꧁❀Maisie❀꧂

The after was a slow, insidious thing. It was in the way she said your name— Dr. Y/L/N, always formal in front of others, but softer when it was just the two of you in the supply closet, counting “narcotics”. It was in the way she’d slide a cup of terrible hospital coffee across the counter toward you, made exactly the way you liked it, without you ever having to ask. It was in the way her hand would find your lower back during a chaotic trauma, a steadying pressure that said I’ve got you without a single word.

It was 2004. She’d been married for twelve years to a man named Benji who worked regular hours and came to hospital functions with a kind smile. He looked at her like she was the center of his universe. You had no right to want her. You wanted her anyway.

You wanted her in the way she’d linger for a moment after handing you a chart, her fingers brushing yours. You wanted her in the way she saved you a seat in the break room, pulling out the chair next to hers with a pointed look when you walked in. You wanted her in the way she found you after bad shifts, sitting in silence with you in an on-call room until your hands stopped shaking. She never asked if you were okay. She just sat with you, close enough that your shoulders almost touched, close enough that you could smell her perfume, a simple floral scent that you would forever associate with safety.

You never said anything.

What was there to say? I'm in love with you, and I know you're married, and I know this is impossible, but I can't stop thinking about you? You were thirty-eight years old. You were too old for confessions. Too old for grand gestures. Too old to believe in the kind of love that changed things. So you watched her from across the trauma bay, watched her move with practiced grace, and you loved her in the silence between your shared glances.

One night in 2007, you were both held over for a double shift during a bad storm. The ER was eerily quiet, and you found her.

The lights in the lounge were too bright. They always were, the harsh, fluorescent, the kind that made everyone look washed out and exhausted, that highlighted the shadows under her eyes and the gray in her hair, that turned the room into something clinical and sterile. You stood beside her, close enough that your arms were almost touching.

“You should go home,” you said, your voice hoarse from exhaustion.

“Benji’s got the kids,” she replied, not looking at you. “I’d just be staring at the ceiling there, anyway.”

You nodded. You stood in silence for a long time, watching the storm. Then, without a word, she leaned her head against your shoulder. Just a small, simple gesture. You held your breath, terrified of breaking the spell. You felt the weight of her, the warmth of her, and you let your cheek rest against the top of her head.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered.

You closed your eyes. “There’s nowhere else I’d be.”

The rumors started in 2009. You’d been working together for ten years, and somewhere in that time, the lines you’d both been so careful to maintain had blurred. It wasn’t just glances and coffee anymore. It was the way you’d walk her to her car after a shift, the way she’d linger, finding reasons to keep talking. It was the way you’d gravitate toward each other in a crowded room, your shoulders touching, your voices dropping to a frequency only the two of you could hear. You’d become a unit, a silent, seamless partnership that the rest of the staff noticed.

You didn’t know who started the rumor. It didn’t matter. In a hospital, rumors spread faster than infections, and this one had all the hallmarks of something that would stick.

Did you hear about the new attending? The one who works trauma?

Yeah. Heard she’s one of them. You know. A lesbian.

She’s always hovering around Evans. You think Evans knows?

Evans is married. She’s got kids. I doubt she wants anything to do with that.

You heard it first from a nurse named Karen, who cornered you in the break room while you were pouring coffee. She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

"You know, we don't have a problem with that sort of thing here," she said, her voice a low, conspiratorial purr. "But maybe you should be careful. Some people might get the wrong idea. The way you look at Dana."

Your hands went cold around the warm mug. You stared at her, your heart pounding so hard you were sure she could see it.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Karen smiled. "Of course you don't. Just thought you should know. People talk."

She left. You stood in the break room, alone, and tried to breathe, but the air felt thin, sharp in your lungs.

You told yourself it didn't matter. You told yourself you didn't care what people thought. You were a doctor. You were good at your job. That was all that mattered. You’d weathered worse things than gossip.

But the gossip was insidious. The nurses who used to joke with you went quiet when you entered a room, their conversations halting mid-sentence. The attendings who used to invite you to lunch suddenly had prior commitments. You’d walk into the locker room and hear the whispers stop, replaced by a pointed silence that was louder than any words. A patient’s family member requested a new doctor, saying they were “uncomfortable.” The attending who was your colleague gave you a look—a mix of pity and judgment that made your stomach turn.

You didn't say anything. You didn't complain. You went to work, you did your job, you saved lives. You told yourself that was enough.

But it wasn't. Because the worst part wasn't the whispers. The worst part was Dana.

Dana heard the rumors. You knew she did. Everyone heard the rumors.

And she did nothing.

At first, you thought she was just waiting for it to blow over. But then she started taking her breaks in the nurse’s station instead of the lounge. She stopped saving you a seat. When you walked into a room, she’d suddenly find a task that required her to leave. The hand that used to find your lower back, the lingering touches, the quiet moments after bad shifts—it all evaporated. She stopped looking at you across the ER like you were the only person in the room. Instead, she looked through you, her gaze sliding past yours with a practiced blankness that was worse than anger.

You’d catch glimpses of her old self sometimes. A flicker of warmth in her eyes when you told a joke to a patient, quickly masked. A moment where she almost reached for your arm in a trauma, pulling her hand back at the last second. She was building a wall between you, brick by silent brick, and you were powerless to stop it.

One night, you found a small, folded note in your locker. It was in her handwriting. All it said was: I’m sorry. I can’t be seen with you right now.

You crumpled the note in your fist, your knuckles white. You’d never felt so small.

You confronted her six months after the rumors started. You found her in the break room, alone, her back to the door as she stared at a cold cup of coffee.

"Dana."

She stiffened. Didn't turn around.

"We need to talk."

"I'm busy."

You closed the door behind you, the soft click of the latch echoing in the silence. "You've been avoiding me for months. We haven't had a real conversation in weeks. I find notes in my locker like I’m some sort of villain."

She turned then. Her face was carefully blank, the professional mask she wore when she didn't want anyone to see what she was feeling. But her eyes were tired, shadowed with something that looked like grief.

"I haven't been avoiding you."

"Yes, you have." Your voice cracked, despite your best efforts. "Ever since the rumors started."

Something flickered in her expression. Guilt, maybe. Or fear. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't." The word came out sharper than you intended, and you saw her flinch. "Don't do that. Don't pretend you don't know. You heard what they're saying about me. About us."

She was quiet for a long moment, her jaw working. Then: "I heard."

"And you didn't say anything." It wasn’t a question. Your voice was hollow now. "Karen has been treating me like a pariah for half a year. I've been reassigned from two critical cases because families are 'uncomfortable.' I come to work every day feeling like I have to apologize for my existence. And you... you just let it happen."

"What was I supposed to say?" Her voice was tight, controlled.

"Anything!" You threw your hands up, the dam finally breaking. "Anything would have been better than nothing! You could have told them to stop. You could have told them it didn't matter. You could have—" You stopped, your throat constricting. "You could have stood up for me."

Dana's jaw tightened, a muscle ticking in her cheek. "It's not that simple."

"Why not?" You stepped closer, your voice dropping. "I'm your—" You stopped. What were you? You'd never defined it. Never named it. Never said the words that had been sitting between you for ten years, for a thousand shared glances and silent understandings.

"I'm your friend," you said finally, the word feeling wholly inadequate. "At least, I thought I was."

She flinched. It was small, almost imperceptible, but you saw it. The mask cracked, and beneath it was raw, desperate pain.

"You don't understand," she said, her voice breaking. "I have a husband. I have children. I have a life here. If people start talking about me the way they're talking about you—"

"What about me?" Your voice was barely a whisper now, but it felt louder than a scream in the small room. "You think I have no life just because I'm single? You're throwing me under the bus to protect yourself? To protect your image?"

"It's not like that."

"Then what is it like, Dana?" You felt the tears you’d been holding back for six months finally spill over, hot and shameful on your cheeks. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you're pretending you don't know me. Like you're ashamed of me. Of what they think I am."

"I'm not ashamed," she said, but she couldn’t meet your eyes.

"Then what are you?"

She didn't answer. She looked at you for a long, aching moment, and you saw something in her eyes—something that looked like fear, like longing, like ten years of unspoken things clawing their way to the surface. Her hand twitched at her side, as if she wanted to reach out and wipe your tears away.

"I can't," she said finally, and her voice was so quiet you almost didn’t hear it. "I'm sorry. I can't."

She walked past you, her shoulder brushing yours for the briefest second, and then she was gone. The door swung shut with a soft click, leaving you alone in the silence of the break room.

You stood there for a long time, staring at the spot where she’d been, the taste of defeat bitter in your mouth. You had loved her in the quiet spaces, in the stolen moments, in the silence. And in the end, it was the silence.

Her silence, that destroyed you.

The silence after Dana walked out was the loudest thing you'd ever heard.

You stood in the break room for what felt like hours, though it was probably only minutes. Your tears had dried. You looked at the door she'd disappeared through and felt something crack open up in your chest—something you'd been holding together for years, piece by careful piece.

You went back to work because that's what you did. That's what you'd always done.

You scrubbed in on a trauma, hands steady, voice calm. The patient was a twenty-three-year-old man, a construction worker who'd fallen three stories. His wife was in the waiting room. She was seven months pregnant.

You saved him. You always saved them. That was the cruel joke of it—you could hold someone's heart in your hands, could coax life back into lungs that had stopped breathing, could stitch together the broken pieces of strangers,

but you couldn't fix this. 

You couldn't fix her. 

You couldn't fix yourself.

The months that followed were slow.

Dana didn't just avoid you. She officially removed you from her life, and she did it with the same quiet efficiency she brought to everything else. She switched her shifts. She stopped taking breaks in the lounge altogether. When you walked into a room, she walked out. When you were assigned to the same trauma, she worked opposite sides of the bay, always keeping patients, equipment, anything between you.

You tried to talk to her again, once.

You cornered her by the ambulance bay, three weeks after the confrontation. It was two in the morning, snow falling, the lot empty except for a single ambulance that had just left. She was pulling on her coat, preparing to walk to her car.

"Dana. Please."

She stopped but didn't turn around. You could see the tension in her shoulders, the way her hands had gone still on her coat.

"I just want to understand," you said. Your voice sounded foreign to you—thin, desperate. "I just want to know what I did wrong."

She turned then, and for a moment, you saw it—the crack in her armor. Her eyes were bright, her lips pressed together so tightly they'd gone white.

"You didn't do anything wrong," she said. The words came out strangled.

"Then why?"

She shook her head, "You need to let this go. You need to let me go."

"I don't know how."

Her face crumpled. It was just for a second, but you saw it—the same raw, aching thing you'd been carrying for a decade, reflected back at you. Then she was gone, walking across the lot, her boots crunching on the salt-dusted pavement.

She got in her car. She drove away. You stood in the snow until your hands went numb, watching the red of her taillights disappear into the dark.

The worst part was that you still had to see her.

That was the unique cruelty of a hospital. You couldn't just disappear, couldn't move to another city, couldn't pretend the last ten years hadn't happened. You had to walk the same halls, ride the same elevators, breathe the same recycled air. You had to hear her voice over the intercom, see her handwriting on patient charts, catch glimpses of her across the trauma bay—her hands, always moving, always saving, the same hands that used to find your shoulder, your back, your arm.

You started taking the stairs instead of the elevator because you couldn't bear the possibility of being trapped in a small space with her.

You stopped going to the cafeteria because that was where she took her lunch now.

You ate in an empty on-call room, door locked, sitting on the edge of a bed that smelled like bleach and stale sheets, forcing down protein bars you couldn't taste.

The other nurses noticed. Of course they did. The rumors had quieted—there was nothing left to talk about, after all. You'd been effectively neutralized. No one whispered anymore. They just... didn't look at you. Didn't talk to you unless they had to. You'd become a ghost in your own department, haunting the edges of a place where you'd once belonged.

You threw yourself into your work because it was the only thing left. You took every trauma, every code, every impossible case. You worked double shifts, triple shifts. You slept in the hospital more nights than you slept at home. Your apartment, when you bothered to go there, felt wrong—too quiet, too empty, filled with furniture you'd bought with Dana's voice in your head.

You lost weight. You didn't notice, but other people did. Jack, one of the older attendings who'd always been kind to you, pulled you aside one day.

"When's the last time you ate a real meal?" he asked, 

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're disappearing."

You laughed at that. It came out wrong—too sharp, too hollow. "I'm right here."

Jack looked at you for a long moment. "She's not worth destroying yourself over."

You felt something twist in your chest. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Jack said quietly. "I've seen things. I saw you two, before. The way you were together. The way you looked at each other." he paused. "I'm sorry. For what happened. For what they did to you. To both of you."

You couldn't respond. Your throat had closed up. You nodded once, a jerky, mechanical movement, and walked away before you could fall apart in front of him.

You saw Dana with her husband six weeks after the ambulance bay.

It was a Saturday, and you'd made the mistake of going to the cafeteria to get coffee because the machine on your floor was broken. You rounded the corner and there they were—Benji's hand on her lower back, the same place her hand used to find you. He was saying something, smiling, and she was smiling back, and she looked... fine. She looked normal. Like she hadn't spent the last six months methodically dismantling your entire world.

You stopped so abruptly that the person behind you almost ran into you.

You watched her laugh at something he said, watched her reach up to touch his face, and you felt something splinter inside you. Not the clean break of anger or betrayal, but something messier. Something that tasted like: That could have been me. That should have been me. If I had been born different. If the world was different. If I was different.

You turned and walked away. Your coffee was forgotten. You made it to the stairwell before your knees gave out, and you sat down on the cold concrete steps, your back against the wall, and you cried. Not the quiet tears of the break room, but ugly, wrenching sobs that tore out of you from somewhere deep, somewhere primal. You cried until you had nothing left, until you were just a hollow shell sitting in a stairwell, listening to the distant sounds of a hospital that kept moving without you.

You started having nightmares.

Not about patients, not about the things you'd see. You dreamed about Dana. Over and over, the same dream. You were standing in the trauma bay, and she was across from you, and you were trying to reach her, but the room kept stretching, growing longer and longer, and no matter how fast you ran, you couldn't close the distance. You'd wake up gasping, tangled in sheets, your hand reaching for someone who wasn't there.

You stopped sleeping. Two hours a night, three if you were lucky. You drank coffee like it was water, your hands shaking from caffeine and exhaustion and something you refused to name.

You made a mistake on a patient. A minor one, a medication dosage slightly off, caught by the pharmacist before it could do any harm. But it was noted. It was recorded. You were called into the chief of medicine's office.

"We're concerned about you," he said. He was a thin man with kind eyes. You'd always liked him. Now you sat across from his desk, feeling like a child called to the principal's office.

"I'm fine."

"Your charting has been inconsistent. You've made two minor errors in the last three weeks. You've worked ninety hours in the last six days."

"I'm fine," you repeated. Your voice sounded flat, even to you.

He studied you for a long moment. "This isn't a reprimand. We're mandating you take seventy-two hours off. No work. No coming in. I want you to sleep. I want you to eat. I want you to remember that you can't save anyone if you're falling apart."

You opened your mouth to argue, but nothing came out. Because he was right. You were falling apart. You'd been falling apart for months, and everyone could see it except you.

You went home. You sat in your apartment, the one that felt like a stranger's, and you stared at the wall. You didn't sleep. You didn't eat. You sat on your couch, the couch that Dana had mocked, and you thought about every moment of the last ten years.

The first time she laughed at something you said.

The first time she saved you a seat.

The first time you realized you were in love with her, standing next to the fridge in staff room, watching her talk about her trip to Michigan, thinking: I would burn my whole life down for you.

You'd been so careful. You'd never asked for anything. Never pushed, never pressured, never said the words that would have made it real. You'd loved her in the silence, and the silence had been enough until it wasn't. Until the silence became a weapon. 

You went back to work after three days. You were still thin, still exhausted, but you'd slept. You'd eaten. You'd put yourself back together enough to function.

The first day back, you walked into the ER and there was a new nurse. Young, nervous, clearly fresh out of school. She was standing at the nurses' station, looking lost, and without thinking, you walked over.

"Need some help?"

She looked up at you with wide eyes. "I'm looking for Dana Evans. They said she was the charge nurse? I'm supposed to shadow her."

Your chest constricted. "She's... she should be in the trauma bay. I can take you."

You led the new nurse through the ER, past the beds, past the monitors, past the ghosts of a thousand moments you couldn't escape. And there she was. Dana. Standing at the trauma bay, reviewing a chart, her reading glasses perched on her nose.

She looked up when you approached. For a moment—just a moment—something passed between you. Something that was pain and longing and ten years of everything you'd never said.

"Dr. Y/L/N," she said. Formal. Professional. The same way she'd said your name a thousand times.

"Dana." You forced your voice to be steady. "This is your new orientee. She was looking for you."

Dana's gaze dropped to the new nurse, and she smiled—that warm, competent smile you'd fallen in love with a decade ago. "Of course. Come with me. I'll show you around."

She walked away. The new nurse followed. You stood in the middle of the trauma bay, watching her go, and you felt something you hadn't felt in months: a flicker of anger. Not at her—you couldn't be angry at her, not really, no matter how much you tried but at yourself. At the years you'd wasted. At the words you'd never said.

What if you had said them? What if, that first day, instead of I think we're going to work well together, you'd said I think I'm in love with you? What if, in 2004, you'd told her the truth? What if you hadn't been so careful, so silent, so afraid?

What if you'd been brave?

You didn't last seventy-two hours after that.

It was a bad shift. The kind of shift that would have broken you even on your best day. A pediatric code, a four-year-old girl who'd drowned in a backyard pool. You worked her for forty-five minutes. You did everything right. She died anyway.

You stood in the trauma bay, your hands still wet from the code, and you couldn't move. The other staff filtered out, their faces drawn, their eyes averted. You were alone with the empty bed, the discarded equipment, the silence.

And then you weren't alone.

You didn't hear her come in. You just felt her. The same way you'd always felt her, from the very first day.

"Y/N."

Your name. Not Dr. Y/L/N. Just your name. She hadn't said it in months.

You didn't turn around. You couldn't. If you turned around, you would break.

"Y/N, look at me."

"I can't."

You heard her move closer. Felt her behind you, close enough to touch.

"I know," she said, and her voice was shaking. "I know. But I need you to hear me."

You closed your eyes. Your hands were trembling.

"I've been trying to do the right thing," she said. "For months, I've been telling myself that I was protecting my family, protecting my children, protecting you. I told myself that if I just... if I just stayed away, it would get easier. That we would get over it. That we would move on."

Her voice cracked on the last words.

"But I can't," she whispered. "I can't move on. I can't get over it. I can't—" She stopped. Took a breath that sounded like it cost her everything. "I can't stop thinking about you. I can't stop wanting you. I can't stop loving you."

You turned then.

She was crying. Dana Evans, who had held up the world for twenty years, who had seen things you couldn't imagine, who had stood in the middle of chaos and never flinched—she was crying, her face wet, her hands shaking, her mask finally, completely gone.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry. I was a coward. I was so afraid of what people would say, of what it would mean, of what I would lose—and I lost you anyway. I lost you, and I've been walking around for months like a person who's had a limb amputated, pretending I can't feel the ghost of you everywhere."

You stared at her. Your heart was pounding so hard you could feel it in your throat, in your temples, in the tips of your fingers.

"You have a husband," you said. Your voice came out rough, scraped raw.

"I know."

"You have children."

"I know."

"You said you couldn't."

She stepped closer. You could see the individual tears tracking down her face, the way her lip trembled, the way her hands were fisted at her sides like she was physically holding herself back.

"I was wrong," she said. "I was wrong about everything. And I know it might be too late. I know I don't have the right to ask you for anything. But I need you to know that I love you. I have loved you every single day since 1999, since you walked into this hospital looking like you were going to be sick, and you looked at me like I was the only thing in the room."

She was close enough now that you could smell her perfume, the same simple floral scent you'd been chasing for a decade.

"I love you," she said again, her voice breaking. "And I am so, so sorry."

You stood there, in the middle of the trauma bay where a child had just died, with the woman you'd loved for ten years crying in front of you, and you realized: you were still afraid. You were terrified. Of what this meant, of what it would cost, of what would happen when the sun rose and the real world came back.

But you were more terrified of walking away.

You reached out. Your hand trembled as you touched her face, your fingers brushing the tears from her cheek. She closed her eyes, leaning into your touch like a starving thing finally being fed.

"I've loved you since 1999 too," you said. "I've loved you every day. And I'm so angry at you I can barely breathe. And I don't know if I can trust you. And I don't know if this can work. But I—" Your voice broke. "I don't know how to stop. I've tried. I've tried so hard. And I can't."

She opened her eyes. They were red-rimmed, swollen, the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen.

"I will spend the rest of my life making this up to you," she said. "If you let me. If you still want me."

You laughed. It was wet and broken and nothing like the laugh you'd imagined a thousand times, but it was real.

"I want you," you said. "I've always wanted you. I just—I need you to be brave. I need you to choose me. Not in secret. Not in silence. I need you to choose me the way I've been choosing you for ten years."

She nodded, tears still falling. "I will. I promise. I will."

You kissed her.

It wasn't the kiss you'd dreamed about. It was messy and desperate and tasted like salt and grief and ten years of everything you'd never said. It was the kiss of two people who had spent too long in the dark, finally stumbling toward the light.

She pulled back first, her forehead against yours, both of you breathing hard.

"What now?" she whispered.

You looked at her—really looked at her, for the first time in months. You saw the fear still there, the guilt, the weight of everything she was about to lose. But you also saw something else.  

You saw love.

"Now," you said, "we figure it out. Together. One day at a time."

She let out a shaky breath. "Together."