dancing-writes

“I don’t care, Jack. It’s not happening,” Robby said, not even turning to look at Abbot.

“My wife is gone, Robinavitch. She’s gone. And I’m entitled to bereavement leave in the event of a loss. It says so in my contract,” Abbot snapped.

Frank’s eyes went wide. He had met you once and genuinely liked you. Why hadn’t he heard about this? Surely everyone here should be devastated. From what he’d seen you were well liked. And he thought Robby was your friend?

“I don’t give a shit what your contract says. You can’t have the time. We’re short staffed as it is,” Robby said with a sigh before turning to face Jack, leaning on the counter.

“My wife is gone, Robby.”

“I know, Jack. That’s why we’re short staffed.” Robby sounded so…unbothered. Bored even.  

“The least you could do is give me the time I’m entitled to.” Abbot’s brows were furrowed as he glowered at the chief attending.

Frank wasn’t even pretending to chart anymore, his gaze moving between the two men.

Robby took a deep breath and ran a hand over his beard. “I know she’s gone. Trust me, Jack, we all know. We feel it deeply. The answer’s still no.”

With that Robby walked off. Abbot frowned after him for a moment before heading toward the lockers as he muttered to himself.

Frank leaned back in his chair. Jesus. He’d liked Robby, was excited to learn from him, but he had no idea the man was so…cold. Even if Robby wasn’t as close with you as Frank had thought, he knew Jack and Robby were close. Practically brothers, one of the nurses had said. And this was all the sympathy he could muster when a man’s wife died?

Dana came over to look something up on the computer next to him. “What’s going on, kid? There’s patients to see. What are you doing sitting on your ass?”

Frank looked toward the room where Robby had disappeared before turning to the charge nurse. “Can I ask you a question?”

She glanced at him over her glasses. “Sure.”

“I thought Abbot and Robby were friends.”

She blinked at him. “Still waiting on the question.”

“Is Robby…always so harsh?”

Now he had her full attention. “Spit it out, kid.”

“Abbot was asking Robby for bereavement leave because his wife died and Robby told him no. He didn’t even seem to care she was de—”

Dana cut him off with a cackle, head tipping back in her mirth. Frank just blinked at her until she finished. She swept her glasses off and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Kid, there is something you need to know about Jack Abbot. Never, and I mean never, believe anything that man says about his wife.”

“What?”

“The Mrs. is on a trip to visit her sister, that’s all. Abbot’s just dramatic. Worse when it comes to her. She’s just fine, trust me.”

Frank’s mouth dropped open. “So, he does this kind of thing all the time?”

Dana nodded and went back to typing. “Yep.”

“Doesn’t his wife get mad? Abby would kill me.”

“Oh, honey,” Dana said with a crooked smile. “She’s just as bad as he is.”

How does type one diabetes work?

The cells in your body need glucose in order to work properly—but glucose can’t enter the cell on its own. It needs insulin. Insulin is a hormone made in the pancreas and it acts as a key that allows glucose into cells.

In type one diabetes, the pancreas doesn’t work properly. That means people who have type one diabetes need to inject insulin, since they can’t produce it themselves.

Lantus: a long acting insulin. You inject it once in the morning and it gives steady, tiny doses of insulin throughout the day. It’s a big dose (35 units in Trinity’s case) but it works veryyy slowly.

Lispro: a fast-acting insulin. You inject it before each meal and it quickly lowers your blood sugar, to compensate for the incoming sugar from eating. It’s a very small dose (2 to units, depending on the person and what they’re eating) and only lasts a couple of hours.

Glucagon: a medication (actually a hormone as well) that essentially takes all of the stored glucose in your body and dumps it into your bloodstream. Used in emergencies to boost blood sugar levels.

IO: Intraosseus. It’s shorthand for a cannula that gets drilled right into your bone. We can give IV medications through that line and it eventually makes it into the bloodstream.

D50: the D stands for dextrose (sugar) and the 50 denotes the concentration: it’s 50% dextrose. This rapidly increases blood sugar.

Etomidate: a medication used to sedate a patient, specifically before an intubation in this case.

Roc: short for rocuronium. A medication to paralyze a patient, specifically before intubation in this case. In the past, you might have heard “sux” (short for succinylcholine) used for intubation. Roc has fewer risks, so we use roc now instead.

D10: same idea as D50–the D stands for dextrose (sugar) and the 10 refers to the concentration: 10% dextrose. It’s used as a maintenance drip, to keep glucose up after the D50 rapidly corrects it.

Hydrocortisone: a steroid with many uses. In this case, it would be used to correct an adrenal crisis and increase blood pressure.

Pyxis: the name of the machine that stores our medications and keeps them locked up.

Addison’s disease: a condition where your body doesn’t produce the hormone cortisol. It can cause drops in blood sugar.

CHAPTER 1

Trinity’s life had long been measured in highs and lows.

“Trin?” Whittaker called from the kitchen. “You coming?”

This morning was a low.

She killed the alarm instead of snoozing it—and woke up twenty minutes later in a panic.

Everything after that was a blur. A rushed shower. Clothes yanked on half-damp skin. Teeth brushed too hard, too fast.

Her hair hung limp and wet on her shoulders as she twisted it up and forgot about it.

She slid open her nightstand drawer and grabbed a syringe and the first insulin vial her fingers hit.

“Trinity!” Whittaker called again. “Robby will have our asses if we’re late again!”

“Shut up, Huckleberry,” she shot back, already drawing up the dose.

She pinched her stomach and jabbed the needle in without bothering with the alcohol swab. Didn’t pause. Didn’t check the label again.

She tossed the other vial into her bag, zipped it shut, and was already moving.

She stumbled into the kitchen, grabbed a granola bar on instinct, and followed Whittaker out the door before her brain could catch up with her hands.

She made it to work with minutes to spare.

Badge swipe. Elevator. The familiar hum of the hospital swallowing her whole.

“Go ahead,” she told Whittaker, “I’ll be there in a sec.”

Her stomach still felt a little off from the rushed granola bar, but she brushed it aside. Mornings were always like that. She ducked into the staff bathroom and shut herself into a stall.

She pulled her meter from her bag, pricked her finger, and waited.

The number blinked back at her.

180.

She frowned, then exhaled. Barely high. No big deal.

She reached back into her bag and pulled out the insulin vial she’d tossed in there that morning, turning it once in her fingers.

Lantus.

Oh shit.

She closed her eyes, replaying the morning in flashes—alarm, shower, Whittaker yelling, the needle in her skin. She definitely remembered injecting.

Okay. She must have used Lispro at home. Just 2 units of fast-acting insulin, to correct for the granola bar.

Which meant she’d put the Lantus in her bag to take at work.

Right.

She didn’t overthink it. Drew up the 35 unit dose. Pinched her stomach and injected quickly—efficient, practiced, already mentally halfway back out the door.

She dropped the syringe into the sharps, capped the vial, shoved it back into her bag.

Another problem solved.

She washed her hands, glanced at her reflection—pale, hair still damp at the edges, eyes sharp and focused—and squared her shoulders.

Then she was back out on the unit, already moving, already late.

“Santos,” Robby said, unimpressed. “Thank you for joining us.”

She gave a small nod.

And for a little while, everything worked exactly the way it always did.

She moved from room to room on muscle memory alone—hands steady, voice clipped, thoughts snapping into place the way they always did. Orders entered. Questions answered. Charts updated. The familiar rhythm carried her forward.

Then something slipped.

Just a fraction of a beat. A delay between seeing and doing. She reached for a chart and missed the edge.

Annoying. Not alarming.

Within minutes, the cold settled in. Not the ambient chill of the unit, but something deeper, creeping up her arms. She shoved her hands into her scrub pockets whenever she could, flexing them hard enough to sting, trying to stave off any tremors.

Granola bar burned off faster than she thought. Stress. Moving nonstop. Fine.

“Trinity!” Frank called. “Trauma ETA two minutes!”

“On my way!”

The patient came in barely alive. They stabilized him just in time and shipped him to the OR.

The adrenaline carried her through it—sharp, clean, almost clarifying. But the second she peeled off her gloves, the floor bent.

Her stomach rolled. She leaned briefly against the hallway wall, breathing shallow through her nose.

Her heart was racing now, hammering against her ribs in a way that didn’t match her exertion. A fine sheen of sweat prickled along her spine despite the cold.

Low.

The thought came fast—and with it, relief.

Good. She could fix that.

She peeled off toward the staff lounge before anyone could notice her unsteadiness, already fishing for glucose tabs in her pockets. The door shut behind her with a soft click, sealing her into the quiet.

The quiet made everything worse.

The room was blindingly white, too still—like it was waiting. She dropped into the nearest chair, elbows braced on the table, trying to slow her breathing.

She pressed her palms flat against the table and let herself think—really think—for the first time all morning.

Granola bar.

Meter: 180.

The vial of Lantus in her bag.

She closed her eyes.

She’d taken the Lantus at home. She remembered drawing up thirty-five units.

Except—

Her stomach dropped. The vial at home was Lispro.

She’d taken thirty-five units of Lispro.

And thirty-five units of Lantus.

“Oh fuck,” she whispered.

The realization hit all at once—sharp, dizzying.

Seventy units.

Her heart lurched into her throat. The room tilted even though she hadn’t moved.

No. No no no.

This wasn’t a quick dip. This wasn’t something she could muscle through alone in a bathroom.

Her breathing sped up, shallow and uneven.

Okay. Okay. Don’t spiral. No one needs to know.

Take the glucose.

Her fingers barely obeyed her anymore.

She fumbled into her pocket and came up with a handful of tabs in her palm.

Too many. Didn’t matter.

She shoved them into her mouth, chewing fast, grimacing as the chalky sweetness coated her tongue. Another handful followed. She swallowed hard, willing the familiar warmth to hit.

It didn’t.

Instead, the room tipped again.

Nausea surged, sharp and hollow. She begged the tabs to stay down.

She staggered toward the trash can and wretched, everything she’d swallowed coming back up.

“Fuck,” she breathed, the word barely audible.

Her vision smeared at the edges, like someone had dragged a wet brush across it. The trash can lurched closer, then farther away.

She tried to straighten, clipped her shoulder on the counter, and then her legs simply gave out.

She hit the tile hard, the impact knocking the breath from her lungs.

The world narrowed to sound and sensation—the hum of the fridge, distant voices somewhere down the hall, the cold linoleum seeping through her scrubs.

The room dimmed.

The taste of glucose and bile lingered, sickly sweet and wrong.

She tried to move her arm.

Nothing happened.

The thought slipped away before it finished forming.

——————————

“Anyone seen Santos?”

Robby barely looked up from the computer. “No idea,” he said absently, fingers still moving across the keyboard. “Maybe with the ankle fracture in central six?”

“Nope, already checked,” Frank answered, moving on.

Robby pushed back from the desk a moment later, grabbing his coffee cup out of habit. He threaded through the department, eyes skimming monitors and faces without really landing on any of them. Another alarm chirped. Someone swore. The ER breathed around him.

He cut toward the staff area with a coffee refill on his mind and nudged open the door with his shoulder.

His eyes found her on the floor immediately.

Trinity was laying half on her side, half-curled, a smear of vomit clinging to her cheek and pooling on the linoleum.

“Jesus fucking—”

He looked back into the hall, spotting Dana.

“Dana! Get a bed!”

He was already moving, dropping to his knees beside Trinity and rolling her fully onto her side.

“Trinity?” he called. “Trinity, can you hear me?”

He rubbed his knuckle firmly into her sternum.

Nothing.

“Come on,” he murmured.

He lifted her jaw slightly and pressed two fingers to her carotid.

Her pulse thrummed beneath his fingertips, fast and thready.

Her chest rose and fell with wet pulls of air.

Dana and Frank skidded into the hall, a team and a gurney right behind them.

“Oh my god,” Dana breathed.

“What the hell happened?” Frank said, dropping down beside her.

“Found her like this,” Robby said quickly. “She’s breathing. Let’s move.”

They lifted Trinity cleanly, rolling the bed toward the trauma bays before the rails were even up.

“What’s open?” Robby asked.

“Trauma two,” Dana replied.

“Narcan and a tox screen as soon as we land.”

“You got it.”

The doors flew open.

They slid the gurney into the center of the room, brakes snapping into place as staff closed in around her.

Princess placed the leads across her chest. Kim wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm. Perlah clipped the pulse ox to her finger. Mateo scrubbed alcohol into the crook of her elbow. Dana suctioned her mouth.

Coordinated chaos.

“Lungs are clear bilaterally,” Frank said, pulling off his stethoscope.

Robby leaned in with his penlight, quick and practiced, bracing himself for pinpoint pupils.

Instead, he found two wide, dark pools staring back at him, reactive to the beam of light.

“Pupils four millimeters and reactive,” he said. “Respiratory rate’s normal—hold the Narcan for now.”

“Heart rate one-eighteen,” Princess called. “BP’s 88 over 50.”

Robby stepped half a pace back, eyes never leaving Trinity as the room kept moving. “Hang fluids. Full AMS workup,” he said. “EKG. Labs. Tox screen.”

Trinity’s body went suddenly still.

Not calm.

Locked.

Her jaw clenched.

“Robby—” Dana said sharply.

Trinity let out a harsh, strangled sound as her body seized, muscles pulling rigid all at once. Her eyes rolled before fixing, unfocused.

“On her side,” Robby ordered, hands already at her shoulders.

They rolled her as her body jerked in short, violent bursts—relentless, rhythmic. Foam gathered at the corner of her lips. Robby carefully held her head just enough to keep her from hitting it on the gurney.

“Two of Ativan IM. More suction. High-flow oxygen.”

“Any history of seizures?” Frank asked.

Kim’s head snapped up from the glucometer.

“Robby—glucose is 28.”

The room shifted.

“Okay,” Robby said, sharp and immediate. “Hold the Ativan—do we have a line in?”

“No.”

“Glucagon, intranasal. D50, IO. Now. Do we know if she’s diabetic?”

Glances and shrugs were exchanged across the bed.

“Not that I know of,” Dana said.

The monitor screamed.

“Sats are down to 88 on the non-rebreather,” Perlah said.

“Get an intubation tray on standby,” Robby said.

A wet sound bubbled in Trinity’s throat. Fluid ribboned through the suction tubing.

“She’s vomiting,” Frank said, grabbing her shoulder and pulling it further forward.

“84%,” Perlah added.

Robby’s eyes flicked to Frank’s, just long enough for the calculation to pass between them.

“We need to tube her,” Robby decided, shaking his head. “Etomidate and roc. Frank, set up for an IO if we can’t get that line.”

“Glucagon going in,” Perlah called.

For several agonizing moments, nothing changed.

Trinity’s body stayed rigid, jerking hard against the mattress, no meaningful expansion of her lungs.

“Sats?” Robby asked as the team flurried around him, scrubbing the IO site.

“84,” Perlah replied.

Robby tracked her chest, waiting for any trace of movement beyond the waves of convulsions.

Then he saw the smallest change.

The rigidity started to break into uneven tremors, muscles no longer locked straight.

Robby hesitated, watching closely.

Then Trinity coughed.

It was weak at first, followed by another that tore out of her, harsh and wet, her chest heaving violently.

He watched the saturation on the monitor tick up two percent. Three percent.

“Hold,” Robby said quickly, “Hold the RSI meds.”

She gave another cough, stronger than the last.

“Sats are coming back up,” Perlah said. “88. 90.”

Trinity’s body continued to loosen, the gaps between jerks becoming longer.

“I have access over here,” Mateo reported, flushing a new IV line.

“Push the D50.”

It was only a few seconds before she started to slow. The seizure burned off in stages, first softening the tremors, then fading entirely until her body sagged into exhausted stillness.

“Sats are up,” Perlah said. “96.”

“Okay,” Robby said, finally exhaling as he carefully released her head. “Hang D10. Keep her on her side with the non-rebreather. What’s her temp?”

“98.8,” Perlah replied.

Trinity made a soft sound, catching their attention.

“Trinity?” Robby called. “Can you open your eyes for me?”

Her lashes fluttered, then stilled.

“Still out,” Frank murmured. “Could be insulin exposure.”

“Maybe,” Robby said, nodding once. “Can someone check the Pyxis log—see if she accessed any insulin today. Or if she had any diabetic patients.”

“Yep,” Kim said, already heading for the door.

Frank watched the monitor. “She’s young to drop this hard. Something pushed her.”

Robby exhaled slowly.

“Have one hundred milligrams hydrocortisone IV on hand if her pressure doesn’t come up.”

“You thinking adrenal?” Frank asked.

“I’m thinking everything,” Robby replied. “Add cortisol, insulin, and ethanol levels to the labs. Let’s cover all our bases.”

“Pressure’s up to 98 over 70,” Perlah said.

“Better,” Robby nodded. “Let’s watch that, make sure it keeps coming up.”

Trinity shifted on the bed, drawing their attention back down to her.

Her eyes cracked open, slow and hesitant.

“Trinity?” Frank asked.

She turned her head slightly. The oxygen tubing tugged at the mask and she reacted immediately, tilting away from it. Her hand came up, unsteady and shaking, to shove it aside.

“Keep that on,” Dana said, carefully guiding it back over her nose.

Trinity flinched at the contact.

Her hand dropped from the mask and brushed the adhesive leads across her chest.

She stilled.

Her fingers slid downward, catching on wires, tape, the unfamiliar pull against skin. Her brow creased as she looked down, breath hitching.

A strained sound slipped out of her as her chest began to rise too fast, breaths stacking unevenly.

“It’s okay—” Dana started.

Trinity rolled onto her back instead, movement sloppy and misjudged. Her hands came up too fast for how unsteady she was.

She went to pull at the wires, trying to yank them off.

Hands shot down to still her. Trinity immediately fought them. She threw weak punches and kicks, not aimed or controlled. Pure reflex.

“Careful—” Frank warned.

Robby was already there.

He caught one of her wrists mid-arc, momentum jarring through both of them as her other hand came up, just as wild. He intercepted that one too, grip firm but careful, keeping her from connecting with anyone.

“Trinity,” he said sharply. “Stop.”

She fought him automatically, twisting, trying to pull free. Her breathing fractured into short, ragged pulls, a rough sound tearing loose when her body didn’t do what she wanted. Her eyes skated around the room—lights, movement, faces—never settling.

Robby shifted, stepping directly into her line of sight.

“Trinity,” he said, low and even. “Calm down.”

She didn’t.

He leaned closer anyway, voice dropping, narrowing everything down.

“Santos.”

Her eyes snapped to his.

The change was immediate.

Her body stayed tense, breath still too fast, but the resistance drained out of her all at once. Her hands trembled in his grip.

She stared at him, eyes still fierce.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “You’re in the ED. You’re alright.”

Her breathing began to space out, uneven but no longer escalating. The effort bled out of her.

She surveyed the room again, this time taking in the number of people surrounding her. She started to tense, the instinct to fight trickling back in.

“No,” Robby warned, squeezing her wrists to bring her attention back. “Right here.”

She looked back up at him, a faint crease pinching her brow.

“You had a seizure,” he said simply. “We’re taking care of you.”

Her mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

She closed it again.

Then—quieter now, more focused—

“My locker,” she slurred, looking for the door. “I need—”

The words stalled, unfinished, as she lost her grip on the thought. Her eyes found Robby again. “…what?”

“You’re confused,” he said patiently. “The only thing you need to do right now is rest. Can you do that for me?”

After a beat, she nodded. Small. Reluctant.

He released her wrists, hovering close. Her gaze slid off him again, muscles slowly giving up the fight.

“That’s it,” Robby said quietly, finally letting his hands fall away. “Good.”

Kim stepped up beside the bed.

“Little poke, Trinity,” she warned before pricking her finger.

Trinity gave a small wince but didn’t resist.

Kim touched the test strip to the bead of blood pooled on her fingertip.

After a moment, the results popped up.

“46,” she said, turning the screen briefly to Robby.

“Coming back up,” Frank said. “Still pretty damn low.”

“Keep the D10 running,” Robby said. “Check it again in five.”

Kim nodded and stepped toward the counter, slipping the meter back onto its dock.

The room softened, but it didn’t relax.

Monitors continued their steady chatter. Dana pulled a blanket up over Trinity’s shoulders, careful not to jostle the IV.

Trinity lay with her eyes closed now, not asleep so much as spent.

Robby stayed where he was. He had an ER to run but he couldn’t bring himself to step away.

“Do me a favor,” he said to Frank. “Get out there and keep things moving. I’ll grab you if we need you.”

“I got it,” Frank nodded, slipping back out into the chaos of the department.

Robby watched the rise and fall of Trinity’s chest. The way her fingers twitched occasionally against the sheet, then stilled. He checked the monitor. The drip. Her face.

Five minutes passed.

“Glucose?”

Kim was already there.

Another quick prick. Another bead of blood.

Trinity stirred but didn’t wake, her face tightening briefly before smoothing out again.

“54,” Kim said.

Robby dragged the computer closer, placing a few orders between glances at Trinity and the monitor.

“BP’s back up,” Dana noted. “112 over 72.”

“I definitely like that one better,” Robby said, blowing out a long breath.

Another five minutes.

“Glucose?”

Kim pricked her finger again. This time Trinity stirred more noticeably.

“62.”

Better.

Not great.

“Alright,” Robby said. “Same plan.”

Trinity’s eyes opened again, clearer this time. Her gaze found him and held.

“Hey,” he said, leaning in. “You back?”

She nodded.

“You know where you are?”

“Work,” she said hoarsely.

“What day is it?”

A pause.

“Monday.”

“You know who I am?”

“Unfortunately.”

A startled laugh slipped out of him. “Yep. You’re back.”

She scanned the room now, cataloging details: Dana at the counter, Kim near the bed, the IV in her arm, fluids dripping steadily overhead.

“Something knocked your blood sugar down to 28,” Robby said.

Her eyes snapped back to him.

“We’ve got you back up to 62 now. Do you have diabetes?”

The question stalled her.

Her expression went blank, like she was sorting through too many pieces at once.

“I…” She swallowed. “I didn’t eat today,” she said finally, shaking her head.

Robby nodded once. “Twenty-eight is very low for fasting alone. Any history of adrenal issues? Addison’s?”

“No.”

“Steroids recently?” he asked. “Stopped them suddenly?”

“I’m not an idiot,” she snapped.

“I didn’t say that,” he replied, leaning back.

“I haven’t eaten, okay?” Her voice cracked despite her effort to keep it sharp. “I haven’t slept. For weeks I’ve been—” She stopped, jaw tightening. “It’s just been a lot.”

The words landed smaller than she meant them to.

Robby let the silence sit.

“Residency is demanding,” he said finally. “And it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Life piles on.”

She nodded faintly, eyes still down.

“If you need time,” he went on, measured, “or space, or a break—we can figure something out. This place is not worth your health, Trinity.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said quietly. “Won’t happen again. I promise.”

“You’re not in trouble,” Robby said. “This is concern, not reprimand.”

She exhaled hard. “I fucked up, okay? Just discharge me and I can go.”

“Absolutely not.”

Her shoulders tightened, irritation cutting through.

“I’m fine now,” she protested. “I just need food and sleep. I can do that at home.”

“No, you need a D10 drip and Q10 glucose checks,” he replied, pushing off the bedrail and heading for the door. “Which you can’t do at home.”

He walked away, leaving no room for argument.

“This is ridiculous.”

“So is a blood sugar of 28,” he tossed over his shoulder as the door swung shut behind him.

“Asshole,” she muttered.

“Usually I’m inclined to agree,” Dana said lightly, stepping up to the computer. “Just stay put for a bit. Then we’ll see about getting you out of here.”

“Fine,” Trinity said, dropping her head back onto the pillow.

The room fell quiet.

You got into the car before your thoughts could turn into something louder. 

In. Out.

One.

Two.

Three.

The door clicked shut with a soft, final click.

For a second, you didn’t move. Just sat there with the note still in your hand, the steering wheel cold under your palms.

Dana’s voice surfaced first- calm, certain, impossible to ignore.

The man I know…

Then Jack’s, rougher around the edges.

He thinks he did something bad enough that you changed your entire life.

Your grip tightened.

That wasn’t the truth.

He had done something, but the result wasn’t bad. Not like he thought.

Something had changed in your life.

And the worst part wasn’t what you’d done to protect it.

It was how quickly your brain started building a world where it never existed at all.

There was separation between your worklife and your homelife. They always taught in Med school that you had to separate your outside life from what you had going on at home. Compartmentalize, detach, survive.

Maybe you had gotten too good at it.

You had left PTMC when you found out you were pregnant. Started over at St. Mary’s. New hospital. New badge. New life built carefully around silence and control. 

No one knew. Not really. Not the part that mattered.  

Your little boy had five people in the world that knew he existed. One of them was his pediatrician. One was your OB/GYN. Dana and Jack were just necessities. Pieces you’d stolen from your old life just to keep him safe.

This was supposed to feel controlled. Responsible. Safe.

It didn’t.

It felt like you were erasing the most important part of yourself. You had built your entire world around your son… and still had to hide inside it.

How was that fair?

You finally started the car.

The engine filled the silence before you could spiral any further.

Breathe.

It’s time to clock in.

You had to be a mother now. Not the doctor. Or the woman with a past. 

Just Mason’s mother. 

The wall in your mind was coming back up- familiar, practiced, necessary. 

You didn’t know how long it would hold this time.

Your apartment was quiet, save for the soft whir of the baby monitor. Mason was asleep in his crib, one tiny fist curled near his cheek. You stood in the doorway of the nursery, watching him breathe. Dana’s words echoed in your mind.

He’d see a son.

There was a knock on the front door, sharp and insistent in the quiet. You froze. No one ever visited this late. Through the peephole, the hallway light illuminated a familiar, weary face.

Robby stood on your welcome mat, his hands shoved in his pockets like he was trying to hide the fact that they were shaking. He wasn’t in his scrubs anymore. 

What. The. Fuck.

You checked in on Mason before you made a move to open the door. You peer into the dim nursery. He was still asleep, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. Reassured he wouldn’t wake up, you walked back to the front door. You unlocked the deadbolt and opened it just a crack, the chain lock still engaged.

“Robby,” you said, your voice low. “It’s late… and you’re on my doorstep.”

He stood on the other side, the hallway’s harsh fluorescent light casting harsh shadows under his eyes. He looked…unstable. 

He didn’t push the door. Just stood there, looking at you through the narrow gap like it might close if he moved too fast.

‘I know I shouldn’t be here,” he said softly.

His jaw tightened, like even saying that felt like crossing a line.

“Jack gave me your address.”

Shit.

He dragged a hand over the back of his neck. He wasn’t quite looking at you. He was looking through you like he was trying to put a square peg in a round hole in his mind.

“He’s been… off. The past few days.”

A small, humorless exhale.

“You didn’t see him when his wife died. It’s like that. It was eerie. Like he knows something and won’t say it out loud.”

His eyes flickered up to yours, searching, then away again.

“I asked him what was going on and he just-” he stopped, shaking his head, frustrated. “Nothing. Wouldn’t give me anything.”

You took a breath. Control this.

But he kept going before you could get a word in.

“Then I went in to cover Chen’s shift and Jack just… snapped.”

His voice dropped.

“Said if I didn’t come now, I might not get another chance to fix whatever I broke.”

Another breath- shakier this time. You were sure if it was yours or his.

“And then he handed me your address on a crumpled piece of paper like he had been carrying it around for a while. He-” He cut himself off, jaw working like he was chewing his words.

Silence stretched for a second.

“He still wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong,” Robby said, quieter now. “But I saw you at lunch.”

His eyes finally locked onto yours- and this time he didn’t look away.

“You said it was the opposite of someone else. I’ve been stuck on that all day. The opposite of someone else isn’t no one. It’s… more than one person.”

His gaze was intent, searching your face in the sliver of light from your apartment. “Please,” he said, “Either let me in… or tell me to go to hell. But don’t make me stand out here and guess anymore.”

“Fine. Okay,” You said, your voice barely a whisper. You carefully shut the door, your heart hammering against your ribs. You could hide this from him. 

What was the harm in a quick visit if it got him off the scent? 

He was exhausted. Confused.

Not-

Not close enough to see it.

You moved through the living room in a frantic, silent dance. 

The brightly colored mat- rolled and shoved under the sofa. 

The stack of clean burp cloths went into a kitchen drawer. 

The dirty bottle in the sink- covered with a dish towel. 

You paused at the entrance to the short hallway, breath catching as you glanced in the nursery. 

Mason was still asleep. The monitor glowing softly beside him. 

You pulled the door completely shut. 

And immediately felt it.

Guilt. Sharp and instinctive.

Fuck, what if something happened and you couldn’t hear him?

You push the door back open. Just a crack.

Breathless, you returned to the front door, unhooked the chain, and opened it fully.

You hoped you didn’t look like a mad woman who had just speed cleaned her house.

Robby hadn’t moved. His eyes flickered to your face- then past you, into the apartment.

Taking it in.

Too carefully.

He stepped inside. You closed the door behind him, the click of the latch sealing you in your personal hell. He was in Mason’s space. And he didn’t even know it.

“Can I get you something?” you asked, your voice too cheery. “Water? Coffee?”

He didn’t answer. 

His gaze moved through the room. Slow. Quiet. Not casual.

Taking things in.

The too-clean surfaces. The faint, unfamiliar smell in the air. Something… off.

Then his eyes caught on the sofa.

A small shape tucked between the cushions.

He stilled.

A pacifier.

Like Mason had planted it there himself. Like he wanted to be found.

He was farsighted, not nearsighted. Then his eyes traveled to the almost-closed nursery door. A soft, questioning hum came from his throat.

You followed his gaze to the pacifier then to the door then back to him.

No. No no nonononono-

“It’s not what you think,” you said, forcing a short, casual laugh that sounded brittle even to your own ears. “I’ll make some coffee, yeah? You can tell me about your trip.” You quickly grabbed his hand- his skin was cool like the blood had drained from it- and pulled him toward the kitchen, away from the damning pacifier on the couch.

He let you pull him, his body moving, but his eyes stayed fixed on the nursery door. In the kitchen, you released his hand and turned to the coffee maker, your back to him. You fumbled with the filter, your fingers clammy and clumsy.

Get. Your. Shit. Together.

“The trip was… fine,” he said, like he wasn’t really present in the room with you.

“Long. Quiet.” 

“I read a lot of books I’d been meaning to read.” 

“Saw some mountains.”

“It was… fine.”

You could feel his gaze pierce through your back. The silence felt like a lifetime, thick and heavy, broken only by the gurgle of the coffee maker starting to brew.

He whispered your name. Not ‘baby.’ Your real name. Said so softly you almost didn’t hear it over the machine.

You didn’t turn around. You gripped the edge of the counter, your knuckles white.

“...whose baby is that?”

“A real one,” you said, your voice thin. Your hands shook, making the carafe clatter against the base. “Can we ignore the baby for right now? Please?”

You hear how insane that sounds, but you say it anyway.

Robby didn’t answer. He just stood there, in the doorway of your kitchen, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. The coffee maker began its noisy, gurgling cycle, filling the small space with the smell of dark roast. It was a normal sound, a normal smell, in a moment that felt anything but.

“Ignore the baby,” he repeated, his tone hollow. “There’s a baby in your apartment. And you’re asking me to ignore that.”

He took a step forward, not towards you, but to the side, as if to get a clearer view down the hall. His face was pale, his expression one of dawning, terrible comprehension. All the pieces- your disappearance, your new job, your evasions, the ‘opposite of someone else’- were clicking into a picture he clearly hadn’t let himself consider.

“How old?” he asked, like he already knew the answer.

“Please, Mikey,” you said, your voice cracking on the old, soft nickname you’d never used before. Your hands were trembling as you stepped directly in front of him, trying to block his view. You place your palm flat against his chest, a feeble attempt to push him back. “Please… let’s have coffee. Please.”

This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. There were bricks being thrown at your carefully crafted walls.  You had to patch the holes before the whole structure came tumbling down.

You can’t.

He didn’t budge. He was solid, immovable. He looked down at your hands on his chest, then back up at your face. His eyes, usually so expressive and warm, were wide with a kind of horrified clarity.

“‘Mikey,’” he repeated, the name sounding foreign and broken in his mouth. “You haven’t called me that. Ever. You thought nicknames were stupid.” He gently, firmly, took your wrists and moved your hands away from him. He didn’t let go. “How old is that baby?”

The coffee maker beeped, signaling it was done. The silence that followed was absolute, save for the soft, precious coo that sounded from Mason in his room.

He was waiting. They both were waiting. Neither was going to be moved, distracted, or ignored anymore.

You shook your head, tears welling up and blurring the stark lines of his face. “You left,” you whisper, the words a choked accusation and a plea all at once. You bit your lip hard, trying to hold back the inevitable sob, but your body betrayed you with a violent, silent shudder. You couldn’t meet his eyes. You stared at the floor, at his scuffed boots, anywhere but at the dawning realization you knew was there.

Robby’s hands, still holding your wrist, went slack. He released you. For a long moment he was perfectly still. The only sound was your ragged breathing.

He did the math. His eyes lost focus as he calculated backwards.

“Three months,” he said. He didn’t need to lay eyes on Mason to know that. His voice was eerily calm, detached, as if he were diagnosing a complex case from a distance. “That baby is three months old.”

“Oh, God,” he breathed. He took a stumbling step backwards, bumping into the kitchen counter. He brought a hand up to cover his mouth. “Is it… is it mine?”

‘I…” You couldn’t get the words out fast enough between the sobs. A sharp, startled cry from the nursery cut through the tension- Mason, woken by the commotion.

In a blur, you turned and rushed down the short hall, pushing the nursery door fully open. The secret was out. The soft nightlight cast a gentle glow over the crib. Mason was on his back, his face scrunched, working up to a full wail. You scooped him up instantly, his warm, solid weight a familiar anchor against your racing heart. You cradled him close, your back to the doorway, rocking gently. “Shhh, it’s okay, baby. Mama’s here.”

The crying subsided into soft, hiccuping whimpers. You could feel Robby’s presence in the doorway behind you, a silent looming shadow. A part of you hoped this was a horrific nightmare you were going to wake up from any moment. You pressed a kiss to Mason’s dark hair, breathing in his sweet, clean scent.

“I’m not a bad mother.” you spoke into the dim room. You repeated it to yourself. Maybe it was to convince yourself your decisions weren’t wrong.

“You’re not a bad mother.” Robby confirmed, “You’re a careful mother.”

When you finally dared to glance over your shoulder, he was in the doorway. Staring at Mason, his expression utterly shattered. He took one hesitant step into the room, then another, moving as if he was in a dream. He stopped a few feet away, close enough to see the details of his son’s face in the dim light.

His breath hitched. “He has your chin,” he whispered, his voice raw with awe and devastation.

You held Mason tighter, his little body a warm shield against the world collapsing around you. “He…” you managed through hiccuping sobs, “He has your… everything. Spitting image.”

Robby made a sound like he’d been punched in the gut. He took another step closer, his hand lifting as if to touch, then fell back to his side. His eyes never left Mason’s face, tracing every feature with a desperate, hungry intensity.

“What’s his name?” he pleaded.

“Mason.”

“Mason,” he breathed, testing the name.

You nodded, fresh tears spilling over. ‘Mason Robinavitch,” you whispered, giving your son the full name you’d only ever written on official forms.

At the sound of his name, Mason turned his head, his big dark eyes- Robby’s eyes- blinking sleepily in the low light. He stared curiously at the strange man looming in his room.

Robby’s composure shattered. A single, silent tear tracked down his cheek. He didn’t wipe it away. He just stood there, utterly cracked open, looking at his son for the very first time.

“I left,” he said, his voice thick with a grief so profound it seemed to hollow him out from the inside. “And you had our baby. Alone.”

It wasn’t an accusation or question. It was a broken statement of fact.

“I had our baby. Alone.” you nodded, rocking Mason for some semblance of comfort for both of you. “I think I had to be pregnant a month before you left. I… I don’t think I noticed I was pregnant until three months in. S-stress, I think.”

A doctor’s explanation felt absurd in the face of the living, breathing child in your arms. Robby listened, his gaze still locked on Mason, absorbing the timeline. The math was brutal. He’d been walking around, packing for his sabbatical, while you were carrying his child and didn’t even know it.

How selfish was he?

“Three months,” he echoed. He finally dragged his eyes up to meet yours. The heartbreak, not just at the loss of time with his son, but the heartbreak for you was so complete it stole your breath. “You went through your whole pregnancy. The birth. The first three months. And I was… reading books in the mountains.”

He said it without a trace of self-pity, just a stark, horrifying statement. He took one more step, closing the final distance between you. He didn’t reach for Mason. He reached for you, his rough palm coming up to gently cup your cheek, his thumb brushing away a tear. His own tears were falling freely now, silent and unchecked.

“I am so sorry,” he whispered, the words ragged with a grief that seemed to be etched on his very bones. “Baby, I am so, so sorry.”

“You didn’t know. I… I didn’t want you to know. I’m so angry.” You shook your head, looking down at Mason, who had finally fallen back asleep, his long lashes fanning over his cheeks.

Robby’s hand was still on your face, his touch achingly gentle. ‘I know you are,” he said, his voice a raw scrape. “You have every right to be. I left. I didn’t… I didn’t fight for us. I just went.”

He let his hand fall, but he didn’t step back. He stood so close you could feel the heat of him, could see the pulse hammering in his throat. Mason slept peacefully, unaware of the storm he had just caused.

“Can I…” he started, then stopped, swallowing hard. He looked up at you, his eyes pleading. “Can I hold him? Just for a minute?”

“He’s sleeping… he startles easily,” you said, the truth a flimsy shield for the real, primal fear coiling in your gut; that if you handed Mason over, you’d never see your son again. It was ridiculous, you knew that. You know Robby. But some little primitive part of your brain was resource guarding. “Maybe… another time? I’m sorry. I know it’s a lot to ask. I… I don’t mean to be cruel.”

Robby’s face crumbled. He took a slow, shaky breath, his eyes closing for a second as he wrestled with the rejection. When he opened them, the raw hurt was there, but so was a dawning understanding.

He looked from your terrified face to Mason’s peaceful one, then back to you. He took a deliberate step back, putting more space between himself and his son, a physical gesture of surrender.

He ran a trembling hand through his hair. “Tomorrow. Okay. I’ll… I’ll come back tomorrow.”

He looked utterly lost, standing in the middle of your son’s nursery, like a man who had found treasure only to be told he couldn’t have it.

You just nod once. It’s easier than trying to form words around the conflicting emotions in your chest.

Robby lingers for half a second longer- like he wants to say something else, like leaving now might cost him something he just got back- but he doesn’t.

For once… he listens.

He turns and walks out of the nursery, slower than he came in. You hear the soft creak of the old floorboards, the quiet click of the front door.

And then-

Nothing.

Real silence this time.

Not the kind you built. 

Not the kind you forced into place. 

The kind after a hurricane passed.

Mason shifts slightly in your arms, a soft, sleepy sound leaving him as he settles deeper against your chest. 

Your son is still with you.

You press your cheek to the top of his head, your eyes closing as your grip tightens just a fraction.

Breathe. 

One.

Your lungs don’t cooperate.

Two.

Your chest aches like it’s trying to relearn how to expand.

Three.

Air.

Shaky. Uneven. But yours.

You survived.

Barely.

But you did.

And for the first time since you found out you were pregnant.

There’s no divide between your two worlds.

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The blood disappeared after the first wash. You know that. You've spent enough years in hospitals to know exactly how long it takes soap and water to do their job. Yet somehow you're still standing there, staring down at the sink while hot water rushes over your hands. It takes several seconds before you realize you've been washing the same spot on your palm over and over again.

"No."

The word slips out before you can stop it.

You shut the faucet off and brace both hands against the edge of the sink. Water drips from your fingertips into the basin below.

"No. Absolutely not."

A moment later, Perlah squeezes past you on her way back into the department. She takes one look at your face and immediately slows.

"You okay?"

"Fine."

"You look like you're planning a murder."

You grab a paper towel with perhaps slightly more force than necessary.

"I'm considering several."

Perlah studies you for another second before nodding.

"You know what, yeah."

Then she's gone, leaving you alone with the growing certainty that your life has somehow become a practical joke.

Because this is ridiculous.

Not embarrassing. Not inconvenient.

Ridiculous.

You are a third-year emergency medicine resident. You work shifts that blur together until entire weeks disappear. Most days begin before sunrise and end long after dark. You survive on caffeine, stubbornness, and the increasingly fragile belief that residency will eventually end. You have career goals. Fellowship considerations. Research obligations. Student loans. More unfinished charting than any one human being should reasonably possess.

You do not have time for feelings.

You especially do not have time for feelings involving your attending.

The realization had arrived ten minutes ago with all the subtlety of blunt force trauma.

Not because Jack smiled at you.

Not because he looked good.

Not because of any of the things people usually point to when describing the moment they fall for someone.

It happened during a code.

One second you had been discussing a possible appendicitis workup. The next, alarms were sounding down the hall and everyone was moving. There had been no time to think. No time to hesitate. Just immediate action.

You can barely remember crossing the department.

You remember the rhythm instead.

The compression count.

The monitor.

The medication doses.

The familiar cadence of voices in a crowded room.

Most of all, you remember Jack.

Not in a romantic way. Not in the dramatic sense your brain seems determined to insist upon now.

You remember him because he was simply there, occupying his place in the room as naturally as if he'd always belonged there. Orders were exchanged before either of you had fully finished speaking. You knew what he needed before he asked. He knew what information you were gathering before you reported it. Months of working together had built something efficient between you, a kind of professional shorthand that made difficult situations feel manageable.

The patient got pulses back.

The room relaxed.

People dispersed.

And somewhere in the aftermath, while entering orders and trying to slow your own heart rate, you'd looked across the room and felt something shift.

The realization itself had been deceptively simple.

You trusted him.

Completely.

At first, that realization hadn't seemed particularly alarming. Trust was necessary in emergency medicine. Lives depended on it. Every day you trusted nurses to catch mistakes before they happened, residents to communicate important changes, attendings to make the right call when things became complicated. Trust wasn't remarkable. It was the foundation of the entire department.

The problem was that the thought refused to leave.

Even as you finished documenting the code and moved on to your next patient, it remained lodged somewhere in the back of your mind, irritating and persistent. And the longer it sat there, the more another uncomfortable truth began to emerge. You didn't just trust Jack. You trusted him more. More than other attendings. More than people you had known longer. More than was probably reasonable.

The realization spread through your mind with horrifying efficiency, illuminating things you had somehow managed to ignore for months. Suddenly every strange habit, every reaction you'd dismissed as professional admiration, seemed impossible to explain away. You thought about how your eyes automatically searched for him whenever you walked into the department, how his opinion carried a weight that nobody else's did, how criticism from him could linger for hours while a single compliment could improve an otherwise miserable shift. You thought about the strange sense of relief that settled over you when you saw his name on the schedule, the way difficult cases felt more manageable when he was nearby, and the fact that whenever something good happened, some part of you always wanted to tell him first.

One realization became several. Several became dozens. Before long, it felt as though your own brain had assembled a meticulous presentation entitled Evidence That You Are Completely and Irrevocably Screwed, complete with supporting data and peer-reviewed conclusions.

You closed your eyes and immediately searched for alternative explanations.

Exhaustion seemed like a reasonable place to start. You had worked six shifts in seven days and consumed an amount of caffeine that would probably concern a cardiologist. At some point that morning you had stared directly at a medication label and temporarily forgotten how to read. Your judgment was compromised. Your cognitive function was questionable. There had to be a physiological explanation for whatever was currently happening.

Maybe it was sleep deprivation. Maybe it was stress. Maybe residency had finally broken something important in your brain after years of threatening to do exactly that. Any of those possibilities would have been preferable to the obvious answer, which was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Because the obvious answer was that somewhere between overnight shifts, trauma activations, endless charting, and months of standing shoulder to shoulder in crowded resuscitation rooms, you had fallen in love with Jack without noticing it.

The thought landed with enough force to make your stomach drop.

Your eyes flew open. For a moment you simply stared at your reflection in the steel basin, as though the exhausted woman looking back at you might offer a more reasonable explanation. Instead, all you saw were dark circles beneath your eyes, hair escaping from its ponytail, and the expression of someone experiencing a genuine personal betrayal.

"No."

The word sounded ridiculous even to your own ears.

You straightened slightly, pressing your palms against the edge of the sink as though physical stability might somehow compensate for the complete collapse of your emotional equilibrium. This was not happening. It simply wasn't. You refused to accept it.

You had survived medical school. You had survived surgical rotations, which should arguably qualify as a form of psychological warfare. Compared to those things, this should have been manageable. All you had to do was ignore it. Pretend it wasn't happening. Continue functioning exactly as you had before.

It was a solid plan.

Ignoring it lasts approximately thirty-seven minutes.

For thirty-seven whole minutes, you manage to convince yourself that whatever happened at the sink was nothing more than an unfortunate side effect of exhaustion. Residency has done stranger things to your brain. You've worked enough overnight shifts to know that sleep deprivation can make a person emotional, irrational, and occasionally incapable of distinguishing between a genuine crisis and a completely manufactured one. By the time you've finished documenting a trauma evaluation and worked through half your patient list, you've almost succeeded in talking yourself down.

Then you hear his voice.

"Dr. Y/N."

Your hands pause briefly over the keyboard before continuing to type.

"Mm."

The response is deliberately noncommittal. You don't look up. Instead, you focus intently on your chart, suddenly fascinated by documentation that had felt mind-numbingly boring only seconds earlier. If you acknowledge him, you'll have to look at him, and at the moment that feels like an unnecessary risk.

Unfortunately, Jack has never been particularly respectful of strategic avoidance.

A second later he appears beside your workstation, leaning one shoulder against the desk as though he has every right to occupy your personal space. The irritating part is not his presence. The irritating part is that you know he's there before you even glance up. Somewhere over the last year your brain has developed an alarming ability to track Jack's location without conscious effort, the same way it tracks monitor alarms or trauma activations. The awareness is immediate, automatic, and deeply unhelpful now that you've realized what it probably means.

"Trauma One."

Suspicion immediately replaces avoidance.

You finally look up.

"What about it?"

"You forgot to order repeat labs."

You stare at him.

"I did not."

"You did."

"I absolutely did not."

Jack doesn't argue. Instead, he reaches over, rotates your monitor slightly, and points toward the order set currently displayed on the screen. The movement is annoyingly confident, made worse by the fact that he already knows exactly what he's going to find. You follow his finger to the chart, scanning through the orders once, then twice.

There are no repeat labs.

For several seconds, you continue staring at the screen in the vague hope that the orders might spontaneously appear if you give them enough time.

They do not.

Beside you, Jack waits with the patience of a man who knows he's right and is enjoying the experience.

You lean back in your chair and let out a slow breath.

"...I may have forgotten the labs."

The corner of his mouth lifts immediately.

"That's not an apology, kid."

Under normal circumstances, being called kid would irritate you. Today it irritates you for an entirely different reason.

"You know what?" you say, pointing at the chart. "Maybe I forgot on purpose."

"Really?"

"Really. I wanted to experience what it feels like to forget something important. I figured attendings seem to enjoy it, so I'd broaden my horizons."

For a moment he simply looks at you. Then a laugh slips out before he can stop it.

The sound settles somewhere directly beneath your ribs.

That is new.

Or maybe it isn't new. Maybe the laugh has always affected you this way and you've only just become aware of it. The possibility is significantly worse.

Jack shakes his head, still smiling slightly.

"You've got a lot of confidence for somebody who forgot basic patient management."

"I learned from the best."

"That's not the insult you think it is."

"Damn."

The smile widens despite his obvious attempt to suppress it. Then he taps the edge of your monitor and says, "Order the labs."

You sigh heavily enough to qualify as performance art.

"Yes, grandpa."

"I'm not old enough to be your grandfather."

"You sure act like him."

His eyebrows rise.

"Careful."

The warning carries no actual threat behind it. That's the problem. Somewhere along the way the two of you established a rhythm that feels less like resident and attending and more like an argument that has been running continuously for months. You challenge him. He challenges you back. Neither of you seems particularly interested in stopping.

Looking back, you suspect that should have been your first clue.

Because the truth is that this is your favorite part of the day. Not trauma activations. Not procedures. Not difficult diagnoses. This. Standing at a workstation arguing about forgotten lab orders while the department buzzes around you. Trading sarcastic remarks. Making each other laugh. Existing together in a way that has become so familiar you stopped noticing how much you relied on it.

The realization lands quietly this time.

Not with panic.

Not with horror.

Just certainty.

This is why.

Not because he's attractive. Not because he's your attending. Not because of some dramatic moment lifted from a romance novel.

It's because somewhere between overnight shifts and impossible cases, he became your person.

The one you look for.

The one whose opinion matters most.

The one whose presence makes impossible days feel manageable.

Across the department, someone calls his name. Jack glances toward the trauma board, immediately shifting back into attending mode as another problem demands his attention.

"Order the labs, doctor."

You wave him away without looking up.

"Go save lives."

His eyes narrow slightly.

"You forgot the labs."

"You'll never let this go, will you?"

"Not a chance."

A moment later he's gone, disappearing back into the flow of the emergency department. You watch him leave for longer than necessary before forcing your attention back to the chart in front of you.

The realization arrives almost immediately.

You watched him leave. Again.

Your stupid heart follows right after him.

Traitor.

"So."

The voice appears so suddenly that you nearly drop from your chair.

You look up to find Santos leaning against the neighboring workstation with the unmistakable expression of someone who has witnessed something entertaining and intends to make it everybody else's problem. Whitaker is sitting a few feet away working on his charts, though the grin already tugging at the corner of his mouth suggests he knows exactly where this conversation is heading.

Immediately, you become suspicious.

"Guess we're flirting with our attendings now, huh?"

You don't bother looking away from your chart. Partly because you still have work to do, but mostly because looking up would require acknowledging that she may have a point, and you're not emotionally prepared for that conversation.

"I don't know," you reply, clicking through a patient's lab results. "Are we sleeping with trauma surgeons and pretending it doesn't suck the life out of us?"

The reaction is instantaneous.

Whitaker makes a strangled noise that sounds suspiciously like laughter disguised as a cough. Santos whirls around and points at him before he can contribute anything useful.

"Don't."

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're literally smiling."

"I can't control my face."

"You absolutely can."

Whitaker wisely returns his attention to the computer, though the grin lingering on his face suggests he's enjoying this far more than he should. Santos narrows her eyes at him for another second before turning back toward you with renewed focus, apparently remembering that she was in the middle of interrogating you.

"First of all, how dare you, bitch. Second of all, way to deflect. Not answering my question."

"What question?"

"The question where you were staring at Abbot like he personally hung the moon."

You scoff and finally look up from your chart. "I was not."

Neither Santos nor Whitaker appears remotely convinced. They exchange one of those infuriatingly knowing looks that people only seem capable of when they're absolutely certain they're right, and you immediately regret acknowledging either of them.

"You absolutely were," Santos says. "In fact, I think you've got a little drool right here."

Before you can stop her, she reaches toward your face. You slap her hand away on instinct.

"Get off me, you weirdo."

"I'm just trying to help."

"You're being extremely annoying today."

"And yet," Santos replies, entirely unbothered, "I'm still waiting for an explanation."

"There isn't one."

"Interesting, because from where I was standing, it looked a lot like flirting."

You return your attention to the chart, hoping silence will accomplish what logic apparently cannot. Unfortunately, Santos interprets your refusal to engage as confirmation. The dramatic gasp she lets out is loud enough that two nurses glance over from the desk.

"Oh my God."

"What?"

"You didn't deny it."

For reasons completely beyond your understanding, this immediately becomes the highlight of her evening. She looks genuinely delighted by the discovery while you rub a hand over your face and wonder whether transferring hospitals is still a realistic career option.

"I hate this department."

"No, you don't."

"I really do."

"No," Santos says with the absolute confidence of someone who has never once questioned her own conclusions. "You just hate that I, the smartest person here, noticed."

The worst part is that she's probably right. The even worse part is that before you can think of a comeback, your attention betrays you completely. It's automatic, lasting less than a second, but your gaze drifts toward the hallway Jack disappeared down a few minutes ago.

You catch yourself immediately.

Santos catches it faster.

The woman's ability to identify gossip-related developments borders on supernatural.

Her grin becomes unbearable.

"Oh, you've got it baaaad."

"Shut up."

"Bad."

"Santos."

"Really bad."

"Drop it."

By now Whitaker has abandoned any attempt at professionalism and is openly laughing into his coffee. You briefly consider throwing a chart at both of them, but before you can determine whether the resulting paperwork would be worth it, Mel appears seemingly out of nowhere and drops into the empty chair beside Santos.

"Hey," she says, looking between the three of you. "What are we laughing about?"

Santos doesn't even hesitate.

"Nothing. Just discussing how Miss Sunshine over here apparently enjoys doing charity work for the elderly."

Mel's eyes widen immediately.

And you begin seriously reevaluating the consequences of workplace violence.

The problem is that once you've noticed it, you can't seem to stop.

For the first few days, you tell yourself you're imagining things. You're hyperaware because of the realization, that's all. Anyone would be. If you spend enough time thinking about a person, naturally you'll start paying more attention to them. It's confirmation bias. Selective observation. A perfectly normal psychological phenomenon that definitely does not indicate you're catastrophically in love with your attending.

Unfortunately, that explanation starts to fall apart almost immediately.

The issue isn't that you're noticing new things about Jack. The issue is that you're suddenly recognizing the significance of things you've apparently been noticing all along.

You see it during overnight shifts, when the department finally quiets for a few precious minutes and exhaustion begins catching up with everyone. Most attendings disappear into offices when they get a chance to breathe. Jack usually stays on the floor. Sometimes you'll glance up from a chart and catch him rubbing a hand over his face, eyes closed for a brief second before the next patient pulls his attention away. The fatigue is obvious in those moments, written across his expression in a way he'd probably hate if he knew anyone had noticed. Yet somehow, no matter how exhausted he is, he never seems to let it affect the way he treats people.

You start seeing that everywhere.

You see it in the patience he shows family members asking the same question for the fourth time because they're scared and not really listening to the answer. You see it in the way he explains procedures, diagnoses, and risks without ever making people feel stupid for not understanding medical terminology. Most patients leave the emergency department remembering the diagnosis they received. Somehow, many of Jack's patients leave remembering how he made them feel.

The more attention you pay, the more examples you find.

A nurse mentions her son has been sick for several days. Three shifts later, Jack asks whether he's feeling better. A patient comes back to the department weeks after an initial visit, and Jack remembers the dog's name they'd spent half the appointment talking about. One morning he hands you a cup of coffee before shift change and, without thinking, orders it exactly the way you drink it. Not because you've reminded him recently. Not because you've mentioned it at all. Simply because he remembered.

The realization shouldn't affect you as much as it does.

Plenty of people are thoughtful. Plenty of people are kind.

But medicine has a way of grinding those qualities down. Long hours, impossible patient loads, endless administrative demands, and constant exhaustion tend to strip people down to their essentials. You've watched it happen to residents, attendings, nurses, and even yourself. Everyone becomes shorter on patience. Less generous with their energy. More focused on simply surviving the shift.

Yet somehow Jack remains stubbornly, frustratingly himself.

Even on terrible days, he stays late to help with difficult patients. He answers questions he doesn't technically have to answer. He takes responsibility when things go wrong and shares credit when things go right. He never asks residents to do work he wouldn't do himself, and you've lost count of the number of times you've found him transporting patients, helping nurses, or handling tasks that someone with his level of seniority could easily hand off to somebody else.

The worst part is that none of it feels performative.

He isn't trying to impress anyone.

Most of the time, he probably doesn't even realize you're watching.

But you are watching.

That's the problem.

You notice everything now, and every new observation feels less like discovering something about him and more like uncovering evidence that has been sitting in front of you for months. Each detail slots neatly into a picture you were somehow too blind to see before.

By the end of the week, you've reached a conclusion that is both humiliating and impossible to dispute.

You are paying far too much attention to Jack.

And the more attention you pay, the more hopelessly doomed you become.

Three weeks later, you're stitching a laceration on a sixteen-year-old's forehead when Jack walks into the room.

The patient, Dean, is recovering from what the chart diplomatically describes as a "fall from height," though the actual story involved a garage roof, a trampoline, and a level of confidence that far exceeded his coordination. Fortunately, the resulting injuries are limited to a forehead laceration, a badly bruised shoulder, and what will hopefully become a valuable lesson in decision-making. Unfortunately, Dean appears to have learned absolutely nothing.

"So how big is the scar gonna be?" he asks while you place another stitch.

"If you're lucky, barely noticeable."

"And if I'm not lucky?"

"Then you'll have a permanent reminder not to jump off buildings."

"I wasn't jumping off a building."

"You were on a roof."

"That's different."

His mother immediately disagrees from her chair in the corner. "It is literally the same thing, Dean."

While Dean launches into an argument that seems destined to continue indefinitely, you focus on the repair in front of you, grateful for the distraction. For the last several weeks, distractions have become increasingly valuable. Ever since the unfortunate revelation in Trauma Two, you've been attempting to proceed with your life as though nothing has changed. The strategy has been moderately successful right up until the moment Jack enters a room, at which point your brain abandons all professional objectives in favor of becoming deeply irritating.

The curtain shifts, and before you've even looked up, you know exactly who it is. That realization is becoming alarmingly common. Somewhere along the way, you've apparently memorized the rhythm of his voice, the sound of his footsteps, the way he moves through the department. It's information you never consciously decided to learn, yet it exists in your head anyway, filed away alongside medication dosages and trauma protocols.

"Hey," Jack says as he steps inside. "I'm Dr. Abbot. Just checking in. How's it going, Dean?" He glances briefly at the chart before looking back at the teenager. "Looks like you took quite a fall."

Dean immediately brightens. Patients tend to respond well to Jack. You've observed this often enough to stop finding it surprising, although you still find it mildly annoying. Children trust him. Parents trust him. Even the difficult patients who spend half their visit arguing usually soften after speaking with him for a few minutes. He has an irritating ability to make people feel heard, which unfortunately turns out to be an attractive quality.

"Yeah, but I'm okay now," Dean says. Then, after studying Jack for a moment, he adds, "Are you the boss of this hospital?"

Jack looks genuinely confused by the question. "No."

Dean points directly at you.

"She seems like the boss."

A laugh escapes before you can stop it. Across the room, Jack follows Dean's gesture, glances at you for a second, and then nods with the kind of certainty that suggests he's been waiting for an opportunity to say exactly that.

"Yeah," he agrees. "That sounds about right."

You roll your eyes, but Dean's attention has already sharpened. Teenagers possess an extraordinary ability to identify dynamics between people, especially when those dynamics would be embarrassing if acknowledged. You can practically see him studying the two of you, assembling information, drawing conclusions. The process is visible enough that a sense of dread begins creeping up your spine long before he actually opens his mouth.

His mother notices it too.

"Dean," she says warningly.

The fact that she says his name before he's spoken is not reassuring.

"What?" he asks.

Whatever instinct normally prevents people from saying inappropriate things appears to have completely abandoned him.

"You guys married?"

The question lands like a grenade.

For one terrible second, the room goes completely silent except for the monitor beeping beside the bed. Your hand actually pauses in the middle of tying a stitch. Dean's mother immediately closes her eyes as though she's reconsidering several major parenting decisions.

"Oh my God," she mutters.

"Absolutely not," you say at the exact same moment Jack says, "No."

The overlap only makes things worse.

Dean narrows his eyes.

You recognize that expression. It's the look of someone who believes they've discovered something interesting and intends to investigate further.

"That's very suspicious."

"It isn't," you say immediately.

"It kind of is."

"It really isn't."

"It definitely is."

You finish tying the stitch with perhaps slightly more force than necessary. "Dean, I am currently holding a needle."

His mother starts laughing. Jack is visibly trying not to. Neither response improves your mood.

The conversation somehow continues from there despite your best efforts to end it. Dean remains convinced he's uncovered a mystery. His mother continues apologizing. Jack contributes absolutely nothing helpful, choosing instead to stand there with the unmistakable expression of someone enjoying your suffering. By the time you've finished the final stitch and started explaining wound care instructions, the entire room has accepted that you're never going to hear the end of this.

What bothers you most is not the question itself. Teenagers say ridiculous things all the time. What bothers you is the tiny moment beforehand, the fraction of a second when Dean looked between you and Jack and apparently saw something worth asking about. The possibility lingers in the back of your mind throughout the rest of the procedure, unwelcome and impossible to dismiss.

When Jack finally heads toward the door, Dean calls after him with all the confidence of someone who has decided he's correct.

"Good luck, man."

Jack laughs, shakes his head, and disappears into the hallway.

You hate how long your gaze remains fixed on the doorway after he's gone.

You hate even more that Dean notices.

The breaking point arrives during a night shift.

Of course it does.

There is something about three o'clock in the morning that strips people down to their essentials. By then, the coffee has stopped helping, the adrenaline reserves are running low, and everyone in the emergency department is operating on habit, instinct, and sheer stubbornness. The waiting room is overflowing. A chest pain patient has become a STEMI halfway through an evaluation. One of the psychiatric patients has attempted to leave twice. A drunk college student managed to vomit directly onto your shoes and then had the audacity to apologize by calling you "bro."

You have been moving almost continuously for ten hours. You cannot remember the last thing you ate. You vaguely suspect it was yesterday.

By the time the twelve-year-old arrives, you're already exhausted.

The kid is struggling to breathe before he's even fully through the doors. Severe asthma exacerbation. Retractions. Tachypnea. Oxygen saturation dropping. The panic in his mother's face is somehow worse than the panic in his own. Cases like this always hit harder when they're children.

The next hour disappears into work.

Nebulizers. Steroids. Magnesium sulfate. Oxygen. Reassessment after reassessment. Watching every rise and fall of his chest. Listening to every breath sound. Waiting for improvement while trying not to think about all the ways things can go wrong.

Eventually, mercifully, they begin to go right.

The wheezing softens. His respiratory rate slows. The terrified look in his eyes begins to fade. By the end of the hour he's sitting upright in bed, exhausted but breathing comfortably, while his mother wipes tears from her face and thanks everyone in the room with the kind of overwhelming relief that only comes after genuine fear.

You give discharge planning another few minutes, answer questions, make sure they're both okay, and then finally step into the hallway.

The moment the door closes behind you, the adrenaline disappears.

Not gradually.

Completely.

The crash is so abrupt it almost makes you dizzy.

You lean back against the wall and close your eyes for what is intended to be only a second. Around you, the emergency department continues moving at its usual pace. Life continues exactly as it always does.

You simply no longer feel capable of keeping up with it.

"Hey."

You know the voice immediately.

How could you not?

Opening your eyes feels like a mistake, but you do it anyway. Jack is standing a few feet away, studying you with an expression that instantly makes you defensive.

"How long since you've eaten?"

You groan. "I'm not doing this."

"That's not an answer."

"I'm busy."

"So eat while you're busy."

"I don't have time, dr. Abbot."

Jack reaches into the paper bag he's carrying and holds out half a sandwich.

You stare at it.

Then at him.

Then back at the sandwich.

"What is this?"

"A sandwich."

"I know what a sandwich is."

"Congratulations."

You narrow your eyes.

Unfortunately, you're too tired to sustain proper indignation. After a few seconds you take the sandwich, mostly because arguing requires energy you no longer possess.

Jack settles against the wall beside you without asking permission. The gesture should probably feel strange. It doesn't. That's part of the problem. Somewhere over the last year, his presence has become so familiar that your brain accepts it automatically.

For a while neither of you says anything.

The silence isn't awkward. That's another problem.

It would be much easier if it were awkward.

Instead, the two of you stand there eating stale cafeteria food while the department moves around you, and somehow it feels more restful than the fifteen-minute breaks you've spent alone in the resident lounge.

After a minute, Jack nods toward the room you'd just left.

"You did good in there, kid."

The words settle heavily somewhere beneath your ribs. Anyone else would probably assume he was complimenting your medical management, and maybe he was, partially, but you've worked with him long enough to understand what he actually means. He's talking about the way you sat with the kid when he was scared, the way you stayed calm when his mother couldn't, and the fact that you always seem to carry difficult cases long after everyone else has moved on.

"You don't have to do that, you know."

Jack glances over. "Do what?"

"Act like every difficult patient is somehow my responsibility."

Something shifts in his expression then, not enough that most people would notice, but enough that you do.

"You know you can't save everybody."

The statement is gentle, which somehow makes it worse. You look away before he can see your reaction. Of course you know that. Every physician knows that. It's drilled into you from the beginning because it has to be. If you carry every loss, every complication, every patient you couldn't help, eventually the weight becomes impossible to bear. The problem has never been knowing it. The problem is believing it.

"You care too much."

A weak laugh escapes you.

"That's rich coming from you."

The corner of his mouth lifts, and some of the tension eases despite yourself. The conversation falls quiet after that and neither of you seems particularly interested in leaving. Your shoulder brushes his when someone pushes a stretcher past, and neither of you immediately moves away. Standing there in the middle of a crowded emergency department, exhausted enough that your usual defenses have finally worn thin, you realize something that should have occurred to you weeks ago.

For all the time you've spent treating your feelings like a problem to solve, you've never seriously considered the possibility that you weren't alone in them.

The thought hits hard enough to make your pulse stumble. You turn your head before you can stop yourself and immediately regret it. Jack is already looking at you.

That shouldn't matter. People look at each other during conversations all the time. You've worked entire shifts together. You've stood side by side through traumas, codes, procedures, and disasters of every imaginable variety. There is absolutely no logical reason his attention should affect you differently now than it did a month ago. Unfortunately, logic stopped being relevant somewhere around the moment you realized you were in love with him.

The emergency department continues moving around you, but it suddenly feels farther away. The overhead pages, monitor alarms, and constant movement blur into background noise as your brain focuses on one deeply unfortunate detail. Jack isn't looking at you because you're speaking. He isn't looking at you because he's waiting for an answer. He's looking at you because he wants to. The certainty settles into your chest with terrifying ease, bringing with it the quiet understanding that whatever has been growing between the two of you for months has not been happening exclusively inside your own head.

"No."

Jack blinks. "What?"

Horror arrives immediately. You actually said that out loud.

Years of education. Years of training. Countless high-pressure situations requiring calm, professional decision-making, and somehow this is the response your brain produces when confronted with mutual feelings. For a brief moment you consider pretending it never happened, but Jack knows you far too well for that.

Straightening abruptly, you shove the last bite of sandwich into your mouth and point at him with the kind of accusatory conviction usually reserved for criminal investigations.

"No."

His eyebrows rise.

"...No?"

"No."

What exactly am I being accused of?"

The fact that he's amused immediately makes everything worse.

"You know what."

"I genuinely don't."

"You absolutely do."

For a second he simply watches you, and then you see the exact moment understanding arrives. It appears first in his eyes and then in the slow curve of his mouth. It's not the grin he gives you when you're arguing with him or the expression he wears when you're being particularly stubborn. This is something quieter. Warmer. The kind of look that instantly confirms every suspicion you've spent weeks trying to suppress.

"Oh."

You close your eyes.

Of all the possible responses, somehow that one is the most infuriating.

"Oh is exactly what I'm trying to avoid."

His smile only widens.

"That's usually not how this goes."

Suspicion immediately replaces embarrassment.

"How what goes?"

"When people realize they have feelings for someone."

You nearly choke.

"There is no universe in which we're having this conversation."

"We're definitely having this conversation."

"I refuse."

"You already started it, sweetheart."

The betrayal is immediate and profound. You stare at him in disbelief, waiting for some indication that he's joking, but Jack simply looks back at you with infuriating patience. A second later he laughs, not politely or under his breath but genuinely, and the sound catches you completely off guard.

For weeks you've been carrying this realization around like a catastrophe waiting to happen. You've treated it like a problem that needed solving, an obstacle that needed eliminating before it could do any real damage. Every instinct you've had since that afternoon at the sink has been focused on containment. Ignore it. Suppress it. Outwork it. Pretend it isn't there. Yet standing here now, exhausted after a miserable shift and listening to Jack laugh at your complete inability to manage your own emotions, you discover that none of the disasters you'd been expecting have actually occurred. The hospital is still standing. The emergency department hasn't burst into flames. You have not died of embarrassment, despite several close calls.

Against your better judgment, a reluctant laugh escapes you too.

The feeling that follows is strange. The weight you've been carrying doesn't disappear entirely, but it shifts. For the first time it feels shared rather than hidden, acknowledged rather than buried. The fear is still there, but it's no longer yours alone.

When the laughter fades, Jack is still looking at you, and there is something in his expression that makes your chest ache. Affection, certainly. Understanding. Maybe even relief. Whatever it is, it strips away the last of your excuses. You should be terrified. Realistically, this is the point where panic would make the most sense. Instead, for the first time since this whole disaster began, you feel something unexpectedly steady.

Because this no longer feels like something happening to you against your will. It feels like a choice sitting quietly between the two of you, a possibility neither of you has touched yet but one that suddenly seems real enough to reach for.

Your first instinct remains exactly the same.

Absolutely not.

The problem is that, for the first time, you're no longer entirely convinced that's your final answer.

"Just because." You shrug, slowly inch closer towards hallway.

"Are you mad? Did I do something?" Jack finally moves, but stops before he gets too close to make you more upset or mad when you clearly don't want to be close to him.

"No. I just want to sleep on the couch."

"C'mon, doll, give me a real answer. We can just talk it out or-or I'll sleep on the couch. You sleep here." Jack tries to reason with you but for a reason Jack can't even fathom, you are set on on the couch.

"It's okay, handsome. I'll see you in the morning. Goodnight, love you." And then you are off, settling yourself on the couch as you giggle into your hand.

It takes Jack 10 minutes to lull over what he should do. You hear him turn off the bedside lamp and then the rustle of his duvet.

Jack's torn between giving you the space you need and between missing you. But the decision comes and you hear the sound of his crutches on the floor as he moves through the dark house.

You hear him stop next to the couch and you have to cover your mouth so he doesn't hear you giggle. It's quiet for a second before the cushions in front of you dip, and Jack slides in next to you.

"Oh my god, Jack. You're gonna fall." This time, you let the laugh escape you. Because this ridiculous man hold ons to you for dear life just so he doesn't fall on the ground.

"Don't care." He murmurs, practically manhandling you on top of him. "It's your fault, angel. You don't want to sleep next to me or communicate with me. So you're going to sleep like this."

That earns him another laugh from you, your chest shaking. "Okay, okay. Let's go to bed."

"Nope. You're mad. So we're both sleeping on the couch."

"Baby, it was a prank." You breath out in between chuckles, you can see him frown even through the darkness.

"I saw it on TikTok. I'm sorry." You're not really sorry because you are laughing your ass off as you see his reaction.

When his shock wears off, he's clutching you even tighter to him, head buried in your neck. "Oh thank god, sweetheart. You got me so worried."

"Awww, babe, why do you have to be so damn sweet?" Your laughter dies down. You just wanted to tease him a little, not to worry him like this.

"Because my sweetness needs to balance out the fact you are a little minx." There he is. Your Jack with his smart mouth and quick hands. He pinches your side and sits up as you yelp in surprise.

"Okay, come on now, doll. No more couch. My back can't handle sleeping on it." Jack mumbles out. He gets up on his crutches and somehow manages to grab your duvet as well.

"Okay, let's go old man." You tease him and then laugh some more as he shakes his head at you.

"You are really pushing it tonight, huh?" His voice dips deeper as he says it, and you are exactly where you want to be. Teasing him and then squirming under his knowing smirk is your speciality.

God. Maybe you should do pranks like this more often if it gets you this reaction.

“Dada’s lying with his hair?”

Okay. How can you not give her a chuckle at that?

“No, baby. He didn’t lie. Hair color changes when people get older. I’ll go grey like him one day.”

Chubby’s brow furrows in a way that is so cartoonishly Jack. She looks offended by the concept of aging. Jack’s offended by the concept of aging. Like father, like daughter. 

“He was red like me?”

You nod. 

“Exactly like you.”

And that will be what will kill you, you’re sure. Wonderfully. You’d have it no other way. 

The betrayal of her father’s haircolor change gives way to wonder, you think, but she’s studying the photo the best way a six-year-old can. Her thumb traces his hair, then his for-the-camera grin. 

…Like she’s trying to find herself hidden in him. 

She whispers.

“Dada and me was matching before he was grey.”

…Whatever need you had to laugh, if there still was, dies. Yep. Why wouldn’t it? That is a child’s sentence. Everything Jack’s tender n’ terrified about. Time, age, mortality, how much of Chubby he’ll get to see. The future is his cross to bear just as much as the past is. And the present. He's a triple-threat.

And here’s the sweet girl you gave him, making it sweet as pie. The pie's gonna poison the hell out of you, but the comparison still stands.

“Yeah, you and Dada were matching.” 

Still are, in a way. You’re sure that’ll only be more obvious as she grow—

“What are you two doing?”

Jack surprises you at the doorway to the closet. You wonder how emotionally prepared he is for the answer to his question. His reading glasses are shoved up into his hair. 

Chubby holds up the photo with the spring of her arms. 

You manage to find a laugh to stifle again, because the whiplash on his face is beautiful. Basic incomprehension, then comprehension, then death in his eyes. 

Maybe something flustered, but it’s buried underneath his scowl. You'll let it slide.

“Where the hell’d you get that?”

Chubby stands, clutching the photo to her chest. 

“You had red hair like me! We MATCH! You lost yours, but you was so ginger!”

You ‘oop’ when you catch Jack’s scowl faltering. There was no way that wasn’t inevitable. You knew it from the minute he walked into the closet, because if his irritation is going to lose its footing, it’ll be with his perfect little girl. 

But…he takes to glaring at your shit-eating grin.

“I wasn’t…I didn’t…sweetheart, I wasn’t as ginger as you—”

Nope. Absolutely not. You’re not allowing that!

You rise from the floor to interrupt whatever Jack’s pathetic excuse was going to be. You put your lips to his ear and whisper. 

“Jack, you cannot break her heart n’ claim you had brown hair with ‘warm undertones’  like you did with me when I found out. You’re just gonna have to continue feeling like you’re being split open. She’s six. You’ve had enough time to practice handling it. Kay?”

Jack makes a face that looks unwilling and pained.

 “...M’kay.”

His voice is just as pained, like you have a gun to his head. You might as well, because he is not ruining this. 

You kiss him on the cheek as a reward. He steps closer to Chubby. 

“Yeah, pretty. I had red hair like you.” 

And you can’t regret the threat, even as your heart swells to the point of a beautiful burn at the sigh of Chubby grabbing onto him, as if the discovery has made her and her dad secret twins. Jack looks down at her red head pressed against his thigh. Her proud face tipped up at him. 

“You lost yours, but it’s okay, Dada. I still love you. Pick me up.”

Jack’s throat bobs. You can hear the swallow. And because you know he’s not going to, you remind her of manners. 

“What do we say, Chubs?”

“...Please.”

Jack picks her up without any hesitation. He stopped pretending he wasn’t trained to her commands by the time she turned two. He bends and settles her on his arms, even though you know it makes his shoulder complain, because she’s getting big enough now. He’ll probably let his arm fall off before he admits it. 

Oh God. She presses the photo next to his face, comparing. 

She kills you as much as she kills Jack. Is killing him. 

“But I wish you could be ginger again. You can?”

Jack shakes his head, mouth twitching. Face betraying him by telling you how he’s keeping himself from being overwhelmed by the moment. “No, I can’t.”

“Whyyyyyy, Dada?”

“Time.”

Chubby frowns. “Time is a meanie.”

Jack’s mouth twitches again. 

“Yeah. It is.”

Yeah. Time is fucking cruel. Time reminds him there are pictures of a younger, easier version of himself who had more time left. The version of him he didn’t want his baby to know because he needs her, very badly, to love him as he is now. Silver makes him look like what he’s become, least. Old enough to be useful. The ginger punk in the photo looks too unguarded. He doesn’t deserve to have a little girl with the same color in her hair someday. 

He doesn’t now. 

“It’s okay, Dada. I keep it for you!”

Yeah. Jack’s lungs stop working right. 

“...Good. You do that. You wear it better than I did.”

He thinks he’s dying, probably. Could be, but it looks like you know better. He wonders what you see in his eyes. Whatever it is, he tries hard to fight it gone. 

…He didn’t even think of her ginger hair as something from him, cause how could something from him be so…so damn perfect? 

Besides, since she was born, he has looked at her to see you first. Your nose. Your eyes n' complexion. Your stubborn pout. Your loud-as-hell joy. He didn’t think it mattered. This trait he thought time had taken from him. For better or worse. But…fuck.

It shows up bright and alive in the daughter you gave him. So yeah. It matters. It’s reminding him to take his heart medication. 

“Maybe you still have some.”

Chubby touches his hair, much different than how you do when you’re trying to melt him on purpose. She does it with serious intention but clumsy fingers. She parts the grey at his temple as if she’s gonna find a few strands of red hiding somewhere. 

“Your dad doesn’t have any of that ginger hair of yours left. It’s all gone.”

Chubby shakes her head before poking his chest. 

“You have it inside. In your heart. Hearts are red.”

…His kid’s perfect. She doesn’t notice the way she’s just boiled both of her parents’ emotional stability with her revelation that must make sense to her in that little head. 

And because you warned him, Sleepy, he gets to warn you with his eyes. 

Don’t start crying, kiddo. Or he’ll die. Don’t want that to happen, do you? 

Chubby simply takes to rubbing Jack’s chest. 

“You’re still ginger inside. So we still match. Okay?”

The stoicism on Jack’s face dies by an inch. It feels like a sinkhole to him. He kisses her forehead, quick and rough. 

“Alright, Chubs.”

“No, say it.”

“Say what?”

“...Say you’re ginger inside and you and me match. Say it, Dada.”

Fuck. Again. He’s stopped pretending he doesn’t follow her every word, his little red-haired girl. The living proof that the past has made its way back to him in something bossy and half of you. 

When could he even deserve the pain his girls make him feel?

Jack sighs. 

“I’m ginger inside. We still match.”

Chubby beams. He allows that. He tries not to allow smarm-laced giggle you let out with a look he gives you. It usually means trouble for you, but it feels like it just means his outnumbered by two girls he’d brutalize someone to keep happy. 

“Ginger twinsssss!”

“...Sure, baby. Ginger twins.”

I have built a house where I wait for your return

The dress had been hanging on the back of the bedroom door for almost two weeks before Jack finally noticed it.

You had left it there on purpose, though you told yourself you hadn’t. You told yourself it was there because the closet was too full, because the garment bag was too long, because the silk would crease if you shoved it between winter coats and blazers. You told yourself a lot of things because admitting the truth felt too humiliating, and the truth was that part of you wanted him to see it. You wanted him to remember without being reminded. You wanted him to walk past it after a long shift, pause with his hand still on the doorknob, and say, “That’s for the gala, right?” like the date lived somewhere in his head that wasn’t overcrowded by trauma charts, shift changes, hospital pages, and everyone else’s emergencies.

It was a black silk gown, simple in the way expensive things were simple. Off the shoulder, fitted through the waist, smooth over the hips, with a slit that opened only when you walked. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t need to be. The fabric caught the bedroom light softly, almost like water, and every time you passed it, you imagined wearing it beside him.

That was the part that embarrassed you now. You had imagined it.

Jack in a dark suit. You in the black dress. His hand at the small of your back while people congratulated you. Maybe he would be tired, because he was always tired, but he would be there. You pictured him standing slightly behind you when people asked questions about the hospital contracts, his expression quiet but proud, his thumb brushing your hip like he needed to remind himself you were real. You pictured him leaning down and saying something low near your ear, something dry and teasing, something only meant for you. You pictured walking into a room and not feeling like you had to be impressive alone.

Three weeks earlier, he had stood in the kitchen with the invitation in his hand, wearing sweatpants and an old Pitt hoodie, his hair still damp from the shower. His eyes had looked bruised underneath from exhaustion, but when he read your name embossed in gold, he smiled.

“Dr. Y/N Abbot,” he said, running his thumb over the raised lettering. “Founder and Chief Systems Architect. This is fancy.”

You had been sitting at the island with your laptop open, pretending not to watch him too closely. There was a half-empty mug of tea beside your hand that had gone cold while you answered emails, and Jack had been barefoot on the kitchen tile, still carrying the warmth of the shower and the fatigue of the hospital with him.

“It’s a major industry gala, Jack. It’s supposed to be fancy.”

He looked up, amused. “I know. I’m just saying. This is real fancy.”

“You’re acting like I invited you to prom.”

“Kind of feels like it,” he said, setting the invitation down. “Except I don’t think anyone at my prom was casually entering billion-dollar valuation territory.”

You laughed despite yourself, and he came around the island, slipping his arms around your waist from behind. For a moment, you let yourself lean back into him. He smelled like soap, coffee, and hospital laundry detergent, that clean, sterile scent that had somehow become part of your marriage. His mouth brushed the side of your neck, and for a second, the kitchen felt like a place where both of your lives still fit.

“Don’t say it like that,” you murmured.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous,” Jack said, his voice low against your skin. “In a good way. My wife builds technology hospitals are fighting to buy, and I’m over here trying to remember where I left my badge.”

You turned in his arms and looked up at him. His hands stayed at your waist, warm and familiar. You could feel the small tremor of exhaustion in him, the way he was never fully still after a hard shift, like some part of his body was always bracing for the next alarm.

“So you’re coming?”

His smile softened. “Of course I’m coming.”

“You asked Harper to switch?”

“Already done.”

“You’re not on call?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Jack’s expression changed then, the teasing fading into something more careful. He touched your cheek with his thumb, and you hated how quickly your heart wanted to believe him. It was always like that with Jack. One gentle touch, one serious look, one promise said in that tired, sincere voice, and all the loneliness you had been trying to gather into evidence loosened in your hands.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m coming.”

You searched his face. “This one matters to me.”

“I know.”

“It’s not just dinner. We’re announcing the hospital network implementation contracts. The rollout plan. Market entry. The valuation estimate. This is the kind of night people remember.”

Jack nodded and kissed your forehead. “I’ll be there. I promise.”

That was the version of him you kept loving. The version that meant it. The problem was, Jack almost always meant it. If he had been careless, maybe you could have hated him properly. If he had forgotten because you did not matter, maybe the grief would have sharpened into something cleaner, something you could hold without blaming yourself. But Jack remembered in fragments. He loved in fragments. He showed up in small, exhausted pieces and looked at you like he wanted to give you everything, right before the world asked him for more than he had left.

And you kept living on those pieces.

A hand on your waist in the kitchen. His mouth against your temple before a shift. The rare mornings where he woke before his alarm and pulled you back against him like sleep had made him honest. The way he still looked at your face sometimes, quietly, almost helplessly, like he was surprised life had ever given him something soft. You had survived on that for longer than you wanted to admit, and that was the humiliating part. Not that he hurt you. Not even that he missed things. It was that one good look from him could still make you forgive a loneliness he had not yet apologized for.

On the night of the gala, he called you at 5:18 p.m.

You were standing in the bathroom in a silk robe while your makeup artist packed up her kit. Your hair was pinned into a low twist at the back of your neck, with a few pieces left soft around your face. Your earrings were already on, small diamond drops that caught the light whenever you moved. Your face looked finished in the mirror — warm skin, dark lashes, softly lined lips — polished enough that no one would know how nervous you were.

The bathroom smelled like hairspray, powder, perfume, and the faint steam from the shower you had taken an hour earlier. On the counter, your lipstick lay uncapped beside a little dish holding your wedding rings, which you had cleaned that afternoon because you thought there would be photographs of the two of you. The whole apartment felt too quiet, too prepared, like a stage waiting for someone who had not arrived yet.

Your phone lit up on the counter.

Jack.

Your stomach dropped before you even answered.

“Please don’t,” you said immediately.

There was a pause on the other end. Then Jack sighed, and the sound told you everything before he did.

“Y/N.”

You closed your eyes. “You said you weren’t on call.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You said you switched.”

“I did.”

“Then why are you calling me like this?”

He sounded tired already. Not physically tired exactly, but braced, like he knew he was about to hurt you and hated that knowing. “Harper’s kid got sick, and they’re short. It’s bad. I wouldn’t go in if they had coverage.”

You stared at yourself in the mirror. Your eyeliner was perfect. Your lips were perfect. Your whole face looked calm in a way that made you feel almost detached from it.

“Did they ask you, or did you offer?”

Jack didn’t answer quickly enough.

You let out a small, humourless laugh. “Oh.”

“They were drowning,” he said.

“So you offered.”

“I said I could come in for a few hours. I’m going to try to get out as soon as I can.”

You pressed your fingertips into the cool marble counter. The makeup artist moved quietly in your peripheral vision, pretending very hard not to listen.

“Jack, the reception starts at seven. Dinner is at eight. Speeches are at nine-thirty.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“That’s not fair.”

You looked down at your wedding band in the dish. The diamond caught the bathroom light, clean and bright and cruel.

“I can’t do this right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

The silence stretched. You could hear hospital noise in the background already: a distant page, someone calling for transport, the low hum of a place that never cared what anyone had planned.

“I’ll make it,” Jack said, but his voice had changed.

You heard the lie before it fully left his mouth.

“Don’t,” you said softly.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t give me a second promise to cover the first one.”

He exhaled. “Y/N.”

“I have to finish getting dressed.”

“I love you.”

Your throat tightened. “I know.”

He waited, but you did not say it back. After a few seconds, he said he would text you when he knew more, and you ended the call before he could apologize again.

The makeup artist stood very still, her brush bag in one hand, pretending she had not heard enough to understand. You looked at her through the mirror and smiled with the exact expression you used in investor meetings.

“Sorry about that.”

Her face softened. “No, don’t apologize.”

You picked up your lipstick and opened it even though your lips were already done. “I’m fine.”

She did not believe you, which was kind of her. At least she did you the courtesy of not saying so.

You waited until she left before you put your rings back on. For a moment, you stood in the quiet bathroom and looked at yourself in the mirror. The woman looking back at you was composed, elegant, expensive. She looked like someone who knew exactly where she was going. She did not look like someone trying to decide whether it was more pathetic to cry before the biggest night of her career or to still hope her husband might walk through the door in time.

You got dressed carefully. You stepped into the gown and pulled it up over your body, smoothing the silk over your hips with both hands. The dress fit perfectly. That almost made you cry. You had wanted Jack to see it. You had wanted the private little intake of breath he sometimes gave when he forgot to pretend he wasn’t stunned by you. You had wanted him to look at you like he remembered you were not just the person waiting at home with leftovers and patience.

Instead, you zipped yourself up alone.

The first news segment aired from the lobby of The Pitt just after 7:00 p.m.

It wasn’t unusual for the televisions in the emergency department to run local news with the volume low. Most of the time, no one paid attention unless there was a weather alert, a mass casualty incident, or something affecting hospital funding. It was background noise beneath sharper sounds: monitors beeping, wheels rattling, phones ringing, curtain rings scraping open and shut.

Jack was at the desk reviewing imaging when one of the nurses looked up at the television.

“Wait,” she said. “Is that your wife?”

Jack’s head lifted.

The screen showed the front of the Meridian Grand, a luxury hotel downtown with a glass canopy and warm lights spilling onto the rain-dark sidewalk. A reporter stood outside in a wool coat, holding a microphone while guests moved behind her in formalwear.

The lower-third banner read:

L/N POWER SYSTEMS CELEBRATES MAJOR HOSPITAL GRID CONTRACTS Company valuation expected to climb as implementation phase begins

Jack’s hand tightened around the tablet.

The reporter smiled into the camera. “Tonight, L/N Power Systems is hosting a private gala following a major round of hospital infrastructure contracts that could place the company among the most valuable emerging players in emergency energy systems. Founded by electrical engineer Dr. Y/N Abbot, L/N Power Systems has developed adaptive microgrid technology designed to keep critical hospital units powered during grid failures, natural disasters, and rolling outages.”

A resident standing nearby glanced between the television and Jack. “Dr. Abbot, that’s your wife, right?”

Jack nodded once. “Yeah.”

“Damn,” the resident said, clearly trying to sound impressed rather than awkward. “That’s huge.”

Jack did not respond. The broadcast cut to a graphic showing projected contract values, implementation timelines, and valuation estimates. The numbers were careful, couched in analyst language, but the implication was obvious. If your company hit its implementation targets and the contracts expanded the way people expected, you were on track to enter billion-dollar territory.

A nurse whistled quietly. “Billion with a B?”

Another nurse said, “And she designed the actual system?”

Jack looked at the screen. “Yeah.”

The nurse shook her head. “That’s wild.”

The camera returned to the hotel entrance just as your car pulled up. Jack knew it was you before the door opened. He recognized the way Mara, your assistant, stepped out first and turned back toward the car, one hand hovering near the open door.

Then you appeared.

For a second, the desk around him faded out. The dress looked different on you than it had on the hanger. It followed your body with quiet confidence, the black silk catching silver from the camera flashes and gold from the hotel lights. Your shoulders were bare. Your hair was pinned low, elegant but not severe, and the diamonds at your ears glittered whenever you turned your head. You stepped under the canopy and smiled for the cameras.

It was a beautiful smile. It was also the smile you wore when you were trying not to feel something.

The reporter turned as photographers called your name. “And there she is now, Dr. Y/N Abbot, founder and chief systems architect of L/N Power Systems. Dr. Abbot has been described by analysts as one of the most closely watched engineers in the hospital infrastructure space, especially now that her company’s adaptive grid platform is moving from pilot installations into large-scale implementation.”

Someone at the desk said, “Jack, aren’t you supposed to be there?”

Nobody meant it cruelly. That almost made it worse.

Jack swallowed, still watching as you paused beside the step-and-repeat, your clutch held neatly in both hands.

“I was.”

The answer made the area around him go quiet.

On-screen, a reporter asked you, “Dr. Abbot, tonight is being described as a turning point for your company. What does it mean to have hospital systems moving forward with implementation?”

You smiled, and Jack noticed your fingers tighten slightly around your clutch.

“It means the work is becoming real,” you said. “Designing the system was one part of it. Proving it under stress testing was another. Implementation is where it starts to matter for patients, doctors, nurses, and everyone relying on those seconds when the grid becomes unstable.”

The reporter asked, “There’s already discussion of a possible billion-dollar valuation. Are you thinking about that tonight?”

You gave a small laugh, polite and controlled. “I think my CFO is probably thinking about it more than I am. The valuation matters because it affects growth and deployment, but for me, the focus is still the technology. If a trauma bay stays powered during an outage because of something my team built, that means more to me than a headline.”

The reporter thanked you. You nodded, smiled again, and moved inside.

Jack stood very still until the charge nurse beside him looked over. “You okay?”

He dragged his eyes from the screen. “Yeah.”

She held his gaze long enough to make it clear she did not believe him. Then a trauma page came through, and the whole department lurched back into motion. Jack handed off the tablet, shoved his phone into his pocket, and went where he was needed.

Again.

At the gala, people kept asking where your husband was.

You answered the first few times with patience. “He got called into the hospital.”

Most people responded kindly. Some even looked impressed, as if Jack’s absence made the two of you nobler somehow.

“Oh, of course. Emergency medicine.”

“That must be so difficult.”

“You both do such meaningful work.”

“Power couple, even when you’re in different places.”

You smiled through all of it. “Yes. He’s very dedicated.”

The ballroom was beautiful, but after a while its beauty started to feel almost cruel. The ceiling was high and painted cream and gold, with chandeliers throwing soft light over round tables covered in white linen. Each place setting had a black menu card with gold foil, a small arrangement of white orchids, and a tiny glass votive candle. Along one wall, a projection displayed animated renderings of your adaptive grid system: hospital wings lighting in sequence, power rerouting through alternate pathways, emergency loads stabilizing under simulated failures.

Your company’s leadership team sat near the stage. Your engineers were at the tables closest to you, dressed in suits and gowns that looked slightly unfamiliar on them. You loved seeing the people who had built the system with you getting treated like they belonged in rooms where money moved. Some of them kept taking discreet pictures of the menus and the floral arrangements. One of your junior engineers had shown up in a suit that still had a faint fold line in the sleeve from being fresh out of the garment bag. Another kept touching the stem of his wineglass like he was afraid of breaking it.

You should have been happy. Part of you was happy. That was what made the grief feel so unfair. The night was not ruined. The contracts were real. The applause was real. Your team’s pride was real. Your name on that screen was real. All of it was real.

So was the empty chair beside you.

By the tenth time someone asked where your husband was, you stopped hearing the question as a question. It became part of the room.

Where is he?

In the clink of champagne glasses.

Where is he?

In the scrape of chairs being pulled out for other wives, other husbands, other people with someone’s hand resting warmly against the backs of their seats.

Where is he?

In the empty space beside your plate, where his name sat in elegant black ink on heavy cream cardstock.

Dr. Jack Abbot

You stared at it for too long once, long enough that Mara touched your elbow beneath the table.

“You okay?”

You smiled before you answered, because that had become its own kind of muscle memory. “Yes.”

But your chest ached with something so childish and raw that it embarrassed you. You wanted him to think of you. Not the company. Not the press segment. Not the award. You. The woman in the dress he had promised to stand beside. The woman who had cleaned her wedding rings because she thought there would be photographs. The woman who kept glancing at the doors like wanting him hard enough might make him appear.

You hated yourself a little for that.

You hated that even surrounded by applause, even with your name glowing behind you, some stupid, tender part of you was still waiting to be someone’s favorite thing in the room.

Mara stayed close, fielding conversations when she sensed you needed a breath. She wore a deep green dress and carried a tablet even though you had told her not to work tonight.

“You’re doing great,” she murmured when a hospital executive walked away after asking too many questions about rollout costs.

You looked at the champagne flute in your hand. You had not taken a single sip.

“I’m doing rich-woman cosplay.”

“You are a rich woman.”

“Not emotionally.”

Mara almost laughed, then looked at your face and didn’t.

Your hand went to your clutch, where the white envelope from the doctor’s office was tucked beneath your phone. You had not told anyone. Not Mara. Not your mother. Not Jack.

Especially not Jack.

The result had come through that morning after bloodwork confirmed what the home tests had already said. Five weeks. Early enough that it still felt secret and unreal, but real enough that the nurse had told you to start prenatal vitamins and book a follow-up appointment. You had sat in your car outside the clinic with both hands on the steering wheel, staring at the printed result until the words stopped looking like English.

Pregnant.

At first, you cried because you were happy. Then you cried because you were scared. Then, worst of all, you cried because the first person you wanted was Jack, and you had already known there was a chance he would not be there when you told him.

During dinner, your phone buzzed once. You checked it under the table.

Jack: I’m still here. I’m so sorry. I watched your interview. You looked beautiful. I’m proud of you.

You stared at it for a long moment. For a second, you felt nothing. Then the hurt arrived slowly, settling into the parts of you that had already made room for it.

Mara leaned closer. “Is it him?”

You put the phone face down on the table. “Yeah.”

“Is he coming?”

You smoothed the edge of your napkin in your lap. “No.”

Mara went quiet. Across the room, your CFO was laughing with two investors. Someone from the hospital network raised a glass toward you, and you smiled back automatically.

“I don’t want to cry in this dress,” you said.

Mara’s voice softened. “Then don’t. Be mad instead.”

You looked at her, and something in your chest tightened. “I’m so tired of being mad.”

That was the truth you never said out loud. Anger took energy. Anger required the belief that something could still change if you made enough noise. You were so far past that now. You were tired in a way sleep could not fix, tired of dressing up disappointment until it looked like understanding, tired of giving Jack the best parts of your compassion while keeping none of it for yourself.

The first time the lights flickered at The Pitt that night, nobody really reacted.

Hospitals had a way of making disaster feel routine at first. A monitor blinked. A ceiling light hummed. Somewhere behind the desk, a printer stopped halfway through a page and then coughed itself back to life. The nurses looked up, annoyed but not afraid, because annoyance was easier to wear than fear.

Jack was in trauma two with both hands pressed around a patient’s bleeding thigh when the second flicker came.

This time, the room noticed.

“Power?” someone asked.

“Backup should catch,” a nurse said, but her voice had gone thin.

Then the overheads steadied. The monitors held. The ventilator kept its rhythm. The trauma bay stayed bright.

A few seconds later, someone from facilities came over the radio, breathless and stunned.

“Adaptive reroute engaged. Critical load stabilized. We’re holding.”

Jack froze.

Only for a second, but long enough for the words to land somewhere beneath his ribs.

Adaptive reroute.

Your system.

Your work.

Your sleepless nights, your marked-up schematics, your laptop glowing blue at two in the morning while he came home too tired to ask what you were building. Your hands, your mind, your stubbornness, your company, your impossible little gap between failure and recovery.

The trauma bay lights stayed on because of you.

And he was not beside you when the world clapped for it.

“Dr. Abbot?”

Jack blinked and looked down. His gloves were slick. The patient was still bleeding. The room still needed him.

“Clamp,” he said, voice rough. “Now.”

He kept working because that was what he did. He kept people alive. He kept rooms from falling apart. He kept going until the crisis passed and everyone around him could breathe again.

But after, when the patient was taken upstairs and Jack stepped into the hall, the television over the nurses’ station was still showing the gala.

Your gala.

The reporter’s voice filled the space between ringing phones and rolling carts.

“Moments ago, L/N Power Systems’ adaptive grid platform stabilized a critical load interruption at an emergency department participating in one of its pilot programs. Company officials have not yet confirmed which hospital experienced the event, but analysts are already calling tonight a live demonstration of the technology’s value.”

A resident looked from the screen to Jack.

No one had to say it.

Jack already knew.

The hospital had needed you tonight too. The difference was, the hospital had gotten you.

He had not shown up for you at all.

Jack saw your acceptance speech from the staff lounge.

He had missed the start because a patient had crashed, and by the time he made it to the lounge, his scrub top was damp at the collar and his hands still smelled faintly of antiseptic even after washing them twice. Someone had turned the television volume up because your gala was now the top local business story of the evening.

You were on stage behind a podium, your award resting beside the microphone. The lights made your skin glow and turned the black silk of your gown almost blue at the edges. Behind you, the screen showed a slow animation of your company’s system keeping a surgical wing powered during a simulated outage.

Jack stayed in the doorway.

On the screen, you took a breath and looked out at the room.

“When I started this company, a lot of people told me the idea was too difficult to scale,” you said. “Some were polite about it. Some were not. I was told hospitals already had backup systems, that emergency power was a solved problem, and that the failure gap we were focused on was too small to justify the investment.”

You smiled slightly, and the audience laughed when you added, “The thing about engineers is that if you tell us the gap is small, we tend to ask what happens inside it.”

Jack’s throat tightened. He had heard you practice versions of this speech in the shower, in the kitchen, in the car. He had teased you once for rewriting one paragraph eleven times. You had thrown a pillow at him and told him the paragraph was weak.

Now you were saying it without him in the room.

“We built this system because seconds matter,” you continued. “A few seconds without stable power can change what happens in an operating room, in a trauma bay, in a NICU, in an elevator carrying a patient between floors. The goal was never to make hospitals perfect. The goal was to give them a better chance when everything else is failing.”

The staff lounge was quiet. Jack noticed one of the nurses standing near the coffee machine, arms folded, watching with damp eyes.

You glanced down briefly, then back up.

“I’m grateful for my team. I’m grateful to the hospital partners who believed in the technology early. I’m grateful to the people who asked hard questions, because they made the system better.”

You paused.

Jack knew that pause. He knew it because he had lived with you long enough to hear the breath you took before saying something that cost you.

“Tonight is a professional milestone, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel personal too. Building something this demanding changes your life. It changes your relationships. It tests who shows up, who wants to, and who actually does.”

Jack’s face went still.

On-screen, your expression remained calm, but your voice softened.

“I’ve learned that success does not make loneliness disappear. It can fill a ballroom. It can put your name on a screen. It can bring applause, contracts, and congratulations. But at the end of the night, you still know which chair beside you stayed empty.”

Nobody in the lounge moved.

Jack looked at the floor. He did not have to see the screen to know the camera would have found his empty chair. A place card with his name. A dinner plate cleared untouched. A visible absence.

But the camera did find it.

Not for long.

Just long enough.

There it was on the television: the chair beside you, empty beneath warm ballroom light. A white place card sat above the untouched dinner setting.

Dr. Jack Abbot

Someone in the lounge inhaled quietly.

Jack stared at his name on the screen.

It was different seeing it like that. Not as a missed text. Not as a fight waiting to happen. Not as something he could explain with patients and short staffing and impossible nights.

It was a space with his name on it.

A promise that had a shape.

An absence everyone could see.

You continued, steadier now. “I am proud of this company. I am proud of the team who built it. And tonight, I am proud of myself for believing that the things I needed were worth building, even when I had to build them alone.”

The applause started slowly, then grew.

Jack stood there, unable to move.

One of the residents near the table said quietly, “I’m sorry, man.”

Jack nodded, because there was nothing else to do. A minute later, his pager went off again.

You left the gala after midnight with your award in one hand and your clutch in the other.

People tried to stop you on the way out. A board member wanted to introduce you to someone from a national health system. Your CFO wanted five minutes about a follow-up call. A journalist asked for one more quote. You gave polite answers, promised emails, and let Mara run interference until you made it to the lobby.

Outside, the rain had slowed to a mist. The hotel’s front drive shone under the lights, slick and dark like spilled ink. Your heels clicked against the polished stone as you waited for the car. The night air was cold against your bare shoulders, and Mara draped your coat over you before you could pretend you were fine without it.

“You don’t have to go home,” she said.

You looked at the road. “I know.”

“I can book you a suite upstairs.”

“I already did.”

Mara turned to you.

You kept your eyes forward. “I booked it this afternoon. Just in case.”

Her expression changed, but she did not make it worse by reacting too much. “Okay.”

The car pulled up. The driver took your award and placed it carefully in the back seat. When you slid into the car, the dress gathered around your legs in a pool of black silk. Mara got in beside you.

For a while, neither of you spoke. The city moved past in blurred lights and wet windows. Billboards, traffic signals, restaurants closing for the night, people standing under awnings with cigarettes and phones. The world looked ordinary, which felt insulting. Something inside you had cracked open, and outside, people were still ordering late-night fries.

Mara broke the silence gently. “Do you want me to stay with you for a bit?”

You looked down at your clutch. “I’m pregnant.”

The words came out flat, almost too calm.

Mara’s head turned slowly. “Oh, sweetheart.”

Your eyes burned immediately. “I found out this morning.”

“Does Jack know?”

You shook your head. “I was going to tell him tonight.”

Mara covered her mouth for a second, then lowered her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

That was what undid you. Not the empty chair. Not the text. Not the speech. Just someone being sorry for you without making you explain why you had the right to be hurt.

You bent forward slightly, one hand pressed over your stomach, the other over your mouth, trying not to sob too loudly in the back of the car. Mara moved close and put an arm around your shoulders, careful of your hair, careful of the dress, careful of all the pieces of you that were barely holding.

“I wanted him there,” you said, voice muffled through your fingers. “I wanted one night where I didn’t have to understand.”

Mara rubbed your back. “I know.”

“I hate that I still wanted him.”

“That’s love,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t always leave when it should.”

You cried harder at that, because she was right. You thought you had moved past needing him like that. You thought if you got busy enough, successful enough, full enough, maybe you would not notice the missing parts so much. But then something happened, something beautiful or terrifying or important, and he was still the first person you wanted to tell.

You looked out the window, watching the city smear itself into streaks of white and red through the rain. Pittsburgh looked softer from inside the car, almost forgiving. Like it did not know what had happened to you tonight. Like somewhere behind all those lit windows, people were still coming home to each other.

“I’m sitting here with an award, a company people are saying might be worth a billion dollars, a baby I don’t even know how to feel brave enough for yet, and all I can think is that I wanted my husband to call me his girl one more time and mean it like nothing else in the world mattered.”

Mara reached for your hand.

You let her take it.

“I don’t know where to put all of this love,” you whispered. “That’s the worst part. I can leave the apartment. I can sign papers. I can sleep somewhere else. But what am I supposed to do with all the years I spent loving him?”

Mara squeezed your hand.

You looked down at your wedding ring.

“What if I spend the rest of my life missing him?”

The question was so quiet it barely felt spoken, but once it was out, there was no taking it back.

Jack came home at 2:38 a.m.

He opened the apartment door quietly, like quietness could make his absence smaller. The living room lamp was on. Your award sat on the coffee table, still gleaming, still heavy, still proof that the night had happened whether he had attended or not. Beside it were two envelopes. One cream, one white.

You were sitting on the couch in your gown. You had taken your earrings off. Your hair had loosened, soft pieces falling near your cheeks. Your lipstick had faded, and there were faint marks under your eyes where you had cried and carefully wiped the evidence away. Your heels were lined up beside the couch. Your bare feet were tucked beneath you.

Jack stopped near the door. “Hey.”

You looked up. “Hey.”

He closed the door and set his keys in the bowl by the entryway. The sound was small and domestic, so painfully normal that you almost laughed. How many times had you heard that exact sound? Keys in the bowl. Shoes by the door. His tired sigh. Your voice asking if he had eaten. Marriage had so many tiny rituals that survived even when the people inside them were falling apart.

“You’re still dressed,” he said.

“I know.”

“I thought you might be asleep.”

“I thought a lot of things tonight.”

Jack looked down. He was still in his scrubs under a dark jacket. His hair was messy from running his hands through it, and there was a line across his cheek from where a mask had pressed into his skin. He looked exhausted. He looked guilty. He looked like the man you loved.

That was inconvenient.

That was devastating.

He stepped farther into the room. “I watched your speech.”

You nodded.

“You were incredible.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. The way you talked about the system, the contracts, all of it. You were…” He stopped, searching for the right word. “You were exactly who you are.”

Your eyes filled, but you blinked the tears back. “That would have been nice to hear in person.”

Jack flinched. “I know.”

You looked down at your hands. Your rings caught the lamplight.

He came closer, stopping at the end of the coffee table. “I’m sorry.”

You smiled a little, but there was no warmth in it. “You say that so much.”

“I know.”

“I think that’s part of the problem.”

Jack sat in the armchair across from you instead of beside you. You appreciated that. At least he could still read a room.

“I didn’t want to miss it,” he said.

You looked at him. “I believe you.”

He seemed thrown by that. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you sound like that?”

“Because wanting to be there and being there are different things.”

Jack rubbed both hands over his face. When he lowered them, his eyes were red. “Harper called. They were short. I thought if I went in early, I could help stabilize things and leave before dinner.”

“You thought.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t call me before deciding.”

“I didn’t want to stress you out while you were getting ready.”

You stared at him, and he heard it as soon as he said it.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said quickly.

“You didn’t want to stress me out, so you made the decision alone and told me after.”

Jack leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I made the wrong call.”

“You made the familiar call.”

He swallowed.

The room settled around those words. Rain tapped softly at the windows. Somewhere outside, tires hissed against wet pavement. The apartment smelled faintly like his hospital jacket and your perfume, like two lives still pretending they knew how to touch without hurting each other.

“You don’t understand what it’s like there,” Jack said quietly.

The words came out tired. Not cruel. Not even angry at first. Just exhausted enough to be careless.

You went still.

Jack looked at you and immediately seemed to regret it. “Y/N, I didn’t mean—”

“No,” you said softly. “Say it.”

He closed his eyes. “I just mean, when someone is dying in front of you, when there aren’t enough hands, when people are looking at you like you’re the last thing standing between them and the worst day of their life, it’s not easy to walk away.”

You nodded slowly. “I know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

That one hurt.

You stared at him for a second, and something in your face changed. Not anger. Not even shock.

Exhaustion.

The kind that comes when someone you love finally says the thing you always knew they believed underneath all the apologies.

“You’re right,” you said.

Jack opened his eyes. “What?”

“You’re right. I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be you.”

His mouth tightened. “That’s not what I—”

“But I know what it’s like to keep the lights on when a hospital can’t afford for them to go out. I know what it’s like to have people depend on something I built, something I signed my name to, something that could fail in ways that would haunt me. I know what pressure is, Jack. I know what responsibility is.”

His face softened, shame creeping in.

You looked at the award on the table. “And I know what it’s like to be surrounded by people congratulating me while my husband is on a television screen’s other side, using my work to save people, and still somehow unable to show up for me.”

Jack’s eyes shone. “That’s not fair.”

The words came out before he could stop them.

You laughed once, small and wounded. “There it is.”

“Y/N—”

“No, it’s okay. It’s not fair. Someone was dying. The hospital was short. Harper’s kid was sick. There was a trauma. There was a power issue. There’s always a reason, Jack. There is always a reason good enough to make me feel awful for being hurt.”

His jaw worked, but no words came.

You leaned forward slightly, your voice low. “You know what the worst part is? I believe all your reasons. I believe they’re real. I believe they matter. I believe you’re a good doctor and a good man and that people are alive because of you.”

Your eyes filled.

“But I also believe I have been lonely in this marriage. And you keep asking one truth to erase the other.”

Jack looked down.

You reached for the cream envelope on the table. Your fingers brushed over the thick paper, and Jack’s gaze followed the movement.

“What is that?” he asked.

You held it in your lap for a moment. Jack looked at you like he wanted to memorize you and beg forgiveness at the same time. You wondered if he knew how often you had done that to him.

Memorized him, you meant.

The slope of his shoulders when he came home defeated. The faint scar near his eyebrow. The way his hands looked too capable around a coffee mug, too gentle when they touched you, too absent when you needed them and they were somewhere else holding someone else together. You had loved his face through every version of your own disappointment. You had loved him in doorways, waiting for him to take off his shoes. You had loved him across dinner tables where his phone kept lighting up. You had loved him in bed while he slept beside you, too exhausted to notice you were crying.

You had loved him so thoroughly that leaving him felt less like choosing yourself and more like cutting your own heart out before it could beg you to stay.

“I don’t want you to be a lesson,” you said suddenly.

Jack’s brows pulled together. “What?”

You looked down at your hands. “I don’t want to look back one day and tell people you taught me what I deserved. I don’t want you to become some sad, useful story about growth. I wanted you to be my husband.”

His face broke.

You swallowed hard. “I wanted you to be the person I came home to. Not the reason I had to learn how to stop waiting.”

Jack stared at you, and for a moment, you saw the words land somewhere deep enough to hurt him. You almost hated yourself for noticing. You almost hated that even now, a part of you wanted to soften the blow.

“When you asked me to marry you, I thought I understood what you were asking,” you said.

Jack’s face shifted. “What does that mean?”

You looked at him, and the ache in your chest sharpened. “I thought you were asking me to share your life. I thought it meant we would make room for each other, even when it was hard. I knew your job would be demanding. I knew there would be nights you couldn’t leave. I knew I would have to be patient sometimes.”

Your voice stayed even, but Jack’s expression was already changing.

“I didn’t know I was signing up to become the easiest thing to cancel.”

He closed his eyes. “Y/N.”

“I didn’t know I would have to feel guilty for needing you.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty.”

“But I do. Every time. Because there’s always a patient, or a shift, or someone sicker, or something worse. And I know those things matter. I’m not pretending they don’t.”

You set the cream envelope on the table and slid it toward him.

“I just can’t keep living like my pain only counts if it’s an emergency.”

Jack stared at the envelope. For a few seconds, he did not touch it. Then he picked it up.

You watched him open it. You watched him read the first page. You watched the colour leave his face.

“Divorce,” he said quietly.

You folded your hands together so he would not see them shake. “Yes.”

He looked up at you, stunned. “You want a divorce?”

“I don’t want this version of marriage anymore.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

You breathed in slowly. “I know.”

Jack stood, then seemed to realize he did not know where to go, so he sat back down hard. “When did you decide this?”

You looked toward the window. The city lights reflected faintly in the glass.

“I think part of me has been deciding for a long time.”

He shook his head. “No. We’ve had hard months. I know that. But divorce?”

“You keep saying it like I’m being dramatic.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“No,” you said. “You’re trying to find the part where I did this wrong, so you don’t have to look at how long you were doing it to me.”

Jack’s mouth tightened. “That’s not fair.”

The words left him fast.

Too fast.

You looked at him, and he looked like he wanted to reach across the room and take them back.

“Stop saying that to me,” you whispered.

His face cracked. “I’m sorry.”

“I am so tired of being told my pain has to be fair to yours.”

Jack covered his mouth with one hand and looked away.

You wiped your thumb over your ring. “I sat at that table tonight with your name card beside me. People kept asking where you were, and I kept making you sound noble because I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

Jack looked crushed. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. But I did. Because I’m used to protecting you from how it feels to be married to you.”

His mouth opened, then closed again. That was the first time he really had no defense.

You continued, softer now. “I don’t think you’re a bad man, Jack. That would be easier. You’re kind. You care about people. You work yourself into the ground because you can’t stand leaving anyone unsupported.”

Your eyes met his.

“But somehow, I became the person you could leave unsupported because I was good at surviving it.”

Jack’s eyes shone. “That’s not how I see you.”

“I know. But it’s how you treat me.”

He pressed his palms together, his hands shaking slightly. “I can change.”

You looked at him with so much sadness that he almost looked away.

“I needed you to change before I had to beg myself to stop hoping.”

The room was quiet after that.

Then Jack noticed the second envelope. The white one. It sat beside the award, small and plain, with the doctor’s office logo in the corner.

His eyes stayed on it too long.

“What’s that?”

You felt your throat close. This was the part you had dreaded most. The part that made everything feel impossible.

You picked up the white envelope. Jack watched you like his body already knew what his mind did not.

“This is what I was going to give you tonight after the gala.”

His face went still.

You held it out.

He did not take it right away.

“Y/N,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

“Please just open it.”

He took the envelope. His fingers were careful, almost gentle, as if the paper might bruise. He pulled out the test results, unfolded them, and read.

You watched the exact second he understood.

His lips parted. His eyes moved over the page again. Then again. When he looked at you, his face had fallen apart so completely that you had to look down.

“You’re pregnant,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since this morning.”

“This morning?”

You nodded.

Jack looked back at the paper, then at you. “You went alone?”

“I didn’t know if it was real yet. I took tests at home. Then I booked bloodwork.”

“You didn’t tell me?”

You laughed once, and it came out more like a sob. “You weren’t even there when I tried to tell you after.”

He took that quietly.

He deserved it, and he knew he did.

You pressed a hand to your stomach, more for comfort than anything else. “I had this whole plan. It feels stupid now.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It was.” You wiped under your eye carefully. “I thought we’d get through the gala, and then maybe we’d go somewhere quiet. Maybe the balcony or the car. I thought I’d hand it to you and you’d look confused for a second, and then you’d understand. And I thought, for once, the night would feel like ours.”

Jack’s eyes filled. “I should have been there.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

He put the divorce papers and the test results down on the table with shaking hands, keeping them separate, like mixing them together would make the whole thing more unbearable.

“I want this baby,” he said.

Your face crumpled. “I know.”

“I want you.”

You shook your head slowly. “Jack.”

“I do.”

“I know you want me.”

“Then don’t leave.”

“That’s not how this works.”

He stood again, and this time he came around the coffee table but stopped a few feet away from you.

“I’ll do better,” he said.

You looked tired suddenly. Tired in a way he had never really let himself see.

“You’ve said that before.”

“I mean it differently now.”

“You always mean it.”

He swallowed hard. That hurt him because it was true.

You stood too, the black silk falling around you as you rose. Without the heels, you looked more vulnerable. Less like the woman from the news. More like his wife, barefoot in the living room, exhausted from being brave in public.

“I don’t want to punish you,” you said. “I need you to understand that. I’m not doing this because I want you to suffer.”

“It feels like suffering.”

“I know.”

“Then why?”

Your voice broke. “Because staying feels like disappearing.”

Jack’s face tightened as if he had been hit.

You looked down, trying to keep your breathing steady. “I don’t recognize myself anymore sometimes. I used to tell you everything. I used to get excited to share things with you. Then I started editing myself because I didn’t want to add pressure to your life. I stopped telling you when I was upset because you already looked crushed when you came home. I stopped asking for dates because it was humiliating to watch you check your phone the whole time.”

Jack closed his eyes. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“You didn’t ask.”

The words came out quietly, but they landed hard.

He opened his eyes again. “You’re right.”

That made you cry harder, because you had wanted him to argue. You had wanted him to give you something to push against. Instead, he looked at you with tears in his eyes and finally saw the damage.

“You’re right,” he said again, his voice rough. “I should have asked. I should have noticed. I should have made room for you without you having to keep proving you needed it.”

You covered your mouth for a second.

Jack looked at your hand, then your stomach. His voice softened. “Are you okay? Physically?”

That question broke something small inside you.

“I think so.”

“Any pain?”

“No.”

“Bleeding?”

“No.”

“Are you nauseous?”

“A little.”

He nodded, doctor mode flickering in, then dying immediately because he seemed to realize how badly timed it was.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I’m doing the thing.”

You let out a tiny, sad laugh. “Yeah. You are.”

Jack wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “I want to come to the appointments.”

“I know.”

“Will you let me?”

You looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t know yet.”

He nodded quickly, even though it hurt. “Okay.”

“I’m not saying no forever.”

“I understand.”

“I just can’t make promises tonight to make you feel better.”

He breathed in shakily. “Okay.”

You moved toward the chair near the hallway and picked up a small overnight bag.

Jack saw it, and panic crossed his face before he could hide it.

“You packed a bag?”

“Yes.”

“You’re leaving tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“A hotel.”

“Which one?”

You looked at him.

He nodded once, backing off. “Right. Sorry.”

“I’m safe.”

“Okay.”

You slipped the bag over your shoulder. The movement was ordinary, almost boring, and somehow that made it worse. This was what leaving looked like. No screaming. No slammed drawers. Just a woman in a black gown picking up a small bag because she had reached the end of what she could carry.

Jack followed you to the entryway but kept a careful distance.

“Can I drive you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Can I at least walk you down?”

“No.”

He pressed his lips together, trying not to fall apart completely.

You put your hand on the doorknob. For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Then Jack said, “Do you still love me?”

You closed your eyes.

Of course he would ask the one question that did not save anything.

“Yes,” you said.

His breath caught behind you.

You turned back to face him, and there he was: wrinkled scrubs, red eyes, hands half-raised like he wanted to reach for you but had finally learned that wanting did not give him the right.

“I love you,” you said, and the truth of it nearly ruined you. “I love you so much that I stayed long after I started feeling alone. I love you so much that I kept making excuses for you because I knew you were tired, because I knew your work mattered, because I knew you were good.”

Jack’s eyes filled again.

“But I can’t keep giving you access to me just because you’re sorry after,” you whispered. “I can’t keep building a home out of promises you only remember once I’m already hurt.”

“I don’t know how to fix this,” he said.

“I know.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

You looked at him for a long moment. You thought of the gala. The black dress. The empty chair. The envelope. The baby. All the nights you had waited and waited, feeding yourself on old versions of him, surviving on memories like they were meals.

“Be someone our child can count on,” you said. “Start there.”

Jack nodded, crying silently now. “I will.”

You wanted to believe him.

God, you wanted to believe him so badly that for one dangerous second, your hand almost left the doorknob.

But then you remembered the chair.

You remembered your name being called in a room full of people while the place beside you stayed empty.

You remembered that love had not been enough to bring him there.

So you opened the door.

The hallway outside was quiet and softly lit. Somewhere down the hall, a neighbour’s television murmured behind a closed door. Life was still going on in all the ordinary ways.

Jack said your name once more.

You looked back.

He stood in the entryway with your award visible behind him on the coffee table and the two envelopes lying open beside it.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.

You gave him a small, broken smile. “I know.”

And that was what made it worse.

Because you knew.

You knew he loved you. You knew he was proud of you. You knew he would miss you when the apartment went quiet and the hospital could no longer give him somewhere else to run.

But knowing had never been the same as being held.

So you stepped into the hallway. This time, when you walked away, you did not wait for him to follow. You heard the door close gently behind you, and the softness of it hurt more than a slam would have.

After you left, Jack did not move for a long time.

The apartment stayed quiet around him. The lamp hummed softly. Rain touched the windows. Your heels were still by the couch, lined up neatly, as if even your heartbreak had manners.

On the coffee table, the divorce papers sat beside the pregnancy results.

The ending and the beginning.

Both addressed to him.

Jack picked up the remote with a hand that did not feel like his and opened the news replay. He did not know why. Maybe because grief made people stupid. Maybe because some part of him thought if he watched the night properly, he could punish himself into becoming the man who should have been there.

The video loaded.

There you were again.

Black dress. Soft hair. Bare shoulders. That careful, beautiful smile.

He watched you enter alone. He watched you answer questions alone. He watched you sit at the table alone. Then the camera panned, briefly, almost accidentally, to the empty chair beside you.

His name card was clear.

Dr. Jack Abbot

Jack paused the screen.

The room went silent.

There it was.

Not a feeling. Not an argument. Not your sensitivity. Not his schedule. Not bad timing.

Proof.

A chair with his name on it.

A space he had promised to fill.

Jack sat on the couch slowly, still staring at the frozen image. His face crumpled, but no sound came out at first. He had cried before. He had cried after losing patients. He had cried in stairwells, in supply closets, in the shower with one hand braced against the tile.

This was different.

This was not the grief of failing to save someone he had only just met.

This was the grief of realizing he had been losing you slowly while calling it survival.

His eyes moved from the frozen screen to the divorce papers.

Then to the pregnancy result.

Then back to your face.

“How do I forget you?” he whispered, but there was no one there to answer.

The apartment seemed to hold the question for him.

Your perfume still lived faintly in the room. Your mug was still in the sink. Your cardigan was still folded over the back of the chair. The book you had been reading was still open on the side table, a receipt tucked between the pages because you hated using proper bookmarks. There was a sticky note on the fridge in your handwriting reminding both of you to buy more oat milk. There was a pair of your socks half-hidden under the coffee table because you always kicked them off when you were working late. There was a framed photo from your courthouse wedding on the console, both of you laughing because Jack had been unable to get the ring onto your finger at first.

You were everywhere.

That was the cruelty of it. You had left, but the life you had built with him remained behind like a house still waiting for its owner to come home.

Jack covered his mouth with one hand and bent forward, shoulders shaking.

For once, no one was paging him. No one was asking him for help. No one was bleeding, crashing, coding, crying out, reaching for him from the other side of a curtain.

For once, there was no emergency left to run toward.

Only the life he had kept meaning to choose.

Only the wife he had loved too late.

Only the baby he had learned about on the same night he learned she was leaving.

Only the empty chair beside you, waiting on a screen for a man who never came.

And the worst part, the part that finally broke him open, was that Jack knew this would not be a clean grief. He would not miss you once. He would miss you in places. In the kitchen when the coffee brewed too strong. In the car when he passed the hotel downtown and remembered black silk under gold lights. In the emergency department when the power held steady because of the system you built. In every waiting room, every hallway, every quiet elevator ride where he would think of you standing somewhere else, living a life he was no longer trusted to enter.

He would miss you when the baby came.

He would miss you when your child had your eyes.

He would miss you when people asked about his wife and he had to learn how to say your name without saying mine.

Jack stared at the empty chair until the screen blurred.

For the first time all night, he understood that you had not left because you stopped loving him. You left because you were terrified you would spend the rest of your life loving him from a room he never came home to.

And Jack, too late, finally knew what it meant to wait. Not for a patient. Not for a shift to end. Not for the next crisis to pass. But for a woman who might never come back.

The television stayed paused on his name.

The apartment stayed still around him.

And Jack sat there in the home you had built together, finally surrounded by all the love he had assumed would wait forever.

I have built a house where I wait for your return

The dress had been hanging on the back of the bedroom door for almost two weeks before Jack finally noticed it.

You had left it there on purpose, though you told yourself you hadn’t. You told yourself it was there because the closet was too full, because the garment bag was too long, because the silk would crease if you shoved it between winter coats and blazers. You told yourself a lot of things because admitting the truth felt too humiliating, and the truth was that part of you wanted him to see it. You wanted him to remember without being reminded. You wanted him to walk past it after a long shift, pause with his hand still on the doorknob, and say, “That’s for the gala, right?” like the date lived somewhere in his head that wasn’t overcrowded by trauma charts, shift changes, hospital pages, and everyone else’s emergencies.

It was a black silk gown, simple in the way expensive things were simple. Off the shoulder, fitted through the waist, smooth over the hips, with a slit that opened only when you walked. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t need to be. The fabric caught the bedroom light softly, almost like water, and every time you passed it, you imagined wearing it beside him.

That was the part that embarrassed you now. You had imagined it.

Jack in a dark suit. You in the black dress. His hand at the small of your back while people congratulated you. Maybe he would be tired, because he was always tired, but he would be there. You pictured him standing slightly behind you when people asked questions about the hospital contracts, his expression quiet but proud, his thumb brushing your hip like he needed to remind himself you were real. You pictured him leaning down and saying something low near your ear, something dry and teasing, something only meant for you. You pictured walking into a room and not feeling like you had to be impressive alone.

Three weeks earlier, he had stood in the kitchen with the invitation in his hand, wearing sweatpants and an old Pitt hoodie, his hair still damp from the shower. His eyes had looked bruised underneath from exhaustion, but when he read your name embossed in gold, he smiled.

“Dr. Y/N Abbot,” he said, running his thumb over the raised lettering. “Founder and Chief Systems Architect. This is fancy.”

You had been sitting at the island with your laptop open, pretending not to watch him too closely. There was a half-empty mug of tea beside your hand that had gone cold while you answered emails, and Jack had been barefoot on the kitchen tile, still carrying the warmth of the shower and the fatigue of the hospital with him.

“It’s a major industry gala, Jack. It’s supposed to be fancy.”

He looked up, amused. “I know. I’m just saying. This is real fancy.”

“You’re acting like I invited you to prom.”

“Kind of feels like it,” he said, setting the invitation down. “Except I don’t think anyone at my prom was casually entering billion-dollar valuation territory.”

You laughed despite yourself, and he came around the island, slipping his arms around your waist from behind. For a moment, you let yourself lean back into him. He smelled like soap, coffee, and hospital laundry detergent, that clean, sterile scent that had somehow become part of your marriage. His mouth brushed the side of your neck, and for a second, the kitchen felt like a place where both of your lives still fit.

“Don’t say it like that,” you murmured.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous,” Jack said, his voice low against your skin. “In a good way. My wife builds technology hospitals are fighting to buy, and I’m over here trying to remember where I left my badge.”

You turned in his arms and looked up at him. His hands stayed at your waist, warm and familiar. You could feel the small tremor of exhaustion in him, the way he was never fully still after a hard shift, like some part of his body was always bracing for the next alarm.

“So you’re coming?”

His smile softened. “Of course I’m coming.”

“You asked Harper to switch?”

“Already done.”

“You’re not on call?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Jack’s expression changed then, the teasing fading into something more careful. He touched your cheek with his thumb, and you hated how quickly your heart wanted to believe him. It was always like that with Jack. One gentle touch, one serious look, one promise said in that tired, sincere voice, and all the loneliness you had been trying to gather into evidence loosened in your hands.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m coming.”

You searched his face. “This one matters to me.”

“I know.”

“It’s not just dinner. We’re announcing the hospital network implementation contracts. The rollout plan. Market entry. The valuation estimate. This is the kind of night people remember.”

Jack nodded and kissed your forehead. “I’ll be there. I promise.”

That was the version of him you kept loving. The version that meant it. The problem was, Jack almost always meant it. If he had been careless, maybe you could have hated him properly. If he had forgotten because you did not matter, maybe the grief would have sharpened into something cleaner, something you could hold without blaming yourself. But Jack remembered in fragments. He loved in fragments. He showed up in small, exhausted pieces and looked at you like he wanted to give you everything, right before the world asked him for more than he had left.

And you kept living on those pieces.

A hand on your waist in the kitchen. His mouth against your temple before a shift. The rare mornings where he woke before his alarm and pulled you back against him like sleep had made him honest. The way he still looked at your face sometimes, quietly, almost helplessly, like he was surprised life had ever given him something soft. You had survived on that for longer than you wanted to admit, and that was the humiliating part. Not that he hurt you. Not even that he missed things. It was that one good look from him could still make you forgive a loneliness he had not yet apologized for.

On the night of the gala, he called you at 5:18 p.m.

You were standing in the bathroom in a silk robe while your makeup artist packed up her kit. Your hair was pinned into a low twist at the back of your neck, with a few pieces left soft around your face. Your earrings were already on, small diamond drops that caught the light whenever you moved. Your face looked finished in the mirror — warm skin, dark lashes, softly lined lips — polished enough that no one would know how nervous you were.

The bathroom smelled like hairspray, powder, perfume, and the faint steam from the shower you had taken an hour earlier. On the counter, your lipstick lay uncapped beside a little dish holding your wedding rings, which you had cleaned that afternoon because you thought there would be photographs of the two of you. The whole apartment felt too quiet, too prepared, like a stage waiting for someone who had not arrived yet.

Your phone lit up on the counter.

Jack.

Your stomach dropped before you even answered.

“Please don’t,” you said immediately.

There was a pause on the other end. Then Jack sighed, and the sound told you everything before he did.

“Y/N.”

You closed your eyes. “You said you weren’t on call.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You said you switched.”

“I did.”

“Then why are you calling me like this?”

He sounded tired already. Not physically tired exactly, but braced, like he knew he was about to hurt you and hated that knowing. “Harper’s kid got sick, and they’re short. It’s bad. I wouldn’t go in if they had coverage.”

You stared at yourself in the mirror. Your eyeliner was perfect. Your lips were perfect. Your whole face looked calm in a way that made you feel almost detached from it.

“Did they ask you, or did you offer?”

Jack didn’t answer quickly enough.

You let out a small, humourless laugh. “Oh.”

“They were drowning,” he said.

“So you offered.”

“I said I could come in for a few hours. I’m going to try to get out as soon as I can.”

You pressed your fingertips into the cool marble counter. The makeup artist moved quietly in your peripheral vision, pretending very hard not to listen.

“Jack, the reception starts at seven. Dinner is at eight. Speeches are at nine-thirty.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“That’s not fair.”

You looked down at your wedding band in the dish. The diamond caught the bathroom light, clean and bright and cruel.

“I can’t do this right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

The silence stretched. You could hear hospital noise in the background already: a distant page, someone calling for transport, the low hum of a place that never cared what anyone had planned.

“I’ll make it,” Jack said, but his voice had changed.

You heard the lie before it fully left his mouth.

“Don’t,” you said softly.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t give me a second promise to cover the first one.”

He exhaled. “Y/N.”

“I have to finish getting dressed.”

“I love you.”

Your throat tightened. “I know.”

He waited, but you did not say it back. After a few seconds, he said he would text you when he knew more, and you ended the call before he could apologize again.

The makeup artist stood very still, her brush bag in one hand, pretending she had not heard enough to understand. You looked at her through the mirror and smiled with the exact expression you used in investor meetings.

“Sorry about that.”

Her face softened. “No, don’t apologize.”

You picked up your lipstick and opened it even though your lips were already done. “I’m fine.”

She did not believe you, which was kind of her. At least she did you the courtesy of not saying so.

You waited until she left before you put your rings back on. For a moment, you stood in the quiet bathroom and looked at yourself in the mirror. The woman looking back at you was composed, elegant, expensive. She looked like someone who knew exactly where she was going. She did not look like someone trying to decide whether it was more pathetic to cry before the biggest night of her career or to still hope her husband might walk through the door in time.

You got dressed carefully. You stepped into the gown and pulled it up over your body, smoothing the silk over your hips with both hands. The dress fit perfectly. That almost made you cry. You had wanted Jack to see it. You had wanted the private little intake of breath he sometimes gave when he forgot to pretend he wasn’t stunned by you. You had wanted him to look at you like he remembered you were not just the person waiting at home with leftovers and patience.

Instead, you zipped yourself up alone.

The first news segment aired from the lobby of The Pitt just after 7:00 p.m.

It wasn’t unusual for the televisions in the emergency department to run local news with the volume low. Most of the time, no one paid attention unless there was a weather alert, a mass casualty incident, or something affecting hospital funding. It was background noise beneath sharper sounds: monitors beeping, wheels rattling, phones ringing, curtain rings scraping open and shut.

Jack was at the desk reviewing imaging when one of the nurses looked up at the television.

“Wait,” she said. “Is that your wife?”

Jack’s head lifted.

The screen showed the front of the Meridian Grand, a luxury hotel downtown with a glass canopy and warm lights spilling onto the rain-dark sidewalk. A reporter stood outside in a wool coat, holding a microphone while guests moved behind her in formalwear.

The lower-third banner read:

L/N POWER SYSTEMS CELEBRATES MAJOR HOSPITAL GRID CONTRACTS Company valuation expected to climb as implementation phase begins

Jack’s hand tightened around the tablet.

The reporter smiled into the camera. “Tonight, L/N Power Systems is hosting a private gala following a major round of hospital infrastructure contracts that could place the company among the most valuable emerging players in emergency energy systems. Founded by electrical engineer Dr. Y/N Abbot, L/N Power Systems has developed adaptive microgrid technology designed to keep critical hospital units powered during grid failures, natural disasters, and rolling outages.”

A resident standing nearby glanced between the television and Jack. “Dr. Abbot, that’s your wife, right?”

Jack nodded once. “Yeah.”

“Damn,” the resident said, clearly trying to sound impressed rather than awkward. “That’s huge.”

Jack did not respond. The broadcast cut to a graphic showing projected contract values, implementation timelines, and valuation estimates. The numbers were careful, couched in analyst language, but the implication was obvious. If your company hit its implementation targets and the contracts expanded the way people expected, you were on track to enter billion-dollar territory.

A nurse whistled quietly. “Billion with a B?”

Another nurse said, “And she designed the actual system?”

Jack looked at the screen. “Yeah.”

The nurse shook her head. “That’s wild.”

The camera returned to the hotel entrance just as your car pulled up. Jack knew it was you before the door opened. He recognized the way Mara, your assistant, stepped out first and turned back toward the car, one hand hovering near the open door.

Then you appeared.

For a second, the desk around him faded out. The dress looked different on you than it had on the hanger. It followed your body with quiet confidence, the black silk catching silver from the camera flashes and gold from the hotel lights. Your shoulders were bare. Your hair was pinned low, elegant but not severe, and the diamonds at your ears glittered whenever you turned your head. You stepped under the canopy and smiled for the cameras.

It was a beautiful smile. It was also the smile you wore when you were trying not to feel something.

The reporter turned as photographers called your name. “And there she is now, Dr. Y/N Abbot, founder and chief systems architect of L/N Power Systems. Dr. Abbot has been described by analysts as one of the most closely watched engineers in the hospital infrastructure space, especially now that her company’s adaptive grid platform is moving from pilot installations into large-scale implementation.”

Someone at the desk said, “Jack, aren’t you supposed to be there?”

Nobody meant it cruelly. That almost made it worse.

Jack swallowed, still watching as you paused beside the step-and-repeat, your clutch held neatly in both hands.

“I was.”

The answer made the area around him go quiet.

On-screen, a reporter asked you, “Dr. Abbot, tonight is being described as a turning point for your company. What does it mean to have hospital systems moving forward with implementation?”

You smiled, and Jack noticed your fingers tighten slightly around your clutch.

“It means the work is becoming real,” you said. “Designing the system was one part of it. Proving it under stress testing was another. Implementation is where it starts to matter for patients, doctors, nurses, and everyone relying on those seconds when the grid becomes unstable.”

The reporter asked, “There’s already discussion of a possible billion-dollar valuation. Are you thinking about that tonight?”

You gave a small laugh, polite and controlled. “I think my CFO is probably thinking about it more than I am. The valuation matters because it affects growth and deployment, but for me, the focus is still the technology. If a trauma bay stays powered during an outage because of something my team built, that means more to me than a headline.”

The reporter thanked you. You nodded, smiled again, and moved inside.

Jack stood very still until the charge nurse beside him looked over. “You okay?”

He dragged his eyes from the screen. “Yeah.”

She held his gaze long enough to make it clear she did not believe him. Then a trauma page came through, and the whole department lurched back into motion. Jack handed off the tablet, shoved his phone into his pocket, and went where he was needed.

Again.

At the gala, people kept asking where your husband was.

You answered the first few times with patience. “He got called into the hospital.”

Most people responded kindly. Some even looked impressed, as if Jack’s absence made the two of you nobler somehow.

“Oh, of course. Emergency medicine.”

“That must be so difficult.”

“You both do such meaningful work.”

“Power couple, even when you’re in different places.”

You smiled through all of it. “Yes. He’s very dedicated.”

The ballroom was beautiful, but after a while its beauty started to feel almost cruel. The ceiling was high and painted cream and gold, with chandeliers throwing soft light over round tables covered in white linen. Each place setting had a black menu card with gold foil, a small arrangement of white orchids, and a tiny glass votive candle. Along one wall, a projection displayed animated renderings of your adaptive grid system: hospital wings lighting in sequence, power rerouting through alternate pathways, emergency loads stabilizing under simulated failures.

Your company’s leadership team sat near the stage. Your engineers were at the tables closest to you, dressed in suits and gowns that looked slightly unfamiliar on them. You loved seeing the people who had built the system with you getting treated like they belonged in rooms where money moved. Some of them kept taking discreet pictures of the menus and the floral arrangements. One of your junior engineers had shown up in a suit that still had a faint fold line in the sleeve from being fresh out of the garment bag. Another kept touching the stem of his wineglass like he was afraid of breaking it.

You should have been happy. Part of you was happy. That was what made the grief feel so unfair. The night was not ruined. The contracts were real. The applause was real. Your team’s pride was real. Your name on that screen was real. All of it was real.

So was the empty chair beside you.

By the tenth time someone asked where your husband was, you stopped hearing the question as a question. It became part of the room.

Where is he?

In the clink of champagne glasses.

Where is he?

In the scrape of chairs being pulled out for other wives, other husbands, other people with someone’s hand resting warmly against the backs of their seats.

Where is he?

In the empty space beside your plate, where his name sat in elegant black ink on heavy cream cardstock.

Dr. Jack Abbot

You stared at it for too long once, long enough that Mara touched your elbow beneath the table.

“You okay?”

You smiled before you answered, because that had become its own kind of muscle memory. “Yes.”

But your chest ached with something so childish and raw that it embarrassed you. You wanted him to think of you. Not the company. Not the press segment. Not the award. You. The woman in the dress he had promised to stand beside. The woman who had cleaned her wedding rings because she thought there would be photographs. The woman who kept glancing at the doors like wanting him hard enough might make him appear.

You hated yourself a little for that.

You hated that even surrounded by applause, even with your name glowing behind you, some stupid, tender part of you was still waiting to be someone’s favorite thing in the room.

Mara stayed close, fielding conversations when she sensed you needed a breath. She wore a deep green dress and carried a tablet even though you had told her not to work tonight.

“You’re doing great,” she murmured when a hospital executive walked away after asking too many questions about rollout costs.

You looked at the champagne flute in your hand. You had not taken a single sip.

“I’m doing rich-woman cosplay.”

“You are a rich woman.”

“Not emotionally.”

Mara almost laughed, then looked at your face and didn’t.

Your hand went to your clutch, where the white envelope from the doctor’s office was tucked beneath your phone. You had not told anyone. Not Mara. Not your mother. Not Jack.

Especially not Jack.

The result had come through that morning after bloodwork confirmed what the home tests had already said. Five weeks. Early enough that it still felt secret and unreal, but real enough that the nurse had told you to start prenatal vitamins and book a follow-up appointment. You had sat in your car outside the clinic with both hands on the steering wheel, staring at the printed result until the words stopped looking like English.

Pregnant.

At first, you cried because you were happy. Then you cried because you were scared. Then, worst of all, you cried because the first person you wanted was Jack, and you had already known there was a chance he would not be there when you told him.

During dinner, your phone buzzed once. You checked it under the table.

Jack: I’m still here. I’m so sorry. I watched your interview. You looked beautiful. I’m proud of you.

You stared at it for a long moment. For a second, you felt nothing. Then the hurt arrived slowly, settling into the parts of you that had already made room for it.

Mara leaned closer. “Is it him?”

You put the phone face down on the table. “Yeah.”

“Is he coming?”

You smoothed the edge of your napkin in your lap. “No.”

Mara went quiet. Across the room, your CFO was laughing with two investors. Someone from the hospital network raised a glass toward you, and you smiled back automatically.

“I don’t want to cry in this dress,” you said.

Mara’s voice softened. “Then don’t. Be mad instead.”

You looked at her, and something in your chest tightened. “I’m so tired of being mad.”

That was the truth you never said out loud. Anger took energy. Anger required the belief that something could still change if you made enough noise. You were so far past that now. You were tired in a way sleep could not fix, tired of dressing up disappointment until it looked like understanding, tired of giving Jack the best parts of your compassion while keeping none of it for yourself.

The first time the lights flickered at The Pitt that night, nobody really reacted.

Hospitals had a way of making disaster feel routine at first. A monitor blinked. A ceiling light hummed. Somewhere behind the desk, a printer stopped halfway through a page and then coughed itself back to life. The nurses looked up, annoyed but not afraid, because annoyance was easier to wear than fear.

Jack was in trauma two with both hands pressed around a patient’s bleeding thigh when the second flicker came.

This time, the room noticed.

“Power?” someone asked.

“Backup should catch,” a nurse said, but her voice had gone thin.

Then the overheads steadied. The monitors held. The ventilator kept its rhythm. The trauma bay stayed bright.

A few seconds later, someone from facilities came over the radio, breathless and stunned.

“Adaptive reroute engaged. Critical load stabilized. We’re holding.”

Jack froze.

Only for a second, but long enough for the words to land somewhere beneath his ribs.

Adaptive reroute.

Your system.

Your work.

Your sleepless nights, your marked-up schematics, your laptop glowing blue at two in the morning while he came home too tired to ask what you were building. Your hands, your mind, your stubbornness, your company, your impossible little gap between failure and recovery.

The trauma bay lights stayed on because of you.

And he was not beside you when the world clapped for it.

“Dr. Abbot?”

Jack blinked and looked down. His gloves were slick. The patient was still bleeding. The room still needed him.

“Clamp,” he said, voice rough. “Now.”

He kept working because that was what he did. He kept people alive. He kept rooms from falling apart. He kept going until the crisis passed and everyone around him could breathe again.

But after, when the patient was taken upstairs and Jack stepped into the hall, the television over the nurses’ station was still showing the gala.

Your gala.

The reporter’s voice filled the space between ringing phones and rolling carts.

“Moments ago, L/N Power Systems’ adaptive grid platform stabilized a critical load interruption at an emergency department participating in one of its pilot programs. Company officials have not yet confirmed which hospital experienced the event, but analysts are already calling tonight a live demonstration of the technology’s value.”

A resident looked from the screen to Jack.

No one had to say it.

Jack already knew.

The hospital had needed you tonight too. The difference was, the hospital had gotten you.

He had not shown up for you at all.

Jack saw your acceptance speech from the staff lounge.

He had missed the start because a patient had crashed, and by the time he made it to the lounge, his scrub top was damp at the collar and his hands still smelled faintly of antiseptic even after washing them twice. Someone had turned the television volume up because your gala was now the top local business story of the evening.

You were on stage behind a podium, your award resting beside the microphone. The lights made your skin glow and turned the black silk of your gown almost blue at the edges. Behind you, the screen showed a slow animation of your company’s system keeping a surgical wing powered during a simulated outage.

Jack stayed in the doorway.

On the screen, you took a breath and looked out at the room.

“When I started this company, a lot of people told me the idea was too difficult to scale,” you said. “Some were polite about it. Some were not. I was told hospitals already had backup systems, that emergency power was a solved problem, and that the failure gap we were focused on was too small to justify the investment.”

You smiled slightly, and the audience laughed when you added, “The thing about engineers is that if you tell us the gap is small, we tend to ask what happens inside it.”

Jack’s throat tightened. He had heard you practice versions of this speech in the shower, in the kitchen, in the car. He had teased you once for rewriting one paragraph eleven times. You had thrown a pillow at him and told him the paragraph was weak.

Now you were saying it without him in the room.

“We built this system because seconds matter,” you continued. “A few seconds without stable power can change what happens in an operating room, in a trauma bay, in a NICU, in an elevator carrying a patient between floors. The goal was never to make hospitals perfect. The goal was to give them a better chance when everything else is failing.”

The staff lounge was quiet. Jack noticed one of the nurses standing near the coffee machine, arms folded, watching with damp eyes.

You glanced down briefly, then back up.

“I’m grateful for my team. I’m grateful to the hospital partners who believed in the technology early. I’m grateful to the people who asked hard questions, because they made the system better.”

You paused.

Jack knew that pause. He knew it because he had lived with you long enough to hear the breath you took before saying something that cost you.

“Tonight is a professional milestone, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel personal too. Building something this demanding changes your life. It changes your relationships. It tests who shows up, who wants to, and who actually does.”

Jack’s face went still.

On-screen, your expression remained calm, but your voice softened.

“I’ve learned that success does not make loneliness disappear. It can fill a ballroom. It can put your name on a screen. It can bring applause, contracts, and congratulations. But at the end of the night, you still know which chair beside you stayed empty.”

Nobody in the lounge moved.

Jack looked at the floor. He did not have to see the screen to know the camera would have found his empty chair. A place card with his name. A dinner plate cleared untouched. A visible absence.

But the camera did find it.

Not for long.

Just long enough.

There it was on the television: the chair beside you, empty beneath warm ballroom light. A white place card sat above the untouched dinner setting.

Dr. Jack Abbot

Someone in the lounge inhaled quietly.

Jack stared at his name on the screen.

It was different seeing it like that. Not as a missed text. Not as a fight waiting to happen. Not as something he could explain with patients and short staffing and impossible nights.

It was a space with his name on it.

A promise that had a shape.

An absence everyone could see.

You continued, steadier now. “I am proud of this company. I am proud of the team who built it. And tonight, I am proud of myself for believing that the things I needed were worth building, even when I had to build them alone.”

The applause started slowly, then grew.

Jack stood there, unable to move.

One of the residents near the table said quietly, “I’m sorry, man.”

Jack nodded, because there was nothing else to do. A minute later, his pager went off again.

You left the gala after midnight with your award in one hand and your clutch in the other.

People tried to stop you on the way out. A board member wanted to introduce you to someone from a national health system. Your CFO wanted five minutes about a follow-up call. A journalist asked for one more quote. You gave polite answers, promised emails, and let Mara run interference until you made it to the lobby.

Outside, the rain had slowed to a mist. The hotel’s front drive shone under the lights, slick and dark like spilled ink. Your heels clicked against the polished stone as you waited for the car. The night air was cold against your bare shoulders, and Mara draped your coat over you before you could pretend you were fine without it.

“You don’t have to go home,” she said.

You looked at the road. “I know.”

“I can book you a suite upstairs.”

“I already did.”

Mara turned to you.

You kept your eyes forward. “I booked it this afternoon. Just in case.”

Her expression changed, but she did not make it worse by reacting too much. “Okay.”

The car pulled up. The driver took your award and placed it carefully in the back seat. When you slid into the car, the dress gathered around your legs in a pool of black silk. Mara got in beside you.

For a while, neither of you spoke. The city moved past in blurred lights and wet windows. Billboards, traffic signals, restaurants closing for the night, people standing under awnings with cigarettes and phones. The world looked ordinary, which felt insulting. Something inside you had cracked open, and outside, people were still ordering late-night fries.

Mara broke the silence gently. “Do you want me to stay with you for a bit?”

You looked down at your clutch. “I’m pregnant.”

The words came out flat, almost too calm.

Mara’s head turned slowly. “Oh, sweetheart.”

Your eyes burned immediately. “I found out this morning.”

“Does Jack know?”

You shook your head. “I was going to tell him tonight.”

Mara covered her mouth for a second, then lowered her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

That was what undid you. Not the empty chair. Not the text. Not the speech. Just someone being sorry for you without making you explain why you had the right to be hurt.

You bent forward slightly, one hand pressed over your stomach, the other over your mouth, trying not to sob too loudly in the back of the car. Mara moved close and put an arm around your shoulders, careful of your hair, careful of the dress, careful of all the pieces of you that were barely holding.

“I wanted him there,” you said, voice muffled through your fingers. “I wanted one night where I didn’t have to understand.”

Mara rubbed your back. “I know.”

“I hate that I still wanted him.”

“That’s love,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t always leave when it should.”

You cried harder at that, because she was right. You thought you had moved past needing him like that. You thought if you got busy enough, successful enough, full enough, maybe you would not notice the missing parts so much. But then something happened, something beautiful or terrifying or important, and he was still the first person you wanted to tell.

You looked out the window, watching the city smear itself into streaks of white and red through the rain. Pittsburgh looked softer from inside the car, almost forgiving. Like it did not know what had happened to you tonight. Like somewhere behind all those lit windows, people were still coming home to each other.

“I’m sitting here with an award, a company people are saying might be worth a billion dollars, a baby I don’t even know how to feel brave enough for yet, and all I can think is that I wanted my husband to call me his girl one more time and mean it like nothing else in the world mattered.”

Mara reached for your hand.

You let her take it.

“I don’t know where to put all of this love,” you whispered. “That’s the worst part. I can leave the apartment. I can sign papers. I can sleep somewhere else. But what am I supposed to do with all the years I spent loving him?”

Mara squeezed your hand.

You looked down at your wedding ring.

“What if I spend the rest of my life missing him?”

The question was so quiet it barely felt spoken, but once it was out, there was no taking it back.

Jack came home at 2:38 a.m.

He opened the apartment door quietly, like quietness could make his absence smaller. The living room lamp was on. Your award sat on the coffee table, still gleaming, still heavy, still proof that the night had happened whether he had attended or not. Beside it were two envelopes. One cream, one white.

You were sitting on the couch in your gown. You had taken your earrings off. Your hair had loosened, soft pieces falling near your cheeks. Your lipstick had faded, and there were faint marks under your eyes where you had cried and carefully wiped the evidence away. Your heels were lined up beside the couch. Your bare feet were tucked beneath you.

Jack stopped near the door. “Hey.”

You looked up. “Hey.”

He closed the door and set his keys in the bowl by the entryway. The sound was small and domestic, so painfully normal that you almost laughed. How many times had you heard that exact sound? Keys in the bowl. Shoes by the door. His tired sigh. Your voice asking if he had eaten. Marriage had so many tiny rituals that survived even when the people inside them were falling apart.

“You’re still dressed,” he said.

“I know.”

“I thought you might be asleep.”

“I thought a lot of things tonight.”

Jack looked down. He was still in his scrubs under a dark jacket. His hair was messy from running his hands through it, and there was a line across his cheek from where a mask had pressed into his skin. He looked exhausted. He looked guilty. He looked like the man you loved.

That was inconvenient.

That was devastating.

He stepped farther into the room. “I watched your speech.”

You nodded.

“You were incredible.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. The way you talked about the system, the contracts, all of it. You were…” He stopped, searching for the right word. “You were exactly who you are.”

Your eyes filled, but you blinked the tears back. “That would have been nice to hear in person.”

Jack flinched. “I know.”

You looked down at your hands. Your rings caught the lamplight.

He came closer, stopping at the end of the coffee table. “I’m sorry.”

You smiled a little, but there was no warmth in it. “You say that so much.”

“I know.”

“I think that’s part of the problem.”

Jack sat in the armchair across from you instead of beside you. You appreciated that. At least he could still read a room.

“I didn’t want to miss it,” he said.

You looked at him. “I believe you.”

He seemed thrown by that. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you sound like that?”

“Because wanting to be there and being there are different things.”

Jack rubbed both hands over his face. When he lowered them, his eyes were red. “Harper called. They were short. I thought if I went in early, I could help stabilize things and leave before dinner.”

“You thought.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t call me before deciding.”

“I didn’t want to stress you out while you were getting ready.”

You stared at him, and he heard it as soon as he said it.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said quickly.

“You didn’t want to stress me out, so you made the decision alone and told me after.”

Jack leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I made the wrong call.”

“You made the familiar call.”

He swallowed.

The room settled around those words. Rain tapped softly at the windows. Somewhere outside, tires hissed against wet pavement. The apartment smelled faintly like his hospital jacket and your perfume, like two lives still pretending they knew how to touch without hurting each other.

“You don’t understand what it’s like there,” Jack said quietly.

The words came out tired. Not cruel. Not even angry at first. Just exhausted enough to be careless.

You went still.

Jack looked at you and immediately seemed to regret it. “Y/N, I didn’t mean—”

“No,” you said softly. “Say it.”

He closed his eyes. “I just mean, when someone is dying in front of you, when there aren’t enough hands, when people are looking at you like you’re the last thing standing between them and the worst day of their life, it’s not easy to walk away.”

You nodded slowly. “I know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

That one hurt.

You stared at him for a second, and something in your face changed. Not anger. Not even shock.

Exhaustion.

The kind that comes when someone you love finally says the thing you always knew they believed underneath all the apologies.

“You’re right,” you said.

Jack opened his eyes. “What?”

“You’re right. I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be you.”

His mouth tightened. “That’s not what I—”

“But I know what it’s like to keep the lights on when a hospital can’t afford for them to go out. I know what it’s like to have people depend on something I built, something I signed my name to, something that could fail in ways that would haunt me. I know what pressure is, Jack. I know what responsibility is.”

His face softened, shame creeping in.

You looked at the award on the table. “And I know what it’s like to be surrounded by people congratulating me while my husband is on a television screen’s other side, using my work to save people, and still somehow unable to show up for me.”

Jack’s eyes shone. “That’s not fair.”

The words came out before he could stop them.

You laughed once, small and wounded. “There it is.”

“Y/N—”

“No, it’s okay. It’s not fair. Someone was dying. The hospital was short. Harper’s kid was sick. There was a trauma. There was a power issue. There’s always a reason, Jack. There is always a reason good enough to make me feel awful for being hurt.”

His jaw worked, but no words came.

You leaned forward slightly, your voice low. “You know what the worst part is? I believe all your reasons. I believe they’re real. I believe they matter. I believe you’re a good doctor and a good man and that people are alive because of you.”

Your eyes filled.

“But I also believe I have been lonely in this marriage. And you keep asking one truth to erase the other.”

Jack looked down.

You reached for the cream envelope on the table. Your fingers brushed over the thick paper, and Jack’s gaze followed the movement.

“What is that?” he asked.

You held it in your lap for a moment. Jack looked at you like he wanted to memorize you and beg forgiveness at the same time. You wondered if he knew how often you had done that to him.

Memorized him, you meant.

The slope of his shoulders when he came home defeated. The faint scar near his eyebrow. The way his hands looked too capable around a coffee mug, too gentle when they touched you, too absent when you needed them and they were somewhere else holding someone else together. You had loved his face through every version of your own disappointment. You had loved him in doorways, waiting for him to take off his shoes. You had loved him across dinner tables where his phone kept lighting up. You had loved him in bed while he slept beside you, too exhausted to notice you were crying.

You had loved him so thoroughly that leaving him felt less like choosing yourself and more like cutting your own heart out before it could beg you to stay.

“I don’t want you to be a lesson,” you said suddenly.

Jack’s brows pulled together. “What?”

You looked down at your hands. “I don’t want to look back one day and tell people you taught me what I deserved. I don’t want you to become some sad, useful story about growth. I wanted you to be my husband.”

His face broke.

You swallowed hard. “I wanted you to be the person I came home to. Not the reason I had to learn how to stop waiting.”

Jack stared at you, and for a moment, you saw the words land somewhere deep enough to hurt him. You almost hated yourself for noticing. You almost hated that even now, a part of you wanted to soften the blow.

“When you asked me to marry you, I thought I understood what you were asking,” you said.

Jack’s face shifted. “What does that mean?”

You looked at him, and the ache in your chest sharpened. “I thought you were asking me to share your life. I thought it meant we would make room for each other, even when it was hard. I knew your job would be demanding. I knew there would be nights you couldn’t leave. I knew I would have to be patient sometimes.”

Your voice stayed even, but Jack’s expression was already changing.

“I didn’t know I was signing up to become the easiest thing to cancel.”

He closed his eyes. “Y/N.”

“I didn’t know I would have to feel guilty for needing you.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty.”

“But I do. Every time. Because there’s always a patient, or a shift, or someone sicker, or something worse. And I know those things matter. I’m not pretending they don’t.”

You set the cream envelope on the table and slid it toward him.

“I just can’t keep living like my pain only counts if it’s an emergency.”

Jack stared at the envelope. For a few seconds, he did not touch it. Then he picked it up.

You watched him open it. You watched him read the first page. You watched the colour leave his face.

“Divorce,” he said quietly.

You folded your hands together so he would not see them shake. “Yes.”

He looked up at you, stunned. “You want a divorce?”

“I don’t want this version of marriage anymore.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

You breathed in slowly. “I know.”

Jack stood, then seemed to realize he did not know where to go, so he sat back down hard. “When did you decide this?”

You looked toward the window. The city lights reflected faintly in the glass.

“I think part of me has been deciding for a long time.”

He shook his head. “No. We’ve had hard months. I know that. But divorce?”

“You keep saying it like I’m being dramatic.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“No,” you said. “You’re trying to find the part where I did this wrong, so you don’t have to look at how long you were doing it to me.”

Jack’s mouth tightened. “That’s not fair.”

The words left him fast.

Too fast.

You looked at him, and he looked like he wanted to reach across the room and take them back.

“Stop saying that to me,” you whispered.

His face cracked. “I’m sorry.”

“I am so tired of being told my pain has to be fair to yours.”

Jack covered his mouth with one hand and looked away.

You wiped your thumb over your ring. “I sat at that table tonight with your name card beside me. People kept asking where you were, and I kept making you sound noble because I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

Jack looked crushed. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. But I did. Because I’m used to protecting you from how it feels to be married to you.”

His mouth opened, then closed again. That was the first time he really had no defense.

You continued, softer now. “I don’t think you’re a bad man, Jack. That would be easier. You’re kind. You care about people. You work yourself into the ground because you can’t stand leaving anyone unsupported.”

Your eyes met his.

“But somehow, I became the person you could leave unsupported because I was good at surviving it.”

Jack’s eyes shone. “That’s not how I see you.”

“I know. But it’s how you treat me.”

He pressed his palms together, his hands shaking slightly. “I can change.”

You looked at him with so much sadness that he almost looked away.

“I needed you to change before I had to beg myself to stop hoping.”

The room was quiet after that.

Then Jack noticed the second envelope. The white one. It sat beside the award, small and plain, with the doctor’s office logo in the corner.

His eyes stayed on it too long.

“What’s that?”

You felt your throat close. This was the part you had dreaded most. The part that made everything feel impossible.

You picked up the white envelope. Jack watched you like his body already knew what his mind did not.

“This is what I was going to give you tonight after the gala.”

His face went still.

You held it out.

He did not take it right away.

“Y/N,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

“Please just open it.”

He took the envelope. His fingers were careful, almost gentle, as if the paper might bruise. He pulled out the test results, unfolded them, and read.

You watched the exact second he understood.

His lips parted. His eyes moved over the page again. Then again. When he looked at you, his face had fallen apart so completely that you had to look down.

“You’re pregnant,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since this morning.”

“This morning?”

You nodded.

Jack looked back at the paper, then at you. “You went alone?”

“I didn’t know if it was real yet. I took tests at home. Then I booked bloodwork.”

“You didn’t tell me?”

You laughed once, and it came out more like a sob. “You weren’t even there when I tried to tell you after.”

He took that quietly.

He deserved it, and he knew he did.

You pressed a hand to your stomach, more for comfort than anything else. “I had this whole plan. It feels stupid now.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It was.” You wiped under your eye carefully. “I thought we’d get through the gala, and then maybe we’d go somewhere quiet. Maybe the balcony or the car. I thought I’d hand it to you and you’d look confused for a second, and then you’d understand. And I thought, for once, the night would feel like ours.”

Jack’s eyes filled. “I should have been there.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

He put the divorce papers and the test results down on the table with shaking hands, keeping them separate, like mixing them together would make the whole thing more unbearable.

“I want this baby,” he said.

Your face crumpled. “I know.”

“I want you.”

You shook your head slowly. “Jack.”

“I do.”

“I know you want me.”

“Then don’t leave.”

“That’s not how this works.”

He stood again, and this time he came around the coffee table but stopped a few feet away from you.

“I’ll do better,” he said.

You looked tired suddenly. Tired in a way he had never really let himself see.

“You’ve said that before.”

“I mean it differently now.”

“You always mean it.”

He swallowed hard. That hurt him because it was true.

You stood too, the black silk falling around you as you rose. Without the heels, you looked more vulnerable. Less like the woman from the news. More like his wife, barefoot in the living room, exhausted from being brave in public.

“I don’t want to punish you,” you said. “I need you to understand that. I’m not doing this because I want you to suffer.”

“It feels like suffering.”

“I know.”

“Then why?”

Your voice broke. “Because staying feels like disappearing.”

Jack’s face tightened as if he had been hit.

You looked down, trying to keep your breathing steady. “I don’t recognize myself anymore sometimes. I used to tell you everything. I used to get excited to share things with you. Then I started editing myself because I didn’t want to add pressure to your life. I stopped telling you when I was upset because you already looked crushed when you came home. I stopped asking for dates because it was humiliating to watch you check your phone the whole time.”

Jack closed his eyes. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“You didn’t ask.”

The words came out quietly, but they landed hard.

He opened his eyes again. “You’re right.”

That made you cry harder, because you had wanted him to argue. You had wanted him to give you something to push against. Instead, he looked at you with tears in his eyes and finally saw the damage.

“You’re right,” he said again, his voice rough. “I should have asked. I should have noticed. I should have made room for you without you having to keep proving you needed it.”

You covered your mouth for a second.

Jack looked at your hand, then your stomach. His voice softened. “Are you okay? Physically?”

That question broke something small inside you.

“I think so.”

“Any pain?”

“No.”

“Bleeding?”

“No.”

“Are you nauseous?”

“A little.”

He nodded, doctor mode flickering in, then dying immediately because he seemed to realize how badly timed it was.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I’m doing the thing.”

You let out a tiny, sad laugh. “Yeah. You are.”

Jack wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “I want to come to the appointments.”

“I know.”

“Will you let me?”

You looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t know yet.”

He nodded quickly, even though it hurt. “Okay.”

“I’m not saying no forever.”

“I understand.”

“I just can’t make promises tonight to make you feel better.”

He breathed in shakily. “Okay.”

You moved toward the chair near the hallway and picked up a small overnight bag.

Jack saw it, and panic crossed his face before he could hide it.

“You packed a bag?”

“Yes.”

“You’re leaving tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“A hotel.”

“Which one?”

You looked at him.

He nodded once, backing off. “Right. Sorry.”

“I’m safe.”

“Okay.”

You slipped the bag over your shoulder. The movement was ordinary, almost boring, and somehow that made it worse. This was what leaving looked like. No screaming. No slammed drawers. Just a woman in a black gown picking up a small bag because she had reached the end of what she could carry.

Jack followed you to the entryway but kept a careful distance.

“Can I drive you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Can I at least walk you down?”

“No.”

He pressed his lips together, trying not to fall apart completely.

You put your hand on the doorknob. For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Then Jack said, “Do you still love me?”

You closed your eyes.

Of course he would ask the one question that did not save anything.

“Yes,” you said.

His breath caught behind you.

You turned back to face him, and there he was: wrinkled scrubs, red eyes, hands half-raised like he wanted to reach for you but had finally learned that wanting did not give him the right.

“I love you,” you said, and the truth of it nearly ruined you. “I love you so much that I stayed long after I started feeling alone. I love you so much that I kept making excuses for you because I knew you were tired, because I knew your work mattered, because I knew you were good.”

Jack’s eyes filled again.

“But I can’t keep giving you access to me just because you’re sorry after,” you whispered. “I can’t keep building a home out of promises you only remember once I’m already hurt.”

“I don’t know how to fix this,” he said.

“I know.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

You looked at him for a long moment. You thought of the gala. The black dress. The empty chair. The envelope. The baby. All the nights you had waited and waited, feeding yourself on old versions of him, surviving on memories like they were meals.

“Be someone our child can count on,” you said. “Start there.”

Jack nodded, crying silently now. “I will.”

You wanted to believe him.

God, you wanted to believe him so badly that for one dangerous second, your hand almost left the doorknob.

But then you remembered the chair.

You remembered your name being called in a room full of people while the place beside you stayed empty.

You remembered that love had not been enough to bring him there.

So you opened the door.

The hallway outside was quiet and softly lit. Somewhere down the hall, a neighbour’s television murmured behind a closed door. Life was still going on in all the ordinary ways.

Jack said your name once more.

You looked back.

He stood in the entryway with your award visible behind him on the coffee table and the two envelopes lying open beside it.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.

You gave him a small, broken smile. “I know.”

And that was what made it worse.

Because you knew.

You knew he loved you. You knew he was proud of you. You knew he would miss you when the apartment went quiet and the hospital could no longer give him somewhere else to run.

But knowing had never been the same as being held.

So you stepped into the hallway. This time, when you walked away, you did not wait for him to follow. You heard the door close gently behind you, and the softness of it hurt more than a slam would have.

After you left, Jack did not move for a long time.

The apartment stayed quiet around him. The lamp hummed softly. Rain touched the windows. Your heels were still by the couch, lined up neatly, as if even your heartbreak had manners.

On the coffee table, the divorce papers sat beside the pregnancy results.

The ending and the beginning.

Both addressed to him.

Jack picked up the remote with a hand that did not feel like his and opened the news replay. He did not know why. Maybe because grief made people stupid. Maybe because some part of him thought if he watched the night properly, he could punish himself into becoming the man who should have been there.

The video loaded.

There you were again.

Black dress. Soft hair. Bare shoulders. That careful, beautiful smile.

He watched you enter alone. He watched you answer questions alone. He watched you sit at the table alone. Then the camera panned, briefly, almost accidentally, to the empty chair beside you.

His name card was clear.

Dr. Jack Abbot

Jack paused the screen.

The room went silent.

There it was.

Not a feeling. Not an argument. Not your sensitivity. Not his schedule. Not bad timing.

Proof.

A chair with his name on it.

A space he had promised to fill.

Jack sat on the couch slowly, still staring at the frozen image. His face crumpled, but no sound came out at first. He had cried before. He had cried after losing patients. He had cried in stairwells, in supply closets, in the shower with one hand braced against the tile.

This was different.

This was not the grief of failing to save someone he had only just met.

This was the grief of realizing he had been losing you slowly while calling it survival.

His eyes moved from the frozen screen to the divorce papers.

Then to the pregnancy result.

Then back to your face.

“How do I forget you?” he whispered, but there was no one there to answer.

The apartment seemed to hold the question for him.

Your perfume still lived faintly in the room. Your mug was still in the sink. Your cardigan was still folded over the back of the chair. The book you had been reading was still open on the side table, a receipt tucked between the pages because you hated using proper bookmarks. There was a sticky note on the fridge in your handwriting reminding both of you to buy more oat milk. There was a pair of your socks half-hidden under the coffee table because you always kicked them off when you were working late. There was a framed photo from your courthouse wedding on the console, both of you laughing because Jack had been unable to get the ring onto your finger at first.

You were everywhere.

That was the cruelty of it. You had left, but the life you had built with him remained behind like a house still waiting for its owner to come home.

Jack covered his mouth with one hand and bent forward, shoulders shaking.

For once, no one was paging him. No one was asking him for help. No one was bleeding, crashing, coding, crying out, reaching for him from the other side of a curtain.

For once, there was no emergency left to run toward.

Only the life he had kept meaning to choose.

Only the wife he had loved too late.

Only the baby he had learned about on the same night he learned she was leaving.

Only the empty chair beside you, waiting on a screen for a man who never came.

And the worst part, the part that finally broke him open, was that Jack knew this would not be a clean grief. He would not miss you once. He would miss you in places. In the kitchen when the coffee brewed too strong. In the car when he passed the hotel downtown and remembered black silk under gold lights. In the emergency department when the power held steady because of the system you built. In every waiting room, every hallway, every quiet elevator ride where he would think of you standing somewhere else, living a life he was no longer trusted to enter.

He would miss you when the baby came.

He would miss you when your child had your eyes.

He would miss you when people asked about his wife and he had to learn how to say your name without saying mine.

Jack stared at the empty chair until the screen blurred.

For the first time all night, he understood that you had not left because you stopped loving him. You left because you were terrified you would spend the rest of your life loving him from a room he never came home to.

And Jack, too late, finally knew what it meant to wait. Not for a patient. Not for a shift to end. Not for the next crisis to pass. But for a woman who might never come back.

The television stayed paused on his name.

The apartment stayed still around him.

And Jack sat there in the home you had built together, finally surrounded by all the love he had assumed would wait forever.

At first you assumed construction or flooding because of the weather, but then smoke curled upward through the rain and your stomach dropped immediately.

Cars sat mangled across three lanes of traffic at impossible angles. One SUV had spun into the median while another sedan looked almost folded around the back of a delivery truck, its front end crushed so badly it barely resembled a vehicle anymore. Hazard lights blinked weakly through the storm while people stumbled across the interstate in shock.

Your body moved before your brain fully caught up.

“Oh my God.”

You were already unbuckling your seatbelt before the car completely stopped.

Adrenaline sliced straight through your exhaustion hard enough to make your hands shake as you reached for the trauma bag in the passenger seat. Rain hit you instantly the second you shoved the door open, cold water soaking through your clothes within seconds while distant screaming echoed somewhere through the storm.

Someone yelled that a driver was trapped.

Another voice screamed for a medic.

A woman near the shoulder sobbed hard enough she could barely breathe, blood running down the side of her forehead while a man beside her stood completely frozen, staring blankly at the wreckage like his brain had stopped processing reality altogether.

You were already running.

“I’m a doctor,” you shouted over the rain. “Move back and give me some room.”

People listened immediately.

The trapped driver looked somewhere in his forties, pinned awkwardly behind the wheel of the crushed sedan. Blood streamed from a scalp laceration down the side of his face while the airbags hung deflated around him. His breathing came too fast beneath the sound of rain hammering against twisted metal, panic beginning to sharpen around the edges of every inhale.

You crouched carefully beside the shattered driver’s side window, ignoring the glass biting through your scrub pants into your knees.

“Hey,” you said, forcing calmness into your voice despite the adrenaline roaring through your chest. “Can you hear me?”

The man blinked slowly toward you, dazed. “Think so.”

“Good. That’s good.” You adjusted the flashlight between your fingers while quickly checking his pupils. “What’s your name?”

“Leon.”

“Okay, Leon. I’m Dr. Y/L/N.” Your voice stayed steady automatically, years of emergency medicine taking over before panic had a chance to settle in. “Don’t move your neck for me, alright?”

A shaky breath of laughter escaped him. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

Despite everything, you smiled a little.

“You’re doing great,” you assured him quietly. “Stay with me.”

And he did.

His eyes kept finding yours every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.

Your hands moved automatically after that.

Pressure against the head wound. Monitoring responsiveness. Keeping him conscious and talking while you assessed what you could from outside the vehicle. Rainwater mixed with blood beneath your fingers while traffic backed up for what looked like miles behind you, headlights glowing dimly through the storm.

Leon kept looking at you every few seconds like you were the only stable thing left in the middle of the chaos.

“You work at the PTMC?” he asked weakly after spotting the hospital logo embroidered onto your soaked jacket.

“Unfortunately.”

That got a real laugh out of him, brief and pained but enough that relief loosened slightly in your chest.

“You always this calm when you see a car crash?”

You let out a tired breath through your nose. “No. I’m panicking beautifully internally.”

That made him laugh again.

Patients relaxed faster once they laughed. It was something you learned early in residency, fear loosened the second people felt human again instead of helpless.

So you stayed with him.

Even after the paramedics arrived.

Even after they started finishing the extrication, peeling back what remained of the driver’s side door while rain poured endlessly over the wreckage.

You stayed crouched beside him talking him through every step because shock was already creeping in around the edges of his expression, and every time panic threatened to overwhelm him again, his eyes found yours immediately.

“You’re okay,” you kept saying quietly. “Stay with me. You’re okay.”

The interstate blurred around you in streaks of red brake lights and flashing hazards. Rain soaked through your jacket and scrubs completely now, damp fabric clinging uncomfortably to your skin while your hair stuck to the back of your neck. The adrenaline that had carried you through the crash scene was already fading, leaving behind an exhaustion so heavy it felt physical.

An EMT looked up from the stretcher and did a double take.

“Dr. Y/L/N?”

You snapped back into focus automatically.

“Male, approximately forty-two. Restrained driver. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen currently. Complaining of left-sided rib pain. Possible concussion. Neuro status intact for now, but keep an eye on him.”

The EMT nodded once while adjusting the cervical collar. “Got it.”

They moved quickly after that, securing straps, checking vitals, loading equipment through the rain while Leon tracked every movement with the wide-eyed focus of someone trying very hard not to think too much about what had almost happened.

Your knees ached from kneeling on broken glass. Your hands had started trembling slightly now that nobody urgently needed anything from you anymore.

But you stayed beside him anyway.

Leon caught your wrist weakly just before the paramedics closed the ambulance doors.

“Hey.”

You looked up immediately.

His face looked pale beneath the blood and rainwater, eyes glassy with pain and adrenaline, but there was something steadier there too.

Gratitude maybe.

“Thank you for taking care of me.”

The words landed somewhere deeper than they should have.

You swallowed hard before giving his hand one quick squeeze.

“Yeah,” you said softly. “Of course.”

For a second, you just stood there breathing.

The interstate still smelled like gasoline and smoke. Somewhere farther down the road another paramedic shouted instructions while tow trucks crawled through the rain toward the wreckage. Traffic in the opposite lanes slowed almost to a stop as people stared through fogged windows at what was left of the crash.

“You riding in with us?” one of the EMTs asked.

You glanced once toward your abandoned car still trapped in unmoving traffic nearly half a mile behind the accident scene. The thought of trying to get back to it right now felt impossible.

“Yeah,” you answered tiredly.

The ambulance doors shut behind you a second later, sealing you inside with the sharp smell of antiseptic, wet clothing, and adrenaline.

Leon talked for almost the entire ride to the hospital.

Nervous talking.

The kind trauma patients did when they were scared enough to fill every silence because silence meant thinking too hard about how close they came to dying. You’d seen it hundreds of times before. Some people cried. Some got angry. Some went terrifyingly quiet.

Leon talked.

So you let him.

He rambled about his job, about his daughter’s soccer game this weekend, about how his wife was going to kill him for wrecking the car because they still hadn’t finished paying it off. Every few sentences his voice shook slightly before he forced another joke out anyway.

You stayed beside him the whole ride, monitoring pupils and vitals while keeping him talking just enough to assess mental status without making it obvious you were doing it.

“You always pick up patients on the highway on your day off?” he asked weakly at one point.

You let out a tired breath of laughter. “Only the lucky ones.”

That earned another shaky smile from him.

The ambulance doors burst open, paramedics already rolling the stretcher down the bay entrance while rainwater dripped steadily from the wheels onto the floor.

By the time the ambulance rolled through the bay doors at The Pitt, you were freezing hard enough your teeth almost hurt. Your scrubs were soaked completely through, your shoes squelching against the floor while trauma staff moved around you in organized chaos.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Santos called across the ER the second she spotted you climbing out of the ambulance bay. “Always a pleasure seeing you this early, Iron Woman.”

You groaned immediately.

You earned the nickname after accidentally mistaking a patient for Robert Downey Jr. during a twenty-hour shift.

To be fair, the goatee had been identical.

“Dana,” you called immediately, falling into step beside the stretcher. “What’s open?”

Dana barely looked up from the nurses’ station. “Trauma Two’s clear.”

“Perfect.” You pushed damp hair back from your face before glancing toward the department. “Whitaker, Javadi, you’re with me. Perlah, can you help set up Two?”

Perlah nodded immediately and disappeared ahead of the group while Whitaker grabbed gloves from the wall dispenser on his way past.

“You look cold,” Whitaker informed you conversationally.

“Thank you,” you replied flatly.

Javadi appeared beside the stretcher while all of you pushed through the trauma bay doors together. “What happened?”

“Restrained driver, approximately forty-two,” you answered automatically. “High-speed MVA during the storm. Brief LOC reported by witnesses. GCS fifteen on arrival, complaining of left-sided rib pain and worsening headache. Possible concussion.”

“Vitals stable en route,” one of the paramedics added while helping transfer Leon onto the trauma bed.

Whitaker immediately started attaching monitors while Javadi pulled supplies from cabinets with the frantic efficiency of someone still trying very hard to look calmer than she actually felt.

Then Jack looked up from the computer station.

And somehow, in the middle of the packed emergency department, everything softened slightly around the edges.

You caught the exact moment recognition crossed his face. The exhaustion behind his eyes shifted immediately into concern as his gaze moved slowly over you. Soaked scrubs, blood smeared across your gloves, rainwater dripping steadily from your hair onto the floor beneath you.

Jack crossed the trauma bay almost immediately.

“You okay?” he asked quietly. “What happened? I thought you went home.”

His voice grounded you in a way almost nothing else could anymore.

Maybe it was because he always sounded calm even during chaos. Maybe it was because after years together your body recognized him before your brain consciously caught up. Or maybe it was simply that exhaustion hit harder the second somebody else arrived to help carry it.

“I’m fine,” you answered automatically while stripping off your soaked gloves and replacing them with clean ones. “Probably need a head CT.”

Jack’s expression tightened instantly.

“For you?”

You blinked at him before realizing what you’d said. “What? No. For the patient.”

Behind you, Perlah had already started cutting away Leon’s soaked shirt while Whitaker attached cardiac leads to his chest.

“BP’s holding,” Whitaker called.

“Sinus tach at one-ten,” Javadi added while checking another monitor. “Probably pain and adrenaline.”

“Good,” you answered automatically before stepping back beside the bed.

“Where’s Robby?”

“Overdose in Four,” Dana answered from the doorway.

You nodded once and reached for your penlight again, checking Leon’s pupils carefully while rain continued tapping faintly against the ambulance bay doors behind you.

Santos wandered into Trauma Two looking personally offended. “Why does huckleberry and crash get invited? I can help.”

“You can stand there and look pretty while actual doctors save lives,” you shot back immediately.

Santos gasped dramatically. “Dr. Abbot, your girlfriend is bullying me again.”

“She bullies everybody,” Jack muttered.

But there was no heat behind it.

His eyes lingered on you a second too long.

You knew that look by now.

Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to bury concern beneath sarcasm and exhaustion, but you still caught it every time. He noticed the dark circles under your eyes. The slight tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline was wearing off. The way your shoulders sagged whenever you thought nobody was looking.

“You’re freezing,” he said quietly.

“You are correct. I am freezing.”

Without another word, Jack pulled his hoodie off the back of the nurses’ station chair and draped it carefully around your shoulders before you could protest. It was still warm from him, smelling faintly like coffee, antiseptic, and the cologne he only remembered to wear maybe twice a month.

Something in your chest tightened stupidly at the gesture.

Behind him, Santos gagged theatrically. “Oh my God. Romance in the trauma bay. I’m going to throw up.”

“Go chart something,” Jack said flatly.

Whitaker looked up from the monitor leads. “Actually, I think it's very sweet."

“You’re all miserable,” you informed them while pulling the hoodie tighter around yourself.

“No,” Javadi corrected while checking Leon’s blood pressure. “You two are just aggressively in love in public.”

Jack looked genuinely offended. “Aggressively? I don't get it."

Despite yourself, you laughed softly while stepping back toward Leon’s bedside.

Leon noticed the interaction immediately.

“That your boyfriend?” he asked weakly from the trauma bed.

“Husband to the emergency department,” you corrected while snapping fresh gloves on. “Boyfriend in real life.”

Jack rolled his eyes while typing orders into the computer. “Don’t encourage her, Leon.”

Leon grinned despite the pain. “You guys are disgustingly cute.”

Under the brighter trauma lights, bruising had already started blooming dark purple across his ribs beneath the rain-soaked skin.

“Headache worse?” you asked while checking his pupils again.

“A little.”

“You nauseous?”

“Not yet.”

“Good,” you answered. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Javadi palpated carefully along his left side while Whitaker adjusted the blood pressure cuff.

“There’s something strangely comforting about you people,” Leon admitted weakly after a moment.

“You say that now,” Javadi muttered.

That earned another tired laugh from him before he winced sharply afterward.

“There it is,” you said softly. “Still joking. Good sign, buddy.”

There was something oddly comforting about patients who stayed conversational. After years in emergency medicine, you learned to appreciate moments where humanity still existed between procedures and bloodwork and trauma assessments.

Sometimes those tiny conversations mattered almost as much as the medicine itself.

Jack stepped beside you while reviewing Leon’s vitals, his shoulder brushing yours briefly in the cramped trauma bay. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic, damp fabric, and rainwater now that Leon’s soaked clothing had finally been cut away.

“You should change,” Jack murmured quietly while adjusting one of the monitor leads. “I got this, baby.”

You barely glanced at him, still focused on the chart. “Don’t worry. I’ll survive.”

A tired look crossed his face immediately.

“That’s usually what people say right before passing out.”

You shot him a look over your shoulder, though exhaustion dulled most of the energy behind it. “You’re dramatic.”

“You’ve been awake how long now?”

“Eighteen hours.”

Jack stared at you flatly. “That’s not comforting.”

“You stopped at a major accident scene after an eighteen-hour shift?” Javadi asked incredulously.

You shrugged slightly.

And that alone made Jack’s jaw tighten, because that was exactly the kind of thing you always did.

The adrenaline carrying you through the crash scene had almost completely faded now, leaving behind exhaustion so heavy it felt physical. Your wet clothes clung coldly to your skin beneath Jack’s hoodie while every muscle in your body ached now that the immediate crisis had passed.

Jack exhaled softly through his nose before lowering his voice.

“You don’t always have to run yourself into the ground trying to save everybody.”

The words landed harder than they should have.

You focused instead on adjusting Leon’s blanket over his chest, smoothing the fabric carefully just to give your hands something else to do.

Jack knew you too well by now to push after saying something like that.

That was part of what made loving him dangerous sometimes. He noticed things you worked very hard to hide from everybody else.

He noticed the way your hands trembled after bad trauma calls once the adrenaline wore off. How you skipped meals without realizing it during difficult shifts. How every patient death stayed with you longer than you ever admitted aloud.

Jack had spent years in emergency medicine learning how to compartmentalize just enough to survive it, which somehow only made him better at recognizing when you weren’t doing the same.

His hand brushed briefly against the small of your back as he moved toward the monitors again.

“Don’t worry, Leon,” Jack said easily while checking the cardiac tracing. “You’re in good hands.”

Leon looked toward him before his gaze drifted back to you.

“I figured that out already,” he said softly. “She stopped on the interstate for me.”

You glanced up from the chart, slightly surprised by how steady his voice sounded now despite everything.

“You didn’t have to do all that,” Leon continued quietly.

You shrugged lightly, pushing damp hair away from your face. “Part of the job.”

“Maybe,” he answered softly, still watching you carefully. “But most people would’ve kept driving.”

Something warm and uncomfortable settled low in your chest at that.

Most patients never saw the moments in between all of this. They saw calm voices and steady hands. They saw competence because that was what they needed from you in moments like these.

They never saw the aftermath.

The exhaustion. The panic doctors swallowed in real time just to keep functioning. The way people occasionally locked themselves in supply closets for thirty seconds after bad cases just to breathe before walking back out like nothing happened.

But Leon had seen you kneeling beside twisted metal in freezing rain with blood on your hands while traffic screamed past only feet away.

He’d seen the human part too.

And somehow that felt far more exposing than expected.

Before you could answer, something shifted.

Subtle.

Small enough most people in the room probably would have missed it entirely.

But after years in emergency medicine, your body noticed changes before your brain consciously caught up.

Leon’s breathing changed.

One second it was slow and uneven with postictal exhaustion.

The next it caught strangely in his chest.

His eyes lost focus somewhere over your shoulder while every muscle in his body tightened beneath the blankets all at once.

Your stomach dropped instantly.

“Leon?”

Jack looked up from the monitor station at the exact same moment Leon’s entire body stiffened violently against the mattress.

“He’s seizing!”

Everything exploded into motion.

The seizure hit hard and fast, violent enough that the entire trauma bed rattled beneath him. His back arched sharply while his arms convulsed uncontrollably, knocking equipment sideways as monitors erupted into sharp screaming alarms throughout the room.

“Clock started,” Perlah called immediately.

“Two minutes on the seizure pads,” Whitaker added while grabbing suction.

“Turn him,” you ordered.

You and Javadi moved together automatically, carefully rolling Leon onto his side while his body continued jerking violently beneath your hands. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten through his tongue while every breath came in horrible choking gasps between convulsions.

“Airway’s clear,” Javadi said quickly, though her voice still sounded tight with adrenaline.

Across the room Jack was already pulling medication from the crash cart while Dana called CT from the doorway ahead of transport.

Then finally, slowly, the seizure broke.

Leon’s body slumped heavily back against the mattress drenched in sweat while ragged breaths tore unevenly from his chest. The room fell briefly into that strange silence that always followed emergencies, where everybody still moved quickly even though the worst part had passed.

For now.

“Let’s get a CT stat,” Jack said immediately.

You nodded once, trying to ignore the tremor beginning in your hands now that the adrenaline spike was crashing again.

“I’ll stay with him until transport.”

Jack hesitated.

Only briefly, but long enough for you to notice.

Something unreadable crossed his expression while his eyes flicked from Leon back toward you.

Concern maybe.

The same quiet tension he always carried after particularly violent trauma cases.

“You sure?” he asked softly.

You frowned slightly. “Yeah.”

Whitaker glanced briefly between both of you like he noticed something too, but before he could say anything Dana appeared in the doorway again.

“Trauma Three needs help now.”

Jack’s jaw tightened.

His fingers brushed briefly against your wrist before he stepped away toward the hallway, disappearing almost immediately back into the noise and chaos outside the trauma bay.

The room quieted afterward.

Machines beeped steadily while rain tapped faintly against distant ER windows somewhere down the hall. Whitaker and Javadi had already been pulled into another room, leaving you alone beside Leon while he lay motionless in exhausted postictal confusion.

You dimmed the overhead light slightly before adjusting the blanket higher over his chest.

“Hey,” you said gently when you noticed him beginning to stir. “You’re okay. You had a seizure.”

No response.

His eyes stayed fixed upward, unfocused and confused.

Postictal.

You had seen it hundreds of times before. Disorientation. Confusion. Agitation sometimes. Patients waking terrified because their brains had not fully caught up to reality yet.

Your shoulder ached dully now that exhaustion was settling deeper into your body again. You reached absentmindedly for the chart at the foot of the bed, mentally running through differentials and imaging priorities while waiting for CT to call back.

You missed the shift in him by less than a second.

One moment Leon lay motionless against the mattress, the next his eyes sharpened violently.

Not recognition.

Fear.

Pure terrified instinct.

Your stomach dropped.

“Leon—”

He surged upright before you could finish the sentence.

His hand closed around your throat with terrifying force, slamming you backward into the cabinet hard enough to knock the air violently from your lungs. Pain exploded across the back of your skull as your head cracked sharply against metal.

“Leon!”

The sound came out broken and strangled.

But he wasn’t seeing you.

That was the horrifying part.

His eyes looked completely wild now—unfocused, terrified, empty all at once. Pure neurological panic stripped entirely of recognition.

For one terrible second, training overrode fear.

“Leon,” you gasped desperately, grabbing his wrists instinctively instead of striking him. “Listen to me. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.”

Nothing reached him.

His grip tightened harder around your throat.

Air stopped.

Panic slammed through you instantly now, sharp and animal and overwhelming in a way you almost never allowed yourself to feel. Your vision flickered violently while you clawed uselessly at his hands, trying desperately to drag in even one full breath.

You needed help.

Safe word.

Your mouth opened automatically.

“H—”

Nothing came out except a rasp.

Leon shoved you backward harder, your skull slamming against the cabinet again hard enough that white exploded across your vision.

The hospital safe word.

You just needed to say it.

“Hula—”

The sound collapsed into another strangled gasp as his fingers crushed tighter against your airway.

Your lungs burned.

Tears blurred your vision from pain and lack of oxygen while movement echoed faintly somewhere outside the trauma bay. People were still moving through the ER completely unaware of what was happening behind the curtain.

Your body was weakening fast.

You forced one shredded breath into your lungs and screamed:

“HULA HOOP!”

The entire department reacted instantly.

The trauma bay doors burst open hard enough to slam against the wall while voices shouted over each other.

Hands grabbed Leon, trying to drag him backward while he fought wildly in blind confusion and terror.

But before anyone could fully pull him away, he shoved you violently across the room.

Your shoulder struck the edge of the cabinetry with a horrible crack before the rest of your body collapsed hard onto the tile floor.

Pain tore through your arm instantly, sharp and wrong enough it barely felt real.

You couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t think.

The room blurred violently while alarms screamed overhead and people shouted your name somewhere nearby.

And through all of it, through the pain and chaos splitting apart around you, your brain found one thing instinctively.

Jack.

You thought about the way he always found you in crowded trauma bays without even trying. The way his hoodie still smelled faintly like coffee and antiseptic around your shoulders. The quiet brush of his hand against your back only minutes earlier.

You wondered irrationally if he was going to blame himself for leaving the room.

That thought hurt almost as badly as the pain itself.

Your eyes slipped closed just as the world dissolved completely into noise.

Jack was halfway through finishing a chart when he realized he had not seen you in several minutes.

He looked up automatically, scanning the department for you out of habit more than anything else. Usually he could spot you immediately no matter how crowded the ER became. You moved quickly when you worked, sharp and focused and impossible to miss once he knew what to look for.

But you were nowhere.

“Hey, Javadi,” he called while signing off medication orders. “Have you seen Dr. Y/L/N?”

Javadi looked up so quickly, like she was a deer caught in headlights. “Uh… no,” she answered quickly. Too quickly. “I haven’t seen her since I left Leon. Sorry.”

Then she disappeared almost immediately toward another patient before he could ask anything else.

He pushed himself upright from the workstation, the familiar ache radiating faintly through his prosthetic. Long shifts always made it worse. The socket rubbed raw after enough hours on his feet, especially during busy trauma nights when he barely sat down.

Normally he ignored it.

Right now he barely felt it at all.

“Dana,” he called, already moving toward the nurses’ station. “Have you seen Y/N?”

Dana barely looked up from the chart she was reviewing. “Pretty sure she’s still with Leon. Why?”

Jack turned the iPad slightly toward her. “They haven’t gone to CT.”

That got her attention.

Her eyes flicked quickly toward the tracking board before settling back on him. “They’re probably backed up upstairs.”

“Maybe.”

But something still felt wrong.

Dana sighed softly. “Jack, she’s a big girl. She can handle herself.”

He knew that.

God, he knew that better than anybody.

You were one of the strongest people he had ever met. Smarter than most attendings twice your age. Calm during trauma activations that made residents freeze completely. You handled combative patients, pediatric codes, catastrophic MVCs, and grieving families with a steadiness that still amazed him after all these years.

But that feeling in his chest would not go away.

Dana pointed down the hallway. “I actually need you in Central Fourteen. Chest pain rule-out and Dr. Garcia wants another set of eyes before she calls cards.”

Jack exhaled through his nose, still staring at the tracking board.

“Right,” he muttered distractedly. “Yeah. Okay.”

He turned reluctantly toward the direction of Central Fourteen, adjusting his pace automatically as the prosthetic clicked softly against tile beneath his scrub pants. Fatigue had settled deep into the joint hours ago, making his gait slightly uneven now that the adrenaline from earlier trauma activations had worn off.

Then he heard it.

“HULA HOOP!”

Everything in his body stopped instantly.

The voice was barely recognizable.

Raw. Ragged. Strangled around obvious pain and panic in a way that made every hair on the back of his neck stand upright immediately. For one horrible second his brain refused to process it properly because it did not make sense. Not your voice. Not like that.

And then recognition hit him all at once.

The hospital safe word.

Trauma Two.

Jack’s heart dropped so violently it almost hurt.

No.

The thought hit him before anything else.

No no no.

Adrenaline detonated through his bloodstream hard enough to make him dizzy.

Then instinct took over completely.

“No,” he breathed aloud, already moving before the word fully left his mouth.

He pivoted so sharply pain shot violently through his prosthetic, the sudden turn grinding pressure through the socket hard enough that under normal circumstances it would have staggered him. But right now he barely felt it beneath the sheer overwhelming panic flooding his system.

Fear swallowed everything else whole.

Not the controlled fear he knew from trauma medicine. Not the clinical kind that sharpened your focus during codes and mass casualty calls.

This was different.

This was personal.

Jack shoved past a stretcher hard enough that the wheels screeched across tile while people all around him started reacting at the exact same time. Nurses turned toward Trauma Two instantly at the sound of the safe word. Dana’s head snapped upward from the nurses’ station. Santos was already running before half the department fully understood what was happening.

But Jack got there first.

The curtain outside Trauma Two jerked violently as shouting erupted from inside the room. Monitors screamed overhead loud enough to echo through the entire department while equipment crashed hard against the floor somewhere beyond the drapes.

“Get him off her!”

The words barely registered through the roaring in Jack’s ears.

His pulse was so loud now it drowned everything else out.

He hit the doorway hard enough that the curtain ripped halfway off the track as he shoved inside.

And then he saw you.

Lying on the floor.

Motionless.

For one horrifying second his brain simply stopped functioning.

You were crumpled unnaturally against the tile beside the cabinets, one arm twisted wrong beneath you while blood streaked across the side of your face from where your head had struck something hard enough to split skin open. Jack noticed everything all at once in the brutal hyperclarity trauma doctors developed after years in emergency medicine.

The bruising already forming around your throat.

The abnormal angle of your shoulder.

The way your chest barely moved.

And somehow that was the part that terrified him most.

You were not moving enough.

Leon was still screaming somewhere nearby while Ahmed and two nurses fought to restrain him against the opposite wall, his face wild with postictal confusion and terror. Somebody was yelling for sedation meds. The entire trauma bay had dissolved into complete chaos.

But Jack barely registered any of it.

Because you were on the floor.

And you were not getting up.

Something inside his chest seemed to cave inward violently.

“Oh, honey.”

Then he said your name, and the sound that came out barely resembled the steady, composed voice Jack used during traumas and codes and every impossible shift the hospital threw at him.

This was different.

There was no clinical calm left in him now.

Only fear.

Pure terrified fear.

He dropped beside you so fast pain tore sharply through his prosthetic as his knee hit tile, but he ignored it instantly. His hands shook hard enough he almost missed your carotid pulse the first time he checked.

Then finally.

There. Weak, but there.

Relief hit so hard it almost made him nauseous.

“Oh my God,” he whispered shakily, one bloodstained hand cradling the side of your face carefully while the other pressed against your neck searching for injuries. “Hey. Hey, stay with me. Come on.”

You did not respond.

Jack’s stomach turned violently.

Training forced itself back online in fragmented pieces despite the panic threatening to choke him alive. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. Neuro. He assessed automatically even while his brain screamed at him that this was you beneath his hands.

Not a patient.

You.

Blood pressure crash from trauma? Concussion? Cervical injury? Shoulder dislocation? Fracture? Internal bleed?

His eyes flicked instantly toward your throat again and rage flooded him so suddenly it nearly stole his breath.

Finger-shaped bruises were already darkening against your skin.

He hurt you.

The realization nearly made Jack physically sick.

“Jack,” Dana’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as she dropped beside him. “We need to move.”

But Jack could barely hear her.

Your eyelashes fluttered faintly for half a second before falling closed again and something inside him broke completely at the sight.

“No no no,” he whispered frantically, brushing damp hair away from your face with shaking fingers. “Stay awake. Baby, stay awake for me.”

His voice cracked hard on the last word.

That terrified him almost as much as the sight of you bleeding on the floor.

Because Jack Abbot did not lose composure.

Not during traumas, not during mass casualties, not while pronouncing deaths.

But right now panic was tearing straight through him so violently he could barely breathe around it.

And for the first time in years, he had absolutely no idea how to separate being a doctor from being the man who loved you.

“What the hell happened?”

Robby’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as he pushed into Trauma Two with Mohan directly behind him, but for half a second, both of them stopped cold.

The room looked catastrophic. Leon was still fighting violently against security near the far wall, his movements frantic and disorganized while Santos shouted for more sedation. Equipment littered the floor around the trauma bay, overturned trays and scattered supplies crunching beneath people’s shoes as alarms screamed overhead loudly enough to make the entire room feel claustrophobic.

And in the middle of all of it, you were lying motionless on the floor with Jack kneeling beside you.

Blood streaked down the side of your face and disappeared beneath the collar of his hoodie still hanging around your shoulders. Bruising had already started darkening visibly around your throat, ugly fingerprints blooming beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while your left arm rested at an angle that made Mohan’s stomach immediately drop.

“Jesus Christ,” Mohan breathed.

“Security’s got the patient,” Dana snapped, already dropping beside you with Santos. “Probably postictal aggression after the seizure. He went after her.”

Robby moved instantly after that, years of trauma medicine overriding shock the second he reached your side. “Get her on a gurney now. C-spine precautions. Santos, I need vitals. Dana, page CT and tell them we’re coming immediately. Mohan, get me neuro and ortho on standby.”

Everybody moved except Jack.

He stayed frozen beside you on the tile floor, one hand still cradling the side of your face like he physically could not force himself to let go.

“Jack,” Robby said.

No response.

Jack was staring at you with an expression Robby had never seen on him before. Not panic exactly. Worse than panic. Helplessness, maybe, like his brain had short-circuited somewhere between doctor and boyfriend and now could not figure out how to function as either.

“Jack,” Robby repeated more firmly.

That finally seemed to pull him back enough to blink.

“She isn’t breathing right,” he said hoarsely, voice rough enough it barely sounded like him anymore. “He had her by the throat. Her head hit the cabinet, probably. Possible LOC. Shoulder’s definitely dislocated, maybe fractured too.”

The words came out clipped and automatic, pure trauma assessment forced through panic, but his hands were still shaking.

Dana and Santos carefully slid a backboard beneath you while Mohan cut away the remains of the hoodie around your shoulder to assess the injury better. The second the fabric moved, Jack saw the full extent of the bruising spreading across your throat, dark purple already beneath your skin.

“He squeezed hard enough to leave petechiae,” Santos muttered quietly while examining your neck. “Shit.”

Robby’s jaw tightened immediately. “We need airway monitoring. Neck trauma protocol.”

You stirred weakly then, letting out a broken sound somewhere between a gasp and a whimper as Dana stabilized your shoulder. Jack moved instantly at the sound.

“Hey,” he said, voice softening so fast it almost hurt to hear. “Hey, don’t move. You’re okay.”

Your eyes fluttered halfway open for barely a second before unfocusing again.

“She’s awake,” Jack breathed.

“For now,” Robby answered grimly while checking your pupils with a penlight. “Possible concussion. We’re not ruling anything out yet.”

Jack knew that tone. It was the same one they all used when things might be much worse than they looked initially.

Around them, the room was finally beginning to settle into controlled chaos instead of outright panic. Security had Leon restrained now while Santos pushed sedatives through an IV line with tight, controlled movements. Leon’s terrified shouting dissolved into confused, exhausted mumbling as the medication began taking effect.

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mohan said quietly, mostly to fill the horrible silence hanging over the room.

Jack did not answer. Rationally, he already knew that. Postictal aggression, neurological confusion, severe agitation after seizure activity. They had all seen it before. But none of it mattered right now, because every time Jack blinked, he saw your body hitting the floor again.

“On my count,” Santos said firmly while positioning herself near your head. “One, two, three.”

They lifted you carefully onto the gurney, and the second they moved your shoulder, a sharp cry tore from your throat despite your barely conscious state.

Jack physically flinched.

Robby looked at him immediately. “Jack, I need you with me here.”

But Jack still looked frozen. His prosthetic locked slightly as he stood too quickly, pain shooting sharply through the joint while exhaustion and adrenaline crashed violently together inside his body. Normally, he compensated automatically for it. Years of physical therapy had taught him exactly how to move through pain without thinking.

Right now, he barely noticed it. All he could see was you strapped to a trauma gurney instead of standing beside one, and somehow that felt profoundly wrong in a way his brain could not fully process yet.

Dana squeezed his arm briefly as she passed him. “She’s alive,” she said quietly, firmly enough that it sounded almost like an order. “So stay with us.”

Jack swallowed hard, then finally nodded once.

The second the gurney locked into place beside the trauma bed, the room shifted fully into trauma mode. Controlled chaos. Fast hands. Sharply clipped orders. Monitor alarms blending into the constant noise of the ER outside while everybody moved around you with the kind of practiced coordination that only came from years of emergency medicine.

“BP dropping,” Santos called from the monitor station. “Ninety-two over fifty-six. Heart rate one-forty. Pulse ox ninety-four.”

Robby swore quietly under his breath before stepping beside the gurney. “Dana, I need another large bore IV. CBC, CMP, coags, type and screen, lactate. Full trauma panel.”

Dana was already moving before he finished speaking.

Mohan carefully stabilized your cervical spine while Perlah adjusted the collar more securely around your neck. Blood stained the side of your face now, dark against pale skin beneath the fluorescent trauma lights, while bruising continued spreading visibly across your throat.

“She’s tachycardic from pain and adrenaline,” Mohan said quickly while palpating carefully along your ribs and clavicle. “Left shoulder deformity obvious. Could be anterior dislocation, maybe proximal humerus fracture too.”

“She hit hard,” Dana added grimly while cutting away the sleeve of your scrub top completely. “Look at the swelling already, poor baby.”

Jack forced himself closer finally, though every instinct in his body screamed at him to stop looking entirely.

Your shoulder looked wrong. Not subtly wrong, catastrophically wrong. The joint sat visibly displaced beneath skin already darkening with bruising while your arm rested protectively against your torso in unconscious guarding. Even barely responsive, your body was trying to protect the injury.

“Y/N?” Robby called firmly while shining the penlight into your eyes again. “Hey, stay with me.”

Your eyelids fluttered weakly, and your lips parted slightly before a small broken sound escaped you, more pain than words.

“There you go,” Dana said softly. “That’s good, hey sweetie.”

“She’s responsive,” Mohan confirmed. “Pupils reactive bilaterally.”

“Any obvious neuro deficits?”

“Hard to assess until she’s more alert.”

Jack swallowed hard. Normally those words would have sounded clinical. Routine. Hearing them about you made him feel sick.

Robby’s fingers moved carefully along your scalp before stopping near the back of your head. “She’s got a laceration here. Probably where she hit the cabinet.”

“How bad?” Jack asked immediately.

Robby looked up briefly. “Needs staples. I’m more concerned about intracranial bleed.”

Jack felt the room narrow sharply around him as his brain supplied every possibility instantly. Subdural. Epidural. Contusion. Diffuse axonal injury. Years of trauma medicine suddenly felt less like a skill and more like torture because now he knew exactly how bad this could become.

“BP’s still dropping,” Santos called sharply.

“Hang another liter.”

Dana connected fluids immediately while Mohan checked your abdomen carefully for rigidity and tenderness.

“She guarding?”

“Little bit.”

“Could just be pain response.”

“Or internal injury,” Robby answered grimly.

Jack closed his eyes briefly. Only twenty minutes ago, he had been teasing you for refusing to change out of wet scrubs. Twenty minutes ago, you had been standing beside him alive and exhausted and rolling your eyes at him. Now you were strapped to a trauma gurney while your coworkers discussed possible brain bleeds.

The trauma bay doors pushed open again.

“What do we have?”

Garcia entered already pulling gloves on, clearly expecting another routine consult before her eyes landed on the gurney. Then she froze.

“Is that...?”

Nobody answered immediately because suddenly saying it aloud made everything feel horrifyingly real.

Garcia moved closer automatically, surgical instincts taking over even while shock still flickered visibly across her face. Her eyes swept quickly across your injuries, taking in the bruising around your throat, the unstable shoulder, and the blood matted into your hair.

“Oh my God.”

Jack looked away sharply at the sound in her voice. He could handle panic, trauma, blood, failed resuscitations, and catastrophic injuries. But he could not handle hearing pity directed at you.

“What happened?” Garcia asked quietly.

“Postictal assault,” Robby answered while reviewing your vitals. “Patient seized after MVC. Became combative during recovery.”

Garcia’s jaw tightened immediately. Her eyes flicked briefly toward Jack, and somehow that made everything worse. Everybody in the hospital knew about the two of you. Not because either of you talked about it much, but because some things became obvious after enough years working together. The way Jack unconsciously searched for you in crowded rooms. The way your voice softened around him even during impossible shifts. The way both of you somehow always ended up side by side during difficult traumas without discussing it first.

And now everybody was watching him try not to fall apart while you lay bleeding in front of him.

“Y/N,” Garcia said gently while stepping closer to assess your airway. “Can you hear me?”

Your brow twitched faintly at the sound of your name.

“Good,” she murmured softly. “Stay with us.”

Jack finally moved closer again until he stood directly beside the gurney. For a second, he just stared at you. Really stared. At the bruises darkening beneath your jaw, at the trembling rise and fall of your breathing, at the blood drying against your temple.

Then very carefully, he reached down and took your hand.

Your fingers twitched weakly against his palm almost immediately.

Tiny movement. Huge relief.

“Okay,” Robby said firmly, forcing the room back into focus. “Let’s move. I want CT angio head and neck immediately. We’re ruling out intracranial bleed and carotid injury.”

Garcia nodded once beside him, already assessing your airway with practiced hands. “Neck swelling’s getting worse.”

Jack saw it too now that she said it aloud. The bruising around your throat had spread darker beneath the fluorescent lights while swelling gathered visibly beneath your jawline. Every breath you took sounded wrong now. Wet. Shallow. Strained enough to make every survival instinct in his body start screaming.

“Pulse ox is dipping,” Santos called sharply. “Ninety-one.”

“Jaw thrust,” Garcia ordered immediately.

Dana repositioned carefully at your head while Garcia leaned closer, studying the bruising around your airway with growing concern. “She may need to be intubated before CT if the swelling progresses.”

The word hit Jack like a physical blow. Intubated. His brain immediately supplied images he did not want. Ventilator settings. Sedation drips. ICU monitors. Neurological checks every hour.

“No,” he said automatically before he could stop himself.

Everybody looked at him.

Jack swallowed hard immediately, realizing too late he had said it aloud.

Robby’s expression softened slightly. “Jack.”

He hated the way Robby said his name right now. Carefully. Like he was one bad second away from falling apart completely.

“I know,” Jack muttered quickly, dragging a shaky hand down his face. “I know.”

But he didn’t. Not really. Because his brain kept splitting violently between two impossible realities. One side of him catalogued injuries automatically. Airway trauma after strangulation. Possible cervical instability. Hypoxia. Concussion. Internal bleeding. Shoulder fracture-dislocation. The other side could barely process the fact that you were lying here at all.

Your breathing suddenly hitched sharply.

Jack’s head snapped toward you instantly.

Your eyes fluttered weakly before opening. Confusion crossed your face immediately while you tried weakly to move, but pain flashed across your expression so fast it made Jack physically tense.

“Don’t,” he said immediately, stepping closer. “Baby, don’t move.”

Your gaze drifted slowly around the trauma bay like you were trying to understand where you were. The bright lights. The people surrounding you. The monitors beeping overhead. Then finally, your eyes landed on Jack.

Relief flickered there instantly. Small. Barely there. Enough to nearly destroy him.

“Hey,” he said softly, gripping your hand tighter without realizing it. “Hey, I’m right here.”

Your lips parted slightly, but nothing came out at first except a weak breath.

Jack leaned closer immediately. “What?”

Your brow pinched faintly in confusion.

“...Leon?”

The room went quiet for half a second.

Even now, barely conscious and injured and terrified, your first instinct was still the patient. Something inside Jack cracked painfully at that.

“He’s restrained,” Robby answered gently before Jack could. “You’re safe.”

Your eyes shifted again, slower this time.

“Hurts,” you whispered faintly.

Jack looked immediately toward your shoulder. “I know,” he said quietly, voice finally cracking despite how hard he tried to control it. “I know, sweetheart.”

Garcia’s eyes flicked sharply toward him at the sound. Jack almost never lost composure at work. Not like this.

You tried to swallow and immediately winced.

Garcia noticed too. “Throat pain?”

A tiny nod.

“Difficulty breathing?”

Another weak nod.

Garcia looked immediately toward Robby. “Airway’s worsening.”

Robby swore quietly under his breath. “We tube here or risk losing it in CT.”

The room shifted instantly again. More movement. More urgency. Dana reached for airway equipment while Santos prepared sedation meds with visibly tighter movements now. Mohan adjusted oxygen flow quickly while Garcia moved toward the head of the bed.

Jack felt suddenly frozen all over again.

Your eyes moved back toward him weakly, panic beginning to flicker beneath the pain now that you were awake enough to understand pieces of the conversation around you.

“Jack,” you whispered hoarsely.

His chest tightened violently. “I’m here.”

Your fingers curled weakly against his hand.

“Don’t...” Your breathing hitched painfully. “Don’t leave.”

That finally broke him.

Because you sounded scared. You, the person who stayed calm during pediatric arrests and mass casualty incidents and catastrophic traumas that made residents physically sick afterward.

Jack leaned down immediately, pressing his forehead briefly against yours despite the blood and chaos surrounding both of you. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered shakily. “Okay? I’m right here.”

Then your heart rate spiked sharply.

“One-fifty,” Santos warned.

Your oxygen dipped again.

“Eighty-eight.”

Garcia looked up instantly. “That’s it. We’re securing the airway.”

Panic flashed visibly across your face, and Jack felt your hand tighten weakly around his.

“Hey,” he said immediately, brushing damp hair carefully away from your forehead. “Look at me, sweetheart.”

Your unfocused eyes found his again.

“You’re okay,” he whispered, even though his own heart was pounding hard enough to make him nauseous. “Just keep breathing for me.”

Garcia stepped beside him carefully. “Jack,” she said quietly. “I need room.”

And suddenly he realized there was nothing else he could do. No medication to order. No procedure capable of fixing this himself. No trauma protocol separating him from the overwhelming terror flooding his chest.

All he could do was let go of your hand and watch other people try to save you, and somehow that felt worse than anything he had seen in his entire career.

And somehow that felt infinitely worse than any injury he had seen in his entire career.

The intubation blurred together afterward in fragments Jack knew would probably stay with him for the rest of his life.

Garcia’s voice turned sharp and clinical the second she stepped fully into procedure mode. “Etomidate ready?”

“Ready.”

“Succinylcholine?”

“Ready.”

“Pulse ox?”

“Eighty-seven and dropping.”

The room moved quickly around you after that. Packaging tore open, monitors screamed softly overhead, and Santos pushed medications through your IV with controlled precision while Dana stabilized your cervical spine at the head of the bed.

Jack stood rooted beside the wall, feeling completely fucking useless.

He had watched hundreds of intubations in his career. He had performed them himself during impossible traumas, with blood filling airways and families screaming outside the room. Usually, the procedure grounded him. Medicine always grounded him because medicine made sense. Algorithms. Protocols. Airway, breathing, circulation. Find the problem and fix it.

But this was you, and suddenly none of it felt clinical anymore.

Your eyes found his one last time before the sedatives fully took effect. Fear still flickered there beneath the exhaustion and pain, but so did trust. Complete trust. The kind that made his chest ache violently because you were still looking at him like he could somehow fix this.

Then your body relaxed beneath the medication.

Garcia moved immediately. “Going in.”

The room fell quieter for a second except for the ventilator alarms and the sound of Jack’s own pulse hammering violently in his ears. He watched Garcia guide the laryngoscope carefully while Robby monitored your vitals from beside the bed.

“Visualized.”

“Tube.”

“Advancing.”

Jack swallowed hard enough that it hurt.

You looked so small suddenly. That was the thought that kept repeating in his head while he stared at your motionless body beneath trauma lights that suddenly felt much too bright. You had always seemed larger than life somehow. Loud when you wanted to be. Brilliant. Sharp-edged. Impossible to intimidate. The kind of doctor residents followed instinctively because even during disasters, you carried yourself like you could handle anything thrown at you.

Now you were lying completely still while somebody else breathed for you.

“Tube’s in,” Garcia confirmed.

Relief swept through the room instantly, subtle but collective.

“End tidal color change confirmed.”

“Breath sounds bilateral.”

“Secure it.”

Dana taped the ET tube carefully into place while the ventilator connected with a soft mechanical hiss. Your chest finally began rising in slow, controlled breaths afterward, steady and artificial and horrifyingly impersonal.

Jack hated the sound immediately.

The ventilator transformed you from injured into critical in a way his brain could no longer avoid.

Robby was already moving again. “Okay, we transport now. I want CTA head and neck, cervical spine imaging, chest CT, trauma series. Somebody call ortho and tell them she’s likely got a fracture-dislocation.”

“She’s still hypotensive,” Santos warned while adjusting fluids.

“Pressure?”

“Ninety systolic.”

“Hang another liter.”

Everything continued moving around him after that, but Jack could barely process any of it fully anymore. The room had narrowed into snapshots burned violently into his memory. Blood staining the collar of your scrub top. Finger-shaped bruises spreading darker around your throat. Your hand slipping weakly from his when they rolled the gurney toward the doors.

He followed automatically beside the bed while they rushed you toward imaging. His prosthetic protested immediately beneath the sudden pace, sharp pain radiating through the socket with every uneven step, but he barely registered it now. His entire body had narrowed itself into one singular instinct.

Stay close. Do not lose sight of her.

Hallway lights blurred overhead while the gurney rattled violently across tile. Nurses moved aside instantly when they recognized who was lying on the stretcher, and somehow that silence hurt worse than panic would have.

People stopped talking when they saw you.

A respiratory therapist physically froze near the elevators before whispering, “Oh my God.”

Jack looked away immediately. He could not handle watching other people realize how bad this was.

Then suddenly, he was left standing alone in the hallway.

The silence hit him all at once.

He stared numbly at the closed doors for several long seconds before finally turning back toward Trauma Two because he genuinely did not know what else to do with himself.

By the time he returned, the room was mostly empty again. The chaos was over. Only the aftermath remained.

One overturned tray still sat abandoned near the wall where it had been kicked over during the struggle. Wrappers and syringes littered the floor beside shattered plastic packaging while a monitor continued beeping pointlessly beside an empty bed.

And blood.

Your blood was still everywhere.

Jack stopped walking.

For a second he just stood there staring at it. Tiny streaks across the tile floor. Smears against the cabinets where your head had hit. Dark fingerprints dried against the bedrail.

His stomach twisted so violently he thought he might actually throw up.

Because the only thing left of you in this room now was blood.

Not your laugh echoing across the nurses’ station during overnight shifts. Not your sarcasm when Santos annoyed you on purpose. Not the warmth of your body curled against his after impossible shifts when both of you were too exhausted to even speak properly anymore.

Just blood.

Jack looked down slowly at his own hands. There was still dried blood caught beneath his fingernails from where he had held your face trying to keep you conscious. More stained the sleeves of his scrub top in dark rust-colored smears that made his chest tighten painfully every time he looked at them.

You were intubated upstairs while trauma surgeons searched your brain for bleeding.

The thought cracked something open inside him.

If he had stayed. If he had trusted his instincts. If he had checked sooner.

“Jack.”

Dana’s voice came softly from the doorway behind him.

He did not turn around immediately. For a second, neither of them spoke while she took in the scene around him. Dana had worked in emergency medicine long enough to understand what trauma aftermath looked like, not just physically, but emotionally too.

Jack looked wrecked. Not outwardly hysterical. That almost would have been easier. Instead, he looked hollowed out from the inside.

“You should sit down,” she said gently.

“I’m fine.”

The answer came automatically, immediate and empty.

Dana almost sighed because they both knew it was complete bullshit. She stepped further into the room slowly, careful with him now in the same way people approached trauma patients who had not realized how badly they were injured yet.

“You’re shaking.”

His hands were trembling badly now that the adrenaline had started wearing off, small uncontrollable tremors moving through his fingers no matter how tightly he clenched them into fists.

“I left her,” he said quietly.

Dana’s expression softened immediately. “Jack.”

“I left her alone with him.”

The guilt in his voice nearly hurt to hear.

Dana moved closer. “You could not have predicted postictal aggression escalating like that.”