bruising. The rain kept washing over her as she stared at the streetlights, repeating to the medics, “It’s my left foot, my left,” as if naming it might undo the damage.
At the hospital, the X-rays told the rest of the story: the calcaneus was pulverized, the talus displaced, and even the metatarsals were barely holding their shape.
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