#angstykingdonaugust2026

Mel was convinced they had thought of everything. The treehouse would have two windows, because every proper headquarters needed windows. A rope ladder, a trapdoor, a bookshelf, and a sign that read NO ADULTS ALLOWED in thick red marker.

Frank insisted on adding a pulley system. "For snacks," he'd explained.

Mel had rolled her eyes. "You just don't want to climb back down."

By the time they'd finished, the blue construction paper was covered in crooked ruler lines, eraser marks, and enough misspelled words to make either of their teachers cry. Frank held it up proudly. "I think this is our best work."

Mel nodded with all the confidence an eight-year-old could possess. "It looks very professional."

Hand in hand, they marched first to Mel's parents. Her father studied the drawing with exaggerated seriousness. "Hm." He turned it sideways. "Hm."

Frank bounced impatiently. "So?"

"I think it's excellent." Mel beamed. "...Except..." She and Frank exchanged a nervous look. "...you don't have a tree big enough." They looked out the kitchen window. He was right. The tallest tree in the yard was barely taller than the garage. Undeterred, they walked three houses down to Frank's.

His mother examined the plans just as carefully. "I love the snack pulley."

Frank looked at Mel, smug. "See?"

"But..." His shoulders sank. "...we don't have a tree big enough either."

The silence lasted all of five seconds. Frank folded the blueprints under one arm. "We'll just have to find a bigger tree."

Mel grinned. "I know the park has one."

"You're a genius, Melly!"

Neither of them questioned whether building a treehouse in a public park might present a few logistical issues. They took off running, blueprints flapping between them, convinced the world would eventually cooperate if they believed in it hard enough.

Mel couldn't remember exactly when Frank stopped being the boy who lived a few houses away. Or when he became the first person she wanted to tell everything to. She only knew that somewhere along the way he had quietly become her best friend.

She smiled to herself. "I think we would've built it eventually." She looked ahead, her expression softening. "Probably would've collapsed, maybe broken a bone or two." A quiet laugh escaped her. "But we would've had fun trying."

Mel let the silence settle between them. A drop of rain finally slipped from one of the maple leaves overhead, striking the lid of the untouched coffee with a quiet tap. Autumn had always arrived early in Pittsburgh. The air carried that familiar mix of damp earth, cut grass, and leaves just beginning to surrender to gold.

"You know," Mel said with a small smile, turning back towards him, "I always hoped you'd ask me to prom." She looked down at the coffee between her hands before letting out a quiet laugh. "You never did." The memory found her anyway.

Prom had been everything she expected it to be. Too much glitter, too many cameras, a rented ballroom draped in navy and silver streamers that everyone would insist looked elegant until they saw the photos ten years later.

Mel had spent half the evening pretending not to be disappointed. Shawn Mitchell from the lacrosse team had asked her weeks earlier. He was sweet, polite, and had shown up with a bouquet of daisies in the middle of her first period AP Psychology class. She'd said yes. Partly because she felt bad embrassing him in front 35 seniors, but mostly because Frank hadn't said anything.

She'd waited. Every day after school. Every late-night phone call. Every walk home. She kept thinking he was building up the courage. He never did.

Frank showed up with Kelly Spencer from the drama club. She looked beautiful, and they looked happy. Mel hated herself a little for noticing.

The DJ switched songs. "In da Club." Within seconds, the dance floor erupted into exactly the kind of chaos only teenagers could create. Shawn laughed, took Mel's hand, and pulled her into the crowd. Across the room, Frank did the same with Kelly. For a while she forgot to look. Then Shawn spun her beneath his arm and just for a second, over his shoulder, she caught Frank's eyes. He was already looking at her. Neither of them smiled, neither of them looked away. The music pounded around them and everyone else kept dancing. Then Kelly tugged gently on Frank's hand, laughing at something he'd missed. His attention broke as he turned back to her.

Shawn dipped Mel dramatically enough to make her laugh despite herself. When she looked across the room again, Frank was gone, swallowed by the crowd.

Mel exhaled slowly. "I always thought you'd ask." The words had lived in her chest for years. "So when Shawn did..." She shrugged, "I figured maybe I'd imagined the whole thing." She smiled sadly. "I should've known better."

She let the memory fade on its own. She traced the rim of the untouched coffee cup with her thumb, smiling to herself. Funny how one memory always seemed to lead to another.

"Do you remember when you showed up with pizza before Match day?" Mel smiled to herself. "You always brought pizza when you had something you didn't know how to say. Very subtle, by the way."

Mel was still sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, surrounded by residency brochures and a half-finished rank list, when someone knocked. She frowned. Nobody ever knocked.

A second later, Frank's voice came through the door. "If you're pretending not to be home, I can literally hear you walking."

She laughed despite herself and pulled the door open. He stood there holding two pizza boxes. "I brought dinner."

"Two boxes? Is someone dying?" She joked.

"I panic-ordered," he said with a nervous grin.

She stepped aside. "That bad?"

"Worse." He kicked the door shut behind him, dropped the boxes onto her tiny kitchen table, and looked around. "You're still ranking programs?"

"I was." She gestured toward the papers. "You've got about..." she checked the clock, "...forty-eight hours to convince me PTMC isn't perfect."

He glanced at the list. PTMC, number one, just like they'd always planned. "Yeah..." He didn't sit immediately.

Mel watched him pace once around the apartment before finally dropping into the chair across from her. "You okay?"

He rubbed both hands over his face. "No."

Her smile disappeared. "What happened?"

He stared at the unopened pizza. "You remember Abby."

"The English grad student?"

He nodded. "She's pregnant."

The room became impossibly quiet. Mel's heart lurched so hard she was certain he'd heard it. "...Oh."

"I found out this week." He laughed once, nervously. "I've been trying to figure out how to tell you."

She forced a smile. "Congratulations."

"Thanks." He didn't sound convinced. After a long silence, he spoke again. "I told her I'm going to marry her."

Mel's fingers tightened around the edge of a paper plate. "You... did?"

"I haven't bought a ring yet." He looked down at his hands. "I just..." Another silence. "It's the right thing to do." He looked up. "...Right?"

Mel knew that look. He wasn't asking because he doubted Abby. He was asking because, whenever life became too complicated to untangle on his own, he'd always come to her first.

"She'd make a great mom," he said quickly. "She's really sweet and smart."

"Yeah." The ringing in Mel's ears was getting louder.

"And I can love her." He smiled for the first time since he'd arrived. "I mean... that's everything, isn't it?"

He looked at her with the same hopeful expression he'd worn since they were kids whenever he wanted reassurance. "There's no reason not to marry her..." His voice softened. "...Right?"

Mel looked at him for a long moment. At the man she'd imagined growing old beside since she was too young to understand what that feeling meant. Then she looked at the residency papers spread across her coffee table. The future they'd quietly built without ever speaking it aloud. If she said anything now, she'd be asking him to choose between the family already growing inside Abby and the possibility of a life he'd never promised her. That wasn't love. Love was wanting him to walk out of her apartment believing he'd made the right decision. Even if it broke her.

She smiled. "I think your son or daughter is going to have a dad who'll move mountains for them."

Frank's shoulders relaxed. "You really think so?"

"I do."

"And… you think marrying Abby is the right thing?" Mel nodded, but couldn't look him in the eye, instead focusing on getting a slice of pizza out of the box infront of her.

"I think you'd spend the rest of your life wondering if you hadn't."

He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back. "Yeah… I guess you're right." He ducked his head to make eye contact with her. "Was kinda hoping you'd tell me I was being an idiot."

She laughed. "I mean, you're having a kid in residency, you are being an idiot." She smiled at him. "But you're going to be the best dad, Frank."

"Thanks, Mel." His smiled and cleared his throat. "So," he stole a slice. "PTMC next year?"

Mel looked down at the residency forms, then back at him and smiled. "We'll see." She didn't tell him that, sometime between the first pizza and the last, she'd quietly decided she couldn't spend the next four years watching him build a life with someone else. She would change her rank list the next morning. He would never know why.

She sat quietly for a moment. At the time, it felt like there would be more time. She let out a shaky breath. "It's funny what we remember. I can tell you what song was playing at prom. I can tell you what toppings were on that pizza… I can even tell you what color scrubs I was wearing that morning."

Mel wrung her hands. A poor attempt to self-soothe. "I was going to call you that weekend." She smiled faintly. "You just beat me to it."

The memory came anyway.

Abigail Langdon.

She frowned. Weird, but not totally out of the realm of posibility. Frank was always the one who called, but maybe he didn't have his phone on him.

She answered on the second ring. "Hi, Abby."

There was no greeting, only breathing. Uneven and trembling.

"...Abby?"

"I'm sorry." Her voice was barely audible. "I... I don't know how..."

Mel was already on her feet, weaving through the emergency department toward the relative quiet of the stairwell. Already feeling the anxiety building in the pit of her stomach. "Hey. Slow down. What's wrong?"

Another breath. Then another. "It's Frank."

Her stomach tightened. "What happened?"

Silence. Mel wanted to reach through the phone and shake her."...Abby?"

"Tanner found him."

Mel stopped walking. "...What?"

"He..." Abby broke off with a sob. "He went to use the bathroom in the middle of the night." The words came in pieces. "He found him in there," a sob ripped out of Abby, "he thought Frank was just pranking him…but then he couldn't wake him up."

Mel gripped the handrail. Everything around her seemed to disappear. The overhead pages. The monitors. The voices down the hall. All of it faded into static. "...Is he okay?" She heard herself ask it. Heard how desperately she needed the answer.

"He wasn't breathing." Abby's voice cracked. "I started CPR. The paramedics..." She inhaled sharply. "They worked on him all the way to PTMC."

Mel closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Okay," it came out as a whisper. "Okay... then he's there?" Another silence. Long enough that Mel already knew.

"They couldn't bring him back."

The words hollowed her out. "No." She held her hand up to her mouth, feeling the trembling.

"I'm so sorry."

"No." She shook her head, the tears already overflowing her waterline. Mel slid down the wall until she was sitting on the cold concrete steps, the hand on her mouth fully covering the lower half of her face, as though she could somehow physically hold in the sobs threatening to escape.

"They're... they're saying they don't know exactly what happened yet." Abby's voice shook. "They're investigating. That's all anyone will tell me."

Mel couldn't make herself respond.

"Tanner keeps asking if he did something wrong." Her breath caught. "He thinks..." Abby sobbed. "He thinks if he'd gone to wake him up sooner..." She couldn't finish. After a long silence, Abby spoke again. "His parents took the first available flight." Mel nodded even though Abby couldn't see her. "But..." Abby swallowed hard. "I know Frank." Another shaky breath. "I know he would've never forgiven me if I didn't make sure you were the next to know."

The tears came all at once. Hot, relentless. Mel pressed her forehead against the cool concrete wall. "I was going to call him, I had news." The confession escaped in a whisper. "We kept saying we'd catch up when things slowed down."

On the other end of the line, Abby cried quietly. "I'm so sorry, Mel…"

Mel stared at the fresh earth in front of her. The flowers hadn't begun to wilt. Someone had left a small Pittsburgh Penguins pin beside the bouquet from the emergency department. Everything still looked too... new. Too temporary. Like everyone had made some terrible mistake that would be corrected by morning. She swallowed hard.

"I'm so fucking mad at you, Frank," she wiped at her eyes harshly, willing the tears to stay put. "How could you be so stupid. Why wouldn't you call me if you were struggling? I would've come, I could've—" She shook her head. "It doesn't matter now, does it?"

She had always imagined the last thing she'd say to Frank would be clever. A sarcastic remark, or some inside joke that would make him roll his eyes before laughing anyway. Not this. Not sitting in the cold with her forehead pressed against polished granite, her fingers curled helplessly around the edges of a headstone that couldn't hold her back. The coffee she'd brought hours ago sat untouched beside her.

"I keep thinking of more things to tell you," she whispered, her voice cracking from the burning in her throat. "I'll hear something stupid on the radio and think, Frank's going to hate this song. Then I remember." The words dissolved into a sob she couldn't swallow.

"I got the attending position a Presby," a shaky laugh escaped through her tears. "We were finally going to be in the same city again." She traced her fingers over his name.

"I met your kids." The confession barely made it out. "God, Frank, they're so much like you." Her shoulders shook as the grief she had carefully folded into a neat little corner finally came apart all at once. She had spent the past two weeks helping Abby with the arrangements, watching the kids so she could have a breather, helping his parents make calls to other family members. She had been too numb to shed more than a couple lone tears at the funeral.

"I thought..." she managed between broken breaths. "I thought there would be time." The tears came harder now, hot against the engraved letters of his name. "I thought after residency." A breath. "After the kids got older." Another. "When life slowed down."

She laughed bitterly, "but it never slows down, does it?" Her fingertips traced the familiar letters one last time. "I spent our whole lives trying not to ruin the friendship." She bowed her head back against the stone. When she spoke again, her voice was so quiet the wind nearly carried it away.

Mel walked into the locker room after working her first day shift back from a grueling week of working nights. To say Frank missed her would be an understatement. He never liked when she wasn’t working beside him, but this particular time in his life was one that he really could’ve used his emotional support… friend? 

If that’s what you’d call whatever it is that they have going on. 

Frank’s eyes lifted to where she stood at her locker, stretching her arms above her head and twisting her body side to side to stretch out the tightness of the day.

“So,” Frank smiled, “which is worse? Have you come to a conclusion yet?”

“Oh, uh,” Mel giggled, tucking the loose strands of hair behind her ear and reaching into her locker to grab her bag, “I think days and nights bothhave their pros and cons.”

Frank stood, lifting his scrub top over his head and stuffing it into his almost overflowing bag before turning back to Mel with a grin, “Well, I can think of one pro of day shift that automatically makes it superior.”

“Oh yeah?” Mel teased, looking at him over her glasses as she untied her sneakers, her eyes catching on where his shirt rode up, practically face to face with the toned muscles and dark hair scattered on his stomach, trailing down below his waist band. 

“What’s that?” she asked, though she had a feeling she knew exactly what he was gonna say.

“Me,” he said matter-of-factly, pointing at himself and shaking his head like it was the most obvious answer.

“Oh,” Mel laughed brightly, the beautiful sound floating through the air between them, “right, of course. Yeah, you’re definitely a plus.”

Frank could tell she was just keeping up with his bit, something that seemed exclusive to him, but he still felt that familiar spread of a crimson blush across his cheeks.

“Ready?” she asked, slinging her bag over her shoulder, finally ready to ditch the ED for the familiarity of her pajamas and bed. 

She had a package waiting for her at home. A lavender pillow spray that she was very excited to use, hopeful that it would perform some sort of magic on her insomnia.

“Just one second,” he breathed, his eyes fixed on where he untied his scrub pants with nimble fingers.

Mel had to keep her teeth clamped together as she watched him slide them down his legs, her eyes lifting from where the pants pooled around his ankles to his navy blue boxers, for fear that he’d look up and see her gaping at him.

He fished around in his overstuffed backpack, pulling out a pair of wrinkled grey sweatpants and slipping them on. His eyes met hers as he slipped his bag over his shoulders, nodding towards the exit, and together they made their way outside.

“I’m sorry again that I can’t give you a ride,” he apologized, looking down at his feet. “Pretty fucked up that both of our cars decided to shit the bed at the same time.”

“Yeah,” Mel agreed with a breathy laugh, “It’s okay though. I don’t mind walking.”

“Especially with me, right?” Frank teased, brushing his shoulder against hers as they reached the end of the park.

“Sure,” Mel laughed. She said it like she didn’t really mean it, but the truth is, some of her favorite moments are the ones where it’s just the two of them.

Carpooling to work, listening to her playlist while he asks her for what feels like the hundredth time, ‘Who is this again?’

Standing in the ambulance bay while they debrief about their day, when they both should have already gone home.

Sitting in the break room, just chatting, while Frank sips from the Fort Pitt mug she got him for his birthday.

She wished they could have more moments just them, but outside of the context of work. She wished she could invite him over and they could sit on her couch and watch jeopardy and argue over who answered first. She thinks they'd probably just agree on a tie.

She imagined that eventually they’d both grow tired, and she would turn to him and say, ‘Maybe you should head home?’ and his head would lull against her shoulder, and he’d whisper, ‘In a minute.’ 

But he wouldn’t leave ‘in a minute’. 

She imagined that they’d fall asleep there, leaning up against each other, soaking in the warmth of their bodies pressed together for far longer than they reasonably should.

But last time she asked if he wanted to grab dinner after work he told her that even though he would have loved to, Abby already made plans for them to go out, and the sting was still yet to wear off, so she hadn’t asked since. 

She didn’t really care for the feeling of being turned down by her best friend who she just so happened to be in love with, for his wife who only ever seemed to think about herself.

So, she’d settle for what their job would bring them. The quiet moments they could steal before the real world came calling.

“Goodnight, Frank,” Mel said, standing with him underneath the flickering lightpost outside her apartment.

For one fleeting second, she thought she caught his eyes dropping down to her lips, but she brushed it off as the light playing tricks on her.

“Goodnight, Mel.”

And with that she grabbed her package off her porch and made her way inside, toeing off her shoes by the front door and tossing her keys into the little ceramic tray Becca made her in pottery class, before clicking on the lamp by her couch.

She looked up through the large window behind it to catch Frank’s final wave.

He always waited until she was inside and caught her eyes one last time, shooting her a toothy grin and a gentle wave before turning and walking or driving away from her, to go be with his family.

Usually, he’d turn to the left to start his journey home.

This night though—

He turned to the right.