Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Mel was a child, the morning before her first day of school, her mother would brush her hair, combing through it with her fingers while her eyes were closed against the white light of the bathroom, knees pressing into the thin wood of the cabinets she sat in front of. She could feel the frantic energy of her mom, worry she later realized for Mel’s safety and happiness, but her hands were calm and sure as she braided Mel’s hair back. Days or weeks into the school year, the time would slip away and they wouldn’t have time for her mom to do her hair in the morning anymore. Mel would choose an extra five minutes of sleep or Becca would need help with some broken toy or breakfast sat, burning, in the kitchen. But the first morning was sacred, ripe with the low thrum of nerves and new beginnings, the world out there surging toward them minute by minute.

All day, as she met new classmates and old, as she sat in new seats and pulled out new supplies and erased her first pencil mark with her fresh pink eraser she’d pick to shreds by the end of the month, she could close her eyes and feel her mother’s fingers in her hair, along her scalp, comforting her. As she had to stand up and introduce herself or read part of the syllabus aloud or select the critically important lunch eating spot for the year, she’d feel her there like a ghost. A ghost she would, she knew, come home to no matter how awkward things got, no matter whether she talked too much about the hours she spent memorizing poems she found on Tumblr or the musical Becca watched one thousand times in the span of a month or when she said out loud how nervous, how embarrassed, how scared she was of first days, of new faces, of this, this thing she suspected was life itself, only to be met with blank stares. A buzz would begin in her head, the low hum of shame and yearning and guilt, too, because she just couldn’t figure out how everyone else did it, how they all fit in so easily, laughing in the corner of the cafeteria with people they met hours ago. The buzzing would grow all day, grow and grow, if she answered a question wrong, if silence fell when she was paired up with a boy in the second row for a project, if she laughed too loud or stumbled over her words or said just slightly the wrong thing, but she knew, when she got home, her mom would be there waiting, not a ghost at all.

Even as she got older, as Becca’s activities demanded more attention and her father died, a heart attack on some random July day that still baffled her years later, they kept their ritual. Her first day of high school, first day of her first job, first date, even, she’d sit, sometimes on the floor between her mother’s long legs, sometimes perched at the kitchen counter, sometimes as they once had, on a makeshift stool in front of the bathroom mirror, and her mom would comb through her hair and braid it back from her face. They’d pause, a moment, eyes meeting in the mirror. Often both of them would fill, if only briefly, with tears. Then they’d be back into the chaos of the morning, dressing and undressing, eating or not eating, packing or pacing or panicking. But still, through it all, she had the blessing of a braid down her back.

When Becca eventually got into Mamma Mia!, Mel sobbed through “Slipping Through My Fingers” every time. Hearing it from another room, hearing her hum the notes, even the thought of it set her off.

She thought of it that morning as she braided her own hair, desperately aware that she’d give anything, anything, to never have had to learn how to do it herself. It wasn’t the same, she knew because nothing, not one single thing, had been the same since her mom died, but the ritual seemed important to carry on in some childish belief that it would protect her anyway. She imagined her mom’s hands ghosting over her own, twist by twist. But she didn’t have her mom’s finesse, and a piece sprung out, itching the back of her neck and she had to start over.

She sighed and unraveled it. By the third time, her arms ached, and tears spilled down her cheeks, and she wished her mom hadn’t died for the thousandth time, the one hundred thousandth time, a wish made of a wound that would never, ever heal. She started again, thinking of Sophie and Donna, thinking of the funny tricks of time, thinking of her mom as a young woman once, doing the same thing she was doing. She didn’t know if her grandmother had done the same for her, how her mom learned to braid in the first place, couldn’t remember ever asking. She itched to call her. To know. To call her and ask every single question that ever occurred to her, no matter how insignificant, because nothing was insignificant once someone was dead. The itch was an itch she was familair with. A wound she carried around with her. One so deep and so painful, she knew everyone could see it on her no matter how she grew around it, found a place for it, molded it into an inseparable and vital part of herself that fueled her even as it hurt.

Eventually, she got her hair just right, and she got dressed and dressed again, and she ate very little so she wouldn’t throw up on the drive in and all the while the silence in the apartment was shocking after so many mornings for years with her parents and with Becca. She didn’t have anyone to call out goodbye to as she set off, the world unwilling to wait any longer, demanding her forward no matter her nerves.

She read, once, some quote or speech or Tweet, that excitement and anxiety were two sides of the same feeling, and she tried to convince herself she was excited as she entered the hospital doors for the first time. She was excited after all, it was just the fact that maybe the nerves were winning out was all. She wasn’t naive enough to think this would be easy. It never was. She didn’t think it was for anyone. But she knew, she really knew, that she had a tendency to say the wrong thing or too many wrong things and she’d never quite figured out how to stop that.

Often, she invented alternate versions of herself. Ones that were effortless, flawless, at ease. She daydreamed about their lives, what that might look like, what happiness lived there, but she never could make it a reality. When faced, as she was, with new faces, she could only be herself, a self that babbled and said what she was feeling and didn’t quite ever fit.

For a while, in med school, she tried keeping it all in, but somehow that soured too, turning into rumors that she was bitchy, standoffish, and aloof. That she didn’t care, that she didn’t try, that she didn’t have the passion the other students had and, simultaneously, she thought she was better than the rest of her classmates, and the end result was the same. Sidelong looks and quiet evenings studying with one or two other students who recognized it for what it was. She decided then that being upfront about her nerves, her awkwardness, was the better of the two evils. Then, at least, she could comfort herself with the knowledge that she was being true to herself..

She really was happy to be there. Happy to have found Becca a group home she loved. Happy to be here, practicing medicine, helping people, learning. Robby seemed nice enough and the others, too, if a little gruff around the edges. She expected nothing less from those who chose to work in the emergency room.

She was a little relieved, though, that they jumped right into rounds. Not happy that two traumas came quickly after, but she liked being helpful, she liked answering questions right, she liked doing something with her hands. She tried not to be disappointed when she looked up to find the room empty. She knew, really, she knew, it was busy and there was so much else to do, and she was perfectly capable of finding the man’s family herself. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done it before. But, well, she sort of hoped Mohan might have lingered, offered some guidance, offered some friendship. She had the dashed hope someone would have asked if she’d been shown around, asked if she knew where the lounge was, asked if she knew what the process for notifying the family even was at this hospital.

Of course, that was asking too much of a unit too stretched thin, too focused on what came next, what blood to staunch or what heart to restart, that they couldn’t help but look at her as a function of that work. And she was. And she liked to be. But and still and yet. She still had childish dreams of friendship was all. Childish, childish dreams like the braid down her back and a mom waiting at home to ask her how her first day went. Childish dreams she knew she should have left behind long ago but lived in her still, flared up on days like this, only to be killed once again.

Thankfully, there wasn’t any time to dwell as an elderly man was brought in with pneumonia and then a four-year-old who wouldn’t open his eyes, his parents’ voices tight with fear. She did a thorough exam, asking all of the questions she could think of, before she ventured out to get another set of eyes. She braced herself for pushback, for harsh questioning of what she’d already done, knowing from experience the way residents who looked like Dr. Langdon spoke to second years like Mel.

But all he did was listen, eyes on her, asking questions and standing to come help without a second thought. It wasn’t that it surprised her, it was just, well, that it kind of did. She had heard him yell out of the room after Dr. Garcia earlier, heard the tone he used with some of the others in the not even half an hour she’d been there. So, yes, she was expecting some quip, at least, about whether she had checked something or the other, some not-so-gentle reminder that she was a waste of his time.

But, instead, she was ducking to the side of him, his presence taking up more room than she’d expected now that they were side by side, as they walked into the room together.

She noticed the bracelet around his wrist while he examined Tyler and his immediate attention making a little more sense. It wasn’t her he was engaging with, but the fact that it was a little boy lying on that table. She wondered if it had been another patient, if it had been the elderly gentleman that she’d gone to him for help on, whether his reaction would have been the same.

Not that it mattered because it hadn’t been another patient, and he hadn’t reacted any other way than the way he had. So, it was a moot point to wonder the same way it was a moot point to imagine an alternate version of her morning in which she was dazzling in some way that allowed her to skip past the awkwardness of first days to the point where she was comfortable and she had acqaintances and she didn’t feel so in the way no matter where she stood. 

She’d learn the rhythm here, the same way she had at the VA and in med school and everywhere else; she just needed a little time. Time that not everyone was patient enough, or able to, grant her. Time that, somehow, Dr. Langdon gave her, just a little of, just now.

She liked, when the labs came back, that it was a question of what they were missing.  That it was a problem they were trying to solve together. She kicked herself, of course, when he pulled the green ooze from the back of the boy’s mouth. She expected to be berated for wasting his time, for not checking his mouth sooner. She expected some snide comment about how she was a second year and should know better. 

And Mel was stuck, a little, waiting for that and overwhelmed by the way the couple’s hands broke apart so quickly, how the tone of their union changed so dramatically in one singular moment. How she had no idea how to calm things down, flinching against the tension in the room like the held breath of a branch about to break. It was like this a lot with her, this freezing in the face of conflict. She had so much of it inside, not conflict but weight, with Becca and her parents and her life, her life, the life she kept waiting for but somehow never seemed to come, that she couldn’t handle any more of it. The yelling and the boy on the bed and her failure converged and she waited for yet another blow to come from the man, her superior, bent over the bed.

But it didn’t come. Langdon just did what needed to be done, calling the lab and smoothly diffusing the argument between the parents without batting an eye. Her breath no longer held, the branch did not break, but her ears rang with the sound of it splintering anyhow.

He was the first, too, to ask an actual question about her. To ask about the VA. To listen when she brought up her sister. And it wasn’t him walking away, rolling his eyes, brushing her off that ended the conversation short, it was another patient in what she was sure would be a long line of patients who needed more attention than a personal conversation allowed. Still, the moment bolstered her.

Then Garcia entered the room and his whole demeanor shifted, though she couldn’t help but notice the way he made sure she got the crike in the end, that he sort of defended her against Garcia’s insulation that she couldn’t so much as suture the tube into place, that he lingered to reassure her as she spiraled, hurt a little to be talked down to by a woman she’d never met. Because, well, Garcia’s opinion, like the opinion of everyone she ever met, especially here, mattered to her, and based on Garcia’s comment,s she didn’t think Mel was competent or good, deferring to speaking to Langdon rather than Mel herself, who stood there, silent, letting it happen, shame and a wish that she’d stand up for herself causing the buzzing in her ears to grow louder.

It mattered to her that they thought she was good at her job. That she proved herself useful. That she was worth something to them. It mattered to her and it always had, and the crike was nerve-wracking with everyone’s eyes on her and then, in the room empty of everyone except Langdon, she had to let it out. Yes, yes, an alternate version of her would keep her composure until a bathroom break or a leg stretch outside, or hell, even until the evening when she crawled under her thin comforter, the fan spinning overhead, a podcast on in the background, to sigh or cry or scream it out. But she was not an alternate version of herself, and something in her, real or imagined, felt it was okay to let a little bit of it out to the man who stood before her, still looking at her with the intense focus of someone who cared.

Ever since she was a little girl, she felt as if she was stealing attention. As if each time someone looked at her, it actually belonged to someone else. As if she had to justify it. She had to prove herself worthy of their attention. As a young girl, as a teenager, as a young adult, she felt like a thief in the night when she approached anyone, texted anyone, asked anyone to hang out or study together or to get a bite to eat. When boys and then men asked her out, the idea was so prosperous, their wanting to spend time with her, she ignored them completely, thinking they intended it for someone else, thinking they had her confused, thinking of course that no one would ever think that way about her. She was too busy, anyhow, helping care for Becca as her parents passed, first one then the other, like proof that her love was deadly, as proof that she ought not to try. 

She had missed the lesson, taught in some class she’d never attended, that it was okay to want and even need the attention, care, help of someone else. To her, it felt like a crime.

She felt the same, standing before a senior resident in a busy ER on a busy day, their quiet moment quite possibly the difference between life and death for someone on the other side of the walls. Like she was stealing something. Like she didn’t deserve it. Like he ought to have scolded her, dismissed her, taught her again not to let any of that out into the light of day. 

But, he said, “You and me both” and called it a perfect crike and said “You’re doing great.” 

Like a thief in the night discovering some shiny thing, she squirreled his words away into a little corner of her heart, content to know not even the alternate version of herself got to have those to keep.

His sense of humor caught her off guard, simply because, thus fa,r it had been directed toward others with a self-grandizing tone rather than for the fact of humor alone. She couldn’t tell, nor could she ever tell, where the joke ended and the serious advice began, and so, despite the kill-joy commentary that was sure to follow, she had to ask. Still, he smiled and answered her question, and it was funny, now that she knew it was supposed to be.

Had she not been worried about the family, worried not for the criminal consequences like Langdon thought but the emotional ones that would last long after they left the hospital, his fellowship in cynicism comment would have been funny too.

But she needed a minute because she was thinking about the way grief erased half her family and left her to shoulder the weight not alone, of course, because she had her sister, but by all accounts, mostly alone. Thinking about the way she’d do anything to see her parents’ hands touch, to hear them whisper angrily at each other for some perceived slight, to do anything, really, anything at all. She wanted to tell the boy’s parents that. To say there was always something worse that could happen because it had happened to her. But she couldn’t, and Langdon kept asking if she was alright, and some truths she couldn’t give to a man who looked like him, to a man she had only met that morning. Some truths demanded more attention than anyone could give her.

She had always found solace in lyrics. In the miraculous way a stranger had gone through exactly what she had gone through, had thought the same exact thought, and had put it into words and produced it or marketed it or whatever songwriters had to do to get their songs recorded and released it into the world for her to find. It didn’t matter the genre; it was just the lyrics that wormed into her brain. Poetry did the same thing, and stupid posts from her teenage years on Tumblr, phrases come from nothing, devoid of context, popping into her head. Megan Thee Stallion happened to feature on Becca’s getting-ready, female empowerment mix, and so, the lyrics found her in the ambulance bay when she needed them.

And a gunshot wound ruined that moment, too. 

It was not that they were used to death. That they wanted to stop trying to save the body, any body, before them. It was just that there was a line between when it became cruel, destructive, inhumane to keep going. She suspected Langdon’s complaint about the cost earlier when the DNR came back on the elderly woman, was actually about the cruelty too. About the disrespect of their bodily wishes. About the inhumanity of damaging a body that had already made its decision. The body, Mel had learned, knew how to die better than almost anything else, and sometimes there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

She had the sneaking suspicion that weighed on Langdon just as much as it did her and the others. He just hid it behind snark and anger and a jittery energy he needed to direct somewhere productive to tip the scales in the direction of life again.

And Whitaker’s determination was, yes, motivated by saving Mr. Milton’s life, but she knew it was probably partially guilt and a keen awareness that it was their first day here, in this place, where they had to prove themselves, and he had, in his mind and no one else’s, failed somehow. And the worst thing anyone could do was bring that to a patient, to force it upon them, to make them an object of success or failure rather than to see the situation for what it was: an unfortunate inevitibiltiy that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

She didn’t want to leave him once they had called it. Knew he was perched on the precipice of some grand regret. She went for a Langdon-inspired joke about patholgoists to lighten the mood, knowing before she said it that it would fall flat because she was seeing Mr. Milton there in front of her and seeing her father, too, in a mirror image, in a memory that dwarfed her down to a child, sitting in the first row of a church she’d never stepped foot in before, listening but not listening to her father’s boss say things about her father that fit so poorly into the image of the man she knew she realized in a cutting epiphany that her father wasn’t, and hadn’t ever been, only hers.

She was seeing, at the same time, some hospital room just like this and feeling her too-tight funeral shoes her mother set out for her to wear, shoes that were actually Becca’s but Mel could see the tense string of her mother, the way grief pulled her tight, that she didn’t, couldn’t complain. She was feeling the blisters and seeing Mr. Milton and remembering her first patient who died too, in similar circumstances because all deaths were similar circumstances by which someone was there one moment and gone the next, and there was nothing she or anyone could do about it. She remembered, wanted to express to Whitaker, how shocking it was that all her years of studying and practice and dedication paled in comparison to the mystery of the human body, even now. Wanted to tell him that even with the invention of airplanes and robotic CPR and self-driving cars, that bodies still did things no one could predict, still just died for the sake of dying, and it dwarfed you down into a child standing at your father’s casket, not knowing what to say, feeling stupid for standing there at all, stupid for wanting to beg for him back anyway. 

Now, on repeat in her head, in lieu of flowers, send him back.

Sometimes, it was like she witnessed her dad dying every day, every minute, every breath. Maybe because she hadn’t even been there when he died. Maybe because she’d created, in her mind, what it had looked like, invented from this very hospital room and every one she’d been in before, putting him on the table where Mr. Milton now lay to make up for her absence that day. A sisphysian punishment for her attendance at summer camp, singing so quietly around the campfire that no one could hear her or hunched over craft the boy next to her kept trying to ruin not knowing what happened at home until her mom came to fetch her, waiting until they got all the way home, parked in the driveway, to break the news to her, looking forward out the windshield at their shut garage door the whole time, the beige color faded with weather and time that her father never repainted no matter how many times her mother asked. Her absence a failing she could never make up for, no matter how many men she saved.

An emotional response was an understatement. She was swimming in the grief of this moment and her father’s funeral and her mother’s only a few short years later, clutching Becca’s hand and somehow worrying about how sweaty her palm was as the same preacher said the same things, only the body was a different body in the casket she had chosen this time, alone, dressed in an outfit Mel had to choose, decisions she had no idea how to make except that she had to and so she did.. But Whitaker didn’t know that or need to know that. She didn’t think he could handle all of that just now. So she tried her best to comfort him, knew it would come to nothing in the light of what he was facing, in what was surely happening inside his brain, and she eventually had to walk away.

His energy was infectious, his excitement at cases, his boyish disposition, all hands and shoulders and taking up space. She found herself smiling, which was weird to be doing in a hospital, faced with all of this. But she was smiling, and he wanted her to work with him, and maybe her mom hadn’t braided her hair that morning, but she could feel the spirit of her, satisfied with this strange turn of events. Had she looked around that morning and decided who she would feel just a little bit chosen by, Langdon would have been almost last, bypassed only by maybe Garcia or Robby who seemed too busy and on edge to pay any of them any attention at all.

She was sort of a little bit thrilled by it, thrilled by his choosing her, thrilled by the STEMI timing, thrilled by the way the department worked so smoothly sometimes she felt like a cog in a machine.

And she liked to think she was a cog in a machine because it meant she was useful and purposeful and something needed or even wanted her there. She thought of Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House, who said, placidly, she remembered because the word was so pleasing and so sad, “I’ve never been wanted anywhere.” She felt very much like Eleanor, haunted by ghosts, reaching out her hand in the darkness and waking up alone. And her intense wanting was a wound she was sure people could see, bleeding down her forehead, a primal warning sign to back away slowly so no one else would get hurt. What about me, she wanted to beg, what about my wound, but she knew that, too, was a childish fantasy. That it would be more work than anyone was willing to put in to get past the walls she put up in the form of busyness and delight and surface-level vulnerability so they couldn’t see the depth of her hurt and grief lurking inside.

By mid-morning, things were a blur. A mother’s hair wrapped so delicately and sinisterly around a screaming baby’s toe, an insect in an ear canal.

Somehow, she ended up with Mohan again, working on a young girl and her father, trying so hard to be two parents in one. She felt, but couldn’t quite understand, Mohan’s comment about her being the one to talk to the girl. Of course, Mel would have spoken to her differently, of course she knew the difference between what you said to a scared and embarrassed child and to a father wanting to know if his daughter was alright, a father out of his depth. She blinked down at the ground, feeling the way she always felt, thoroughly misunderstood.

When she was a child and couldn’t sleep, she’d pretend she was erasing herself. Starting with her toes, she’d imagine a giant eraser that would wholly remove her from existence. After she erased herself, she’d force herself not to move an inch. It worked, often, and she’d wake in the morning, her body back in existence again, mildly disappointed, wishing in the dark silence of her mind that it had worked for real, that she hadn’t come back to her body at all. Mohan’s comment, the empty rooms, she had that itch back. The buzz in her ears she was desperate to silence, wondering but never asking if anyone heard the same thing too.

With four words, she was back, though. “I’m her only caregiver.”

Mel knew about being a primary caregiver. Knew the pain Rita was feeling. The pressure, the guilt, the needing just one moment alone to shower, taking an extra minute maybe under the warm and silent spray, just to emerge to proof she didn’t deserve a moment to herself at all.

She had felt that exact thing hundreds of times over, guilty for going to school, to work, guilty for hiring someone to do what she ought to be doing, guilty for not being able to handle it all on her own. Now, though, with Becca at her group home, the guilt persisted. And, too, the silence. The silence that was like another stone on top of the grief and the guilt and the bills and the way the life she imagined for herself was so different, it was like a dream she once had, erased before her eyes by death and circumstance and who she turned out to be. She often wondered if this was what life was, if this was what it was meant to feel like, this wishing and wanting and never, ever getting.

She knew what it was to be tired. For exhaustion to win, no matter how hard she fought it. She woke, slumped over homework and textbooks, and at the kitchen table more times than she could count. Sometimes, blinking led to a ten-minute nap she jolted awake from with a racing heart and a sense of looming danger. She knew, in her heart, a heart she still listened to even now, Rita would be back. 

Something unexpected had happened. She hadn’t left her mom behind even if, in the wee hours of the night, she fantasized about it, grew bitter about it, needed to imagine her freedom just for a moment the same way Mel dreamed of someone to help her, someone to take some of the load of her day, when she was erasing herself once again so she didn’t have to feel it so much. Those were just thoughts in the middle of the night as forever stretched before her, a forever of responsibility and pressure and need. Thoughts that didn’t exist come morning.

It weighed on her, though, as the day sped forward. Weighed on her as lunch came, as she called Becca, as she talked with Kiara. She knew, of course she knew, no amount of lava lamp apps and white noise and Megan Thee Stallion lyrics would lift that weight. She would just have to bear it. And she’d have to bear, too, the dismissive way Langdon approached Terrance. What was the point of a medical history if he didn’t read it? If he didn’t use it to make an informed approach to treating each patient? 

It was busy, yes, and it was an ankle sprain, sure, but it still mattered. It mattered because Terrance mattered because Becca mattered because Mel mattered, didn’t she? Didn’t Mel matter to him, even a little bit? Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he’d just wanted a tough case in the little boy on the table, some valiant save to make him feel the adrenaline rush some doctors got into emergency medicine for. Maybe he hadn’t seen her, needed her, found value in her at all other than as another pair of eyes to witness his heroism, another pair of hands to do things to their patients, life-saving things, that she knew, oh she knew, would leave them scarred anyway.

The remnants of what they did here would live on forever in the people who came to the emergency room for their help. The slicing and dicing, the tubes and stitches and shocks, yes, it saved them, but also, she was distinctly aware that they carried it with them the rest of their lives. In tight skin where a scar lived, in joint pain when the rain came in, in limps and redness and in the way they flinched away at a loud noise, at a pair of hands coming toward them, at the thought of a hospital at all. Mel tried very hard to send patients off with as little trauma as possible, aware that what she did would become ingrained into their personhood and their bodies forever.

Maybe he didn’t feel that as deeply as she felt it. Maybe he didn’t feel it at all. Maybe, like Santos, he was in this purely for the stories he could tell to his kids one day, the borderline saves on a patient he only saw as a body on a table rather than a person, a person, a real-life person, scared and alone. In the bright light of this strange, sterile, liminal space, it didn’t matter if someone sat beside them, if family hovered just outside the trauma bay’s doors, they were alone.

Terrance was alone and  Langdon walked away. Mel bit back the hurt and tried to forgive him for his flippancy and went to help Terrance the best way she could. When he barged in, hovering in the doorway like he wanted to witness her flailing in the face of Terrance’s questions, like he wanted to prove he was right to have left, she paused, hesitating. But her job was to do this, to persist, and so she did. And she felt his gloating stare calm into a leaning observation she didn’t feel like shrinking under as she explained to Terrance what was happening inside his body.

Sure, he walked away in the middle of her story, but his questions about how she got through to Terrance were telling. Perhaps he was embarrassed that he had approached it wrong, ashamed Mel had done what he couldn’t do. Perhaps he didn’t think anything at all and he really did have to pee. Breaks were few and far between, after all.

He came to find her, later, in the ambulance bay. “You were great with him,” he said.

She heard it like a question, offering an explanation. He needed, it seemed, a reason it hadn’t worked for him. Why his flashy charm and false bravado hadn’t worked this time.

But, he surprised her by saying, “You’re obviously really good at helping people. You’re crushing it with your patients. You even taught me a couple things.”

He didn’t seem the type to dole out compliments falsely. Still, it stunned her how much she wanted it to be true. To be earnest.

“You’re making a great first impression,” he said. She wondered if he meant for him or for the hospital. Not that it mattered, really, but to Mel it did. A doctor like Langdon, to come find her when the chaos was on the other side of the sliding glass doors, to reassure her, offer her a compliment that seemed genuine, judging from his hesitation, like a little boy abashed at the flowers picked from the neighbor’s garden clutched in his hand, it meant something to Mel. It meant a great something.

Like a dog with a bird at your door, she thought, and shook it out of her head, surprised by it.

The moment glowed in her until, of course, it died with a pediatric drowning and a little sister, saved by older sister who wouldn’t ever recover. A little sister who’d be guilty about that the rest of her life. A little sister who probably giggled as they pushed the bench over to the fence, who just wanted their soccer ball back and thought they could get it, who had not thought death was a thing that could touch them, not once in their whole entire lives.

And then the yelling, the violence. This day was becoming a series of ands she could find no relief from. She tried to erase herself, starting at her toes, but it was too loud and too bright and she was too overwhelmed to do it properly, to take herself out of her body. She kept flinching away.

Langdon noticed, to her shame, and sent her on a break she desperately needed but wouldn’t admit to. He came to find her later, sitting beside her on the floor, not even questioning why she wasn’t in a chair. He called her his least problematic trainee and then it was like she was a person he knew all of the thoughts of, somehow, as he said, “You’re sitting here feeling like maybe you’re not up to it”.

She was expecting him to say she was right to be thinking that. That she wasn’t up to it even if she was good at helping people or making first impressions, expecting him to say no amount of breaks in the ambulance bay or stolen moments in the lounge would make her capable of handling this, day after day, for this rotation.

She got the sense he said it because he had felt it before. She could see him, years ago, without the crust of cynicism and false bravado, just trying to help people. She could see him, a face like his, the way others seemed to react to it before he could even open his mouth, wanting to wound him before he could do it first. Some ancient instinct against a pretty man with gentle hands causing them to lash out because they wanted his attention so desperately, but knew they’d never get it, they wanted to tear him down instead. The comments, she imagined, the doubt in his ability, the dead patients and mistakes, and the kids, oh god the kids, all formed a hard layer on him, over and over, until he was here in this room, sending her away because she wouldn’t be able to do the same. She knew she wouldn’t because grief didn’t make her hard or mad or angry the way she assumed it did for him. It just made her sad.

“Mel,” he said, “you’re a sensitive person.” And she braced for it, for the go-home speech, for the pick another specialty advice that was well-meaning and hurtful nonetheless. “This is a tough place for sensitive people.”

“But we need them badly,” he said.

And she, yet again, was surprised by him. By the way he, ER Ken, knew what to say to her. By the way he softened around her, for a reason she didn’t understand but wouldn’t question for fear it would disappear if spoken aloud the way anything good did. She learned to freeze in the face of anything close to affection. If she looked at it head-on, it would die. A lyric, unbidden, popped into her head, Every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness.

Then it was picking gravel, meticulously, out of a man's leg and Mel entered the state of mind required by this sort of task, the emptying of herself, which she was excellent at. It was the only time the low buzz of awkwardness and shame and pressure quieted itself, the state of mind she clawed for each time she pictured her body disappearing but never could quite achieve.

Then Dana was punched and a woman in her twenties came in with a stroke and then a baby took his first breath right in front of her eyes and she was dazzled by that, that miracle, one of the few times she believed in the word and the world and the buzzing in her head felt like pure and riotous joy and suddenly she realized she hadn’t seen Langdon in awhile. Not even out of the corner of her eye, drawing her gaze like the glinting of some shiny thing.

Then, she forgot about it all because there was a shooting, another shooting in a long line of shootings, but this time she could do something about it, in her own little way, in her own cog-in-a-functioning-healing-machine kind of way, to tip the scales ever so slightly in the direction of something good in the face of the worst thing in the world, a choice made purely to hurt and injure and kill and for what for nothing, for nothing, for nothing.

And she hated to admit it, but the buzzing in her head made sense in this situation. It made sense in the chaos and the terror, and it broke through, calmed her, made her focus on what she could do. And she looked up to see Langdon back, as if he never left, and that, too, calmed her, the buzzing more of a thread of comfort keeping her down on this Earth where this shit happened every day to adults and teenagers and little kids just trying to go to school or grocery shopping or to a concert to see their favorite artist play live for the first or tenth or hundredth time, none of them asking for what came next, none of them deserving their wounds. This Earth where she and her sister lived, this Earth where Langdon existed, too.

She gathered supplies and evaluated patients and donated her blood, her blood, the blood inside herself, to keep the woman on the table alive for another minute. She acted and reacted and taught, when she could, and kept as many people alive as she could and she hovered in this space, this unthinking space, where she really was just a tool, an object of purpose, and the buzzing was there with her, a function of her action, a necessity to remind her just how important her every move was.

The buzzing made of the burden she accepted willingly by her dreaming and her schooling and by stepping into that emergency room that morning. A burden that, sometimes, she thought would kill her, until days like this when it felt like she made a difference, no matter how small, how she reunited mother and daughter and it almost broke her because she was imagining a world, an alternate future for an alternate version of her in which, she too, would see her mother again at the end of this very long day. A version of her who didn’t exist, a future the world and her mother’s body and whatever it was that people thought fate was decided she didn’t deserve.

She did what she could until the room slowed down around her, thrust into it again when the kid came in, his little sister bravely at his side, without their parents. Little kids and sister dynamics and a small moment of solidairy with Dr. Ellis who Mel found she liked the presence of, how reasonable and calmly she responded to everything, even after all they’d seen over the last few hours.

And then it was time to go home, her day bookended by a Robby speech that she recognized for what it was: a broken man speaking to broken people, pretending none of them were broken after all, Mel knowing grief did not leave the body with tears like Robby said, that it existed inside each of them and always would like a chronic illness no one could diagnose because some man chose that day, of all days, to do this.. But her sister was waiting for her for their Friday night routine and so, the rules of her life dictated she move onto the next thing, the next and the next in a long line of tasks and to-dos and the never-ending effort of being alive. 

She stood in the lobby, feeling so heavy, feeling so out of her body, feeling nothing at all, and finally, for the first time all day, the buzzing in her ears silenced as she closed her eyes and this, this was what she did it for, for the moments when she worked herself so hard, did not eat or drink or pee for hours and hours, and the buzzing in her ears made of shame and grief and guilt for anything and everything she’d ever done finally didn’t have the energy to persist. The silence almost buckled her knees. She wished, one day, she could sink into it fully, to live in it forever, but she only had these small moments, only on very rare occasions, usually at the brunt end of something terrible, to remind her it was possible to silence the buzzing at all.

And then Becca came downstairs, and Mel knew she was so late and so sorry and so guilty all over again for not being there earlier and for not being able to care for Becca like she ought to and for choosing a job that required so much of her she had to muster the last remnants for that moment. She made promises of two meals and a movie and yes, she was exhausted and yes, she was a little hurt Langdon didn’t say goodbye and yes, she was sure everyone in The Pitt hated her for some inexplicable reason, some frequency she emitted her whole life that repelled people from her, but she also was happy to be with her sister again, so very happy, after a long day, a long day she knew she’d never recover from, a day in the form of a skeleton violently thrust into her metaphorical closet along with the rest that lived there, waiting for her to excavate them, feeling her think about them all the time, a closet door she paused outside of often but never, ever opened.

They got spaghetti like promised, Becca telling Mel all about one of the staff members at the group home who loved Adventure Time and Gilmore Girls and the Marvel movies too, and they went back to the apartment for Becca’s weekly overnight stay and they did, in fact, put on Elf, Mel’s heavy feeling sinking her into the cushions until she was sure she’d never get up again. Becca shook her awake twice during the movie, annoyed that Mel was missing all the best parts, and then it was over and Becca went to her room to do her nightly routine while Mel went to hers, the door cracked open in case her sister needed anything, and in bed she was no longer tired and the heaviness felt like something she couldn’t shake, something physically wrong with her, but she knew it for what it was and let the grief settle into the place her grief lived, somewhere deep and dark and far away from her, somewhere she learned a long time ago to live with, to breathe around, to carry with her forever.

And when morning came, as it always did, she got up and got dressed and walked Becca to her group home before she made the trek to the hospital, again, stepping through the doors on her second day of work, her hair in a braid done by her sister, this time, and that made all the difference.

Chapter Text

More often than she’d admit to, she found herself thinking about the moment her mother decided she was too old to be a child anymore. Mel had been maybe ten, in a department store with her mom on a rare afternoon when Becca had a babysitter or a group playdate or some other activity that granted Mel and her mom the shrinking oasis of alone time.

Before that afternoon, nearing Christmas, Mel’s belief in Santa lay distinctly in the middle ground, the secret spoiled to her by an inaccuracy she caught when her grandparents laid claim to a gift that read “from Santa” on its shining red tag the year before. And while she hinted that she knew, once or twice, testing the waters with where the line of truth may be with caution and precision so as to never jump to the wrong conclusion, her mother hadn’t addressed it, letting it lie in a strange stalemate between them both. She didn’t not believe, but she wasn’t so sure she believed anymore, either.

Mel liked to think her mom did it on purpose. That she wanted to let Mel live in the magic for a little while longer. That she wanted to let Mel process it in her own way, still writing letters to Santa filled with confessions of every small thing she perceived she had done wrong so as to earn her gifts at the end of the long year, lengthy letters and many of them, all of which her mother placed a stamp on the corner of and promised to mail them out the very next day, evidence in the direction of belief, Mel thought. She knew stamps were something her mom had to pay for.

But that afternoon, trailing after her mom in the department store, the mirage revealed itself as a falsity as her mom turned, casually, over her shoulder while she picked up some sweater or pair of jeans she’d never buy and asked Mel to help her shop for stocking stuffers for Becca. She hadn’t even been looking at Mel, the casual cruelty of the moment lost on her. But Mel felt it. She felt the curtain fall. She felt the thin veil of her childhood slip away ever so imperceptibly, the way childhood always did. At the time, it confused her. It almost made her feel important, helping her mom with this secret task. Almost.

But now, she saw it in another light, as a loss of something vital. A gesture by her mom, who probably thought nothing of it, who probably just wanted some help for once coming up with stocking stuffers for her daughter, knowing Mel knew more about Becca’s interests than anyone, that forced Mel to grow up more than she ought to have. Convenience, perhaps, inflicting a low level and unintended cruelty upon her that was indicative of the rest of Mel’s life. A choosing of one daughter’s imagination and childhood over another in a way that wasn’t fair to either of them and wasn’t anyone’s fault either.

She thought of it often, time and overthinking ruining what once was a special moment, turning it into something she had to reckon with even now, years later. It was silly, she knew. A small moment in a personal history filled with far greater tragedies. But, still, it mattered to her. 

It mattered because it mattered to younger her, because it made her feel stupid for not being in on the joke and sad that it was a joke at all and childish when Christmas rolled around and her mom asked her to help place the hidden presents from her closet under the tree in the middle of the night and again the next morning when she knew everything Becca would unwrap before the paper even came off. She wanted to believe in magic, still. She missed the time when it wasn’t a question at all that the world held that somewhere in it, for her.

It was a moment she entered the real world where magic did not exist, and her father could die, and then her mother soon after, and she would by all accounts be alone with it. A world where veterans were cast aside and children drowned trying to get a ball out of a pool, and where dozens of people died at a concert because of the actions of one man. A world where she returned to work after a sleepless night and didn’t see Langdon at all. 

She kept an eye out all day, the Pitt eerily quiet after the chaos of the day before, expecting to hear his showboating from inside one of the trauma rooms, expecting to see the shape of him from the corner of her eye darting from one thrill to another, expecting to see the lanky lean of him against the nurse’s station, eyes on the board. But it never came, and she inched through the day, tentatively asking Mohan for help when she needed it, uncertain and unstable and with Landgon’s words ringing in her head but not quite landing without the man there in front of her as proof that he existed. That she hadn’t made him, and what he said, up out of thin air to comfort herself on a particularly stressful first day.

She stitched the arm of a woman who tripped carrying scissors and examined a boy whose mom brought him in because his lips were blue, finding out secreted candy was the culprit rather than a lack of oxygen. She treated and examined, and all the while she felt out of her head, felt like she was still lying in her bed in the middle of the night watching the ceiling fan spin.

The buzzing in her head remained at its normal level, just slightly off-kilter like it, too, was waiting for something that would never come like the way she still listened, subconsciously, for the sound of her dad’s keys in the door or the weight of her mother’s feet on the floorboard outside her childhood bedroom, checking to see if she was secretly reading under the covers again.

Robby offered no guidance, offered nothing, sat more than not in a chair at the nurses' station with a dazed look on his face, having quiet conversations with Dana when they thought everyone else was too busy to hear them. He hunched like a dog who had just learned for the first time that sometimes the fist held out to him did not, in fact, contain a treat, but was used for another, more painful purpose.

She felt, strangely, as if she’d been abandoned without ever having been possessed. That she had just come here and already been cast aside. She knew, of course, that the day before had messed everyone up, had messed her up too, in ways that were sure to manifest long from now. But it was like this everywhere for her, like she never could quite see where the line was between who belonged and who didn’t.

Eventually, the news of his voluntary admission to rehab floated its way to her through an overheard conversation between McKay and Javadi, who worked chairs together again once McKay got her ankle monitor sorted that morning.

“It’s good,” McKay said, “that he’s getting the help he needs.”

The news startled her, but it also cast the day before in a different light, turning their interactions into evidentiary pieces for her to scrutinize for signs that she had misunderstood it after all. It made her feel like she was yet again left out of the joke, a joke that wasn’t funny, a joke that only made everyone upset.

Santos skittered around Robby all day, darting out of his glazed eyesight, cherry picking the board despite Dana’s protests, half gloat and half guilt on her face depending on when Mel looked.

The day eventually ended at the time it was supposed to, Mel ducking into the back of the group when they gathered for rounds to get the night shifters up to speed. Ellis nudged her, asking, “You good?”

Mel nodded, face down, not wanting to show her disappointment, not in Langdon, she’d never express anything but support for him and what he was going through, just in the fact that who she thought was her friend, her only friend, wasn’t here and wouldn’t be for a long time. She had imagined a strange, excitable collaboration between them until her next rotation. But that dream was now ruined in the same casual way her mom killed Santa Claus all those years ago.

As the days passed, Mel grew more and more embarrassed. Certain, in the distance of time, they hadn’t been dipping their toes into something good and unique after all. That the day meant nothing to him and she mistook the tiniest kindness as something else because she had a tendency to look at everything through a magnifying glass. Morsels could keep her satiated for years by the simple fact that they were all she was given, but that didn’t mean that’s what they were intended for.

Langdon and the casual, tight line of him, dishing out softness and sharpness with reckless abandon, unaware or uncaring how it was perceived. She read too far into it, into him. He was simply a person who never had to think twice about what he said, everything covered up by a dimpled smile and a twinkle of the eye. Mel ought not to have clung so desperately to what he said in the ambulance bay or in the break room. She knew that now.

But, still, she missed him more than she should have. More than anyone should miss a person they knew for less than a day. She tried to guess where he’d be in the ER at any given moment, what advice he’d offer her, what quip he’d have for Garcia when she graced the floor with her presence. Her sharpness dulled without the flint of his defensive gloating to clash against, offering semi-genuine advice with only a thin layer of snark to Mel in moments when Santos wasn’t around, either.

“I’m not going to bite your head off,” she snickered when Mel just looked at her across the patient’s bed during a consult. “You’ll get into the swing of things around here soon.”

Mel fell into a routine that wasn’t necessarily comfortable, but it fit around her the way all of her routines ended up, slotting into place simply as a way to anchor her through the discomfort of being alive. She worked the day shift, rising early and braiding her hair, and eating store-brand cereal for breakfast before heading out the door. She took the patients who came, any and all of them, often the only one who’d deign to bandaid a crying kid’s road rash or evaluate another abdominal pain patient in a long line of abdominal pain patients who were constipated or experiencing indigestion or nervous about their upcoming interview.

She was not frustrated by this because this was a hospital and this was her job, and all patients deserved her attention and her care simply because they showed up that day. But she did sometimes wish, sometimes desperately so, that Robby would step in and even the load a bit, to tell Santos to fall in line so her thrill-seeking didn’t ruin her education, to stop letting Whittaker take only the low-risk patients because he was still haunted by Mr. Milton’s death.

At night, she’d walk home, heavy and exhausted, but restless too, pacing her quiet apartment for hours, staring at the TV and seeing nothing, picking up books or knitting projects or cookbooks and abandoning them on the coffee table without completing anything. She ate the same things, over and over. Time passed slowly but it did pass and, at the same time every night, she turned off the lights and crawled into bed and stared at the ceiling much like the TV, feeling some itch inside her that told her something wasn’t quite right, that she wasn’t doing what she ought to be doing or wasn’t doing enough, and it kept her up, the unknown quantity of it. She didn’t know what to do or how to make things better. She missed her sister, and she missed caring for her even as it relieved her, the absence of those decisions creating a void in her life that she couldn’t seem to fill.

She saw Becca on Friday nights, and she slept over most of the time, though occasionally she wanted to go back to her group home instead to be with her friends as they rehearsed plays or finished art projects that began to decorate, and then overtake, Mel’s fridge.

It was like, without anyone to take care of, without anyone taking care of her, she became the nothing she so longed for as a child. She successfully erased herself. She floated in and out of the ER, of her life, and no one noticed a thing.

For the first time, on those nights when she couldn’t keep her eyes closed, staring at the shadows on her wall, sometimes catching herself lifting an arm just to prove she was real when the dark shape moved against her wall’s beige paint, she longed for companionship in a way she knew others had started to years ago. She hadn’t understood it before, pressed down under the weight of grief and caretaking and bills and school, but now it was like she looked around and noticed it for the first time.

She saw McKay talking quietly with Mateo. She saw Garcia flirting shamelessly with Santos. She saw worried husbands and terrified girlfriends and family bent over in the waiting room, and it woke her up to that world in a way she hadn’t considered it before.

But she knew she was awkward and uncomfortable with physical touch and that, at this point, it was more embarrassing than endearing to be so inexperienced when it came to how to talk to, let alone touch, men. It wasn’t that she hadn’t kissed anyone before, she had, it was just once she did, the idea of it, the memory of it, soured in her mind so quickly she couldn’t bring herself to ever see them again, thinking they could tell she didn’t know what to do with her lips or her hands or her body, embarrassment ruining everything. It wasn’t as if they fought to see her again, either. Often, they never texted her again, a sure sign she had exposed herself for the unlovable person she knew herself to be.

Free time made her wonder and want. It made her think things she had spent years avoiding. It made her so lonely she couldn’t stand it. At night, she saw the others, leaving in groups, drinking in the park or going to a nearby bar, the groups ever changing but never including her. She didn’t know how to get an invite, nor was she a person who could stomach inviting herself, the thought of not being wanted somewhere and everyone knowing it too painful to bear.

So she was wistful and she waited and she wanted but she didn’t get what she wanted and what else was new? She thought of the Ask Polly column help, I’m the loneliest person in the world! She could never remember any of the advice in it, just that title over and over again. Help! Help! Help!

She went home and went to work, and the time passed and she did nothing with it, the nothing eating at her, tinging the nights with an unreal, panicked feeling that followed her long into the day, bent over a housewife with a burn on her arm or a construction worker who took a hammer to the forehead.

If the weather was nice, Mel would take her breaks in the ambulance bay and FaceTime Becca or put her earbuds in and catch up on a podcast or listen to nothing, liking the muffling of the world sometimes. If the weather was bad, she’d sit out there anyway, catching side eyes from the paramedics rushing past her, white noise blaring in her ears.

One Friday night, Becca paused in the middle of a story about some sparkly slime she made at the group home that week, studying Mel with a serious look on her face. “Are you okay, Mel?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Mel replied, looking away from their one-hundredth watch of Newsies. “Why?”

“You seem sad or something,” Becca said. “I don’t want you to be sad.”

“I’m not,” Mel said, trying to put a reassuring look on her face. “I’m just tired.”

“I know what just tired looks like and this isn’t that” Becca said.

She sighed, turning back to the TV. “Maybe you’re right,” she said quietly. “But it’s okay. I’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Do you miss Mom and Dad?” she asked.

Mel sucked in a breath. “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

“Me too,” Becca said. “All the time.”

“I know,” Mel said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

They turned back to the TV. “Where should we get breakfast in the morning?” Mel asked.

Becca contemplated her options, ultimately deciding on the same place they went last Saturday with the really good pancakes. They sat together, silently for a while, until the movie finished. Becca stood to go into her bedroom to work on some art project that had her fingertips stained purple for the last few days. 

“Did you find a boyfriend yet?” she asked, hovering in her doorway. This time, her tone was far more somber.

“Not yet,” Mel said, “but I just might try to work on that soon.”

“Maybe you won’t be so sad.”

Becca cracked her bedroom door so only a sliver of light glowed out into the darkened living room. Mel knew, of course, that a boyfriend or a partner or anyone wouldn’t fix the sadness that lived inside her. It took up residence years ago in a way that was a vital part of her, a feeling that made her think she was always meant to have it there all along, that she was always meant to suffer and grieve and keep it with her like a rock placed upon her chest as punishment for being alive, weighing, always weighing, her down.

Two weeks after the PittFest shooting, Robby sent them all into a conference room where Kiara went through a presentation about coping with mass casualty events. McKay sat next to her in the back, arms crossed. “You doing okay?” she asked, as everyone filed in.

Mel blinked, looking around before realizing she was talking her her. “Oh, uh, yeah,” she said.

McKay shrugged. “How are you settling in?”

“Good,” Mel said, nodding to reinforce her answer. “I’m still getting used to things, but it’s been good. Yeah, good.”

“That’s a lot of goods,” McKay said. “Well, if you are ever in the mood, a few of us grab food after work and you’re more than welcome to join us.”

Mel nodded. “Alright.”

She paused, trying not to say what desperately wanted to come out of her mouth and then failing. “It’s just that, I sort of need a direct invitation to something or I assume you’re just offering to be nice and don’t really want me there which is one of my worst nightmares, so I will probably never take you up on that offer,” Mel blurted, pausing at McKay’s blinking expression to say, “Just so you don’t think it’s because I don’t want to hang out with you or…anyone else.”

McKay opened her mouth to reply, but Kiara began speaking at the front of the room, and the moment was lost, Mel spending every second regretting what she’d said and wishing she had volunteered to stay behind to monitor patients instead.

When the presentation was over, Mel and McKay stood to file out with the others. McKay paused, blocking Mel’s exit, making eye contact with intense sincerity. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay?” Mel repeated, processing.

“I’ll make sure to invite you directly next time we go out after work,” she said, as if it were oh so simple and not at all annoying for Mel to have asked for.

“Okay?” Mel said again.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m not sure about this week since I have my son, but I’ll let you know.”

Mel knew a brush off when she heard one. I’ll let you know, or let me circle back to you, or let’s hang out sometime, were all code for nicety with no backing to it. She’d been on that end of gentle rejection before, shouldn’t have been surprised really, and the sting wasn’t all that bad when it was coming from McKay, who had so little judgment in her eyes that Mel almost believed her.

That was why it surprised her so much when McKay came up to her at the end of their Thursday shift the following week as Mel gathered her stuff from her locker.

“Hey,” McKay said, “Mohan, Javadi, and I are going to grab a bite to eat. Would you like to come?”

“Umm,” Mel hesitated, hating last-minute plans, hating the way they disrupted the idea of the day she had for herself, even if that idea was only going home and sitting alone in front of the TV for hours while wishing she was doing something else.

“No pressure,” McKay said, smiling.

Mel thought of that urge to do something different, the restlessness she felt each night, and felt a surge of bravery or something a little less bold but still bolstering in her, and said yes before she could change her mind.

“Wait, did you ask Mohan and Javadi if they were okay with me coming first?” Mel asked.

“Yes,” McKay said, “they want you to come, too.”

“Okay,” Mel said. “Then, yes, I would like to come.”

“Great,” McKay said, “We’ll walk, there’s a diner down the block that we like.”

Mel nodded, opting not to say anything else for fear of her invitation being rescinded should she say anything else embarrassing.

Mohan called out a hey as they approached. “I’m glad you decided to come!”

“Me too,” Mel said, and she meant it as they fell into step, Javadi with McKay ahead of them.

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask how your sister’s doing,” Mohan said, turning to Mel. “She’s living at a group home, right? How’s she liking it?”

“Oh,” Mel said, touched she asked. “She’s loving it. Every day she tells me about a new friend she’s made or an activity they did, or a play they’re working on. It’s been really good for her confidence, too, living independently, and they offer classes and workshops on life skills and different jobs that they might want to do. It’s just been awesome for her, even if I do miss her so much.”

“That’s great,” Mohan said. “I’m really glad to hear that.”

Mel scrambled to think of a question to ask Mohan, to reciprocate that kind gesture, and to keep the conversation going. All she could come up with was, “And how are you?”

“I’m good,” Mohan said, “Tired.”

“Yeah,” Mel said.

Silence fell between them as they turned the corner, the evening falling on top of them in the form of an ever-darkening sky.

At the diner, they sat in a corner booth, Mel on the end, and she watched more than she participated, realizing all of a sudden that she was very much still the odd man out despite being just as new to the Pitt as Javadi was. Mohan, McKay, and Javadi clearly spent much more time together, talking about people and drama that Mel had no framework for, referencing stories they were part of that Mel felt too embarrassed and stupid to ask them to repeat for her sake. She sat there, smiling, nodding along, and feeling so dumb she regretted coming at all.

“Have you heard from Landon?” Mohan asked across the table.

Cassie shrugged, “A little. He only gets a bit of time each week to call, but he seems like he’s doing all right. He asked about you, actually.”

Mel found Cassie’s eyes not on Mohan like she’d expected, but on her. “Me?”

“Yeah,” Cassie said, “he wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Oh,” Mel said, cheeks flushing. “Well, that’s nice.”

“I’ll tell him you said hey next time,” she said, smiling. 

The conversation moved on. Mel thought that detail over for a minute, trying to zoom out rather than in so as not to turn this morsel, too, into something far greater than it was. He was simply asking about a new employee he met. He had probably asked about everyone, and she, being part of the group, was an inclusion much the same way she was an inclusion here, tonight, observing from the outskirts rather than part of it in any real, meaningful way, an appendage that could easily be removed and the beast called the world and everyone in it would continue on without even noticing the loss of her.

They lingered in the diner far longer than Mel planned, the itch to leave battling with the discomfort of being the first to go. A call from Becca gave her the perfect excuse, and she hurried out the door, the trio left behind still lounging in the booth. She imagined them there all night, never running out of things to say about work and their dating lives and what workout classes they took when they had time.

Once again, reflection turned the whole encounter into an embarrassing episode in her life. She saw, in retrospect, glances she had missed between Mohan and McKay that suggested, or perhaps proved, they hadn’t wanted her to come in the first place. That they had felt bad for her, had invited her out of pity, and it had thrummed under the whole night, this inauthentic gesture that they all agreed to but regretted. She saw it in the way they continued their conversation around her, in the way they kept going once she left. She saw it in their eyes. Mel decided she wouldn’t put them through the same torture again, and when Mohan invited her out a week later, she declined, ducking from the locker room quickly with a half-hearted excuse.

The same thought that had plagued her her whole life repeated in her head. These were not her people, and this was not her home. But who, and where, and when? She did not know. She long suspected that where she belonged died with her parents, and nothing and no one would ever bring it back to her, no matter how many heart attack patients she saved from the brink, no matter how many cancer patients she did her best to comfort.

Mel’s next few weeks in the Pitt passed at the same pace it had been going. One afternoon near the end of her rotation, Dana sat beside her in the ambulance bay, lighting a cigarette.

“You mind?” she asked, gesturing to it between her fingers.

Mel shook her head, taking a bite of her granola bar. The bay was quiet, but she wouldn’t comment on that aloud.

“How have you been liking it here so far?” Dana asked.

“It’s good,” Mel said, learning that Dana and many of the others had a habit of cutting her off if she talked too long. She knew it wasn’t personal, that it was simply the job requiring an allocation of time and resources that didn’t allow for her rambling tendencies. She saved them the awkwardness and kept her answers short, now.

“Yeah?” Dana asked. “Good. If anyone’s giving you trouble, you just let me know.”

“I will,” Mel said, both of them knowing it was a lie.

“Listen, kid,” Dana said, “I’ve noticed you seem a little withdrawn lately, and I just want you to know that I’m here if you need to talk about anything.”

Mel froze, flinching. This was where it finally came. Where Robby sent Dana to tell her that she really didn’t belong here. That she should pack up and find someplace else to be.

“Don’t misunderstand me, we’re glad you’re here. Hell, this place could use more people like you who put their heads down and do the work and don’t complain. It’s refreshing, honestly.”

Dana nudged her with her elbow, smiling at Mel out of the corner of her eye. She kept her eyes down on the granola bar wrapped in her hands.

“I just want to make sure you’re not shortchanging yourself by, I don’t know, not wanting to rock the boat a little. That’s what boats are made for, you know?”

“Um,” Mel said, “Sure?” She didn’t think that’s what boats were actually made for.

“All I’m saying is, don’t hold back, okay? We like you and we aren’t going to change our minds about that.”

“Okay,” Mel said, slowly.

“Just be yourself,” Dana said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Mel said, again.

Dana stubbed out her cigarette and walked back inside, tossing a smile over her shoulder. The whole conversation left Mel more confused than ever, ashamed that Robby or whoever had noticed her behavior enough to send Dana out to talk to her, unsure as to how to proceed to make it better. Being yourself wasn’t exactly easy when that had never merited positive results before.

She thought about what Dana said all day, darting her eyes away anytime someone glanced at her. When she and Mohan wound up working on the same patient, an elderly woman exhibiting signs of confusion, she looked up twice to find Mohan waiting for a reply to something she had missed entirely.

When they sent the patient up to get an MRI, Mohan pulled her aside. “You okay?”

Mel nodded, looking over Mohan’s shoulder, feeling it all building up inside her, the restlessness, the confusion, the way she never seemed to fit in anywhere no matter how much she changed her personality. Some innate thing in her, some frequency she emitted, screeched in everyone else’s ears, sending them warning signs that she was an imposter pretending to be one of them.

“Mel, come on. I can tell you’re not,” Mohan said, “What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing,” Mel said, shaking her head. “It’s just -”

Yelling from the ambulance bay interrupted them, but Mohan hesitated a moment, squeezing Mel’s elbow, “You’re not getting away from me that easily,” she said. “To be continued.”

A multi-car pile-up had them busy all afternoon, ambulance after ambulance bringing in a range of patients needing stitches, splints, emergency surgery. They worked in tandem, Mel and Mohan, falling into the rhythm of the job with ease, the conversation with Dana forgotten in the chaos as the buzzing in her ears served its focusing function.

Robby was more involved, weeks after the PittFest shooting, but he still kept his distance, offering little outside of medical advice and a cursory good job over his shoulder as he skittered elsewhere. Whittaker eyed after him, face falling each time he walked away without one of their signature man-to-man pep talks.

She thought about but still couldn’t quite figure out where Robby drew his moral line. He didn’t want to ruin the life of a teenage boy threatening to hurt girls, but also didn’t report the father allegedly assaulting his daughter. He made medicine and exams work to give a young girl an abortion past the medically mandated cut-off, had sympathy for Louie, who came in time and time again on the brunt end of drinking too much, but seemed to be pissed at Langdon for his own struggle with substances.

She wondered what made him teeter one way or another, what set one apart from another. What about the lives of the girls David threatened? What about the daughter, left in the hands of an abusive father, what about Langdon dealing with his own hurt? She supposed it was all about it being his decision. She supposed he was mad that he didn’t know what was happening under his nose. That he didn’t get to choose, like with David or Kristi or Silas, what to do or what risk to take or not take. 

She thought maybe he saw Langdon as a moldable figure in his hands and, once he broke shape, crumbled under his fingers by the pressure, he realized this whole time he’d been a person with his own choices and flaws and mistakes too. 

She supposed Robby needed everyone to be perfect so that he could not be, so that he could make the risky decisions and play God, and when they didn’t do that, he couldn’t stand it. She supposed Langdon made him a failure on a day when he couldn’t handle any more of that. She supposed Langdon broke his heart, and it made him distant and it made him mad.

At the end of the shift, Mohan stopped Mel as she exited through the sliding glass doors. “Wait up,” Mohan called. “I’ll walk with you.”

“Oh, no, it’s okay. I’m just heading home.”

“I know,” Mohan said, smiling, “I’ll walk with you. It’ll be nice to get some fresh air after the day we’ve had.”

“Okay,” Mel said, uncomfortable with the idea of what they’d do once they got to Mel’s place. If Mohan expected an invite in, or if they’d hover awkwardly at the front door. The idea that Mohan would then have to walk back here, all alone, to get her car or her bus or whatever mode of transit she had to take home.

“Are you hungry?” Mohan asked in a way that told Mel she knew exactly what she was thinking.

“Sure,” Mel said, “I could eat.”

They walked, perhaps by habit, to the same diner from a few weeks ago and slid into a booth in the back corner. Mel fiddled with the peeling plastic menu, the water glass dripping with condensation onto the table’s surface.

“So,” Mohan said, after they ordered, “what’s up?”

Mel shook her head. It wasn’t that anything was up, it was just that she was sick of this being her norm sometimes. That she wished it wasn’t with all her might, but wishing got her nothing, nothing, in return. What was the use in telling Mohan that?

“Is it the loneliness?” Mohan asked, upfront and meeting Mel’s eyes with a look on her face that Mel couldn’t read.

And that sentence conjured it all up, the everything of it all. Of her guilt at not being able to take care of Becca full time, at her guilt at not having found somewhere for her sooner, her inability to find exactly where she fit or, as Mohan called it, her secret sauce, the way everyone was so nice to her, so fucking nice, and it did nothing for her because it was all surface level and she knew once they looked into the cracks that made her who she was they wouldn’t have anything kind or polite to say anymore. That they wouldn’t have anything to say to her at all. That she’d be, in their eyes, a contamination to get rid of, a liability to the patients she so desperately wanted, needed, to help, to balance the scales of the world around her.

Mohan didn’t wait for her to respond. She just nodded, reaching a hand across the table without touching Mel. It rested there upon the table, palm up, like an invitation Mel would never accept. But it was there.

“I have it too,” Mohan said, like it was a disease they both caught at some point in their lives, something chronic and incurable. “All I do is work and read medical journals and go back to work.”

“I think Robby sent Dana to talk to me about it. She said I was withdrawn.”

“I’ve had many similar conversations with them both,” Mohan said. “They’re just checking in, in their own way.”

“How do you stand it?” Mel asked, suddenly. “It’s just, I miss my sister so much and I had no one to help me care for her for so long and now all at once I have all this free time after work in an empty apartment with no hobbies and no friends and sure everyone at work is nice but nice is just nice it doesn’t mean anything and I know I’m weird and offputting at times but then when I try really hard not to be they say I’m withdrawn but when I don’t hide it, when I am myself like they say I should be, I can see the way they look at me, like an foreign specimen they don’t want to study and I just can’t win.” 

Mel was overwhelmed and looking down at Mohan’s palm and twisting her own fingers around each other to stop herself from reaching out and taking it, taking it for once in her life, a gesture of help no matter how small.

“I thought it would be different here. My first day, I -”

“Langdon?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Mel said. “Or maybe it was, I don’t know what you mean, I never know what anyone means. It was just that he didn’t flinch away from me like everyone else does. He didn’t leave as soon as I opened my mouth. He didn’t treat my personality like it was something contagious to avoid. He didn’t say I was in the wrong field or in the wrong city or in the wrong room. And I know it’s silly and stupid and I only knew him for, what, twelve hours, but I miss him or miss what I made him out to be and I’m sad for him, of course, and I want him to get better, but God, I miss him.”

Even though it was nothing, even though it was one afternoon, really, she was a little angry with him for leaving her. No, that wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t angry at him, not really. It wasn’t his fault. She was just angry that she was still, still alone.

“I’m sorry we’ve made you feel that way,” Mohan said. “I’m sorry I’ve made you feel that way.”

“I don’t want anyone to be sorry,” Mel said, eyes filling with tears because it was so hard to explain what she meant. It wasn’t that she wanted anyone to do anything differently. She just wished that their normal behavior, the normal functioning of the world, allowed for a space for her to fit, too.

“I’ve been distracted,” Mohan said, “but I should have done a better job welcoming you. You came in on such a chaotic day, and you seemed so sure of yourself. You handle your patients so well, it’s easy to forget you’re a student too.”

The food arrived on the arms of the waitress.

“Why don’t we be friends with each other?” Mohan asked, a hint of vulnerability in her voice.

“I’d like that,” Mel said.

“Me, too.”

They ate in companionable silence, and on the way out, Mohan said, “Maybe think about reaching out to him. There’s nothing wrong with needing friendship, and I’m sure he could use some more of it too.”

Mel nodded, and they slid out of the booth and left for their separate apartments and their separate nights, the gesture of it all warming Mel a little. 

She told Becca about it the next day when they went for their Friday night dinner, the same way Becca told Mel about all of her friends at her group home, feeling like a little girl again in a good way for once.

True to her word, Mohan checked in on Mel more often, linking up on cases and offering guidance until Mel didn’t feel uncomfortable asking for her help anymore. They took breaks together, sometimes, chatting about nothing really, but sitting beside each other in a way that comforted them both, Mel liked to think. 

They shared snacks or didn’t, talked about life or didn’t. Mohan liked to tell Mel about what she was reading about, new developments in the medical journals she subscribed to. Mel liked to tell Mohan about her sister and the play she was rehearsing or the classes she was taking. 

And it helped, it did. The nights were still endless, chafing at her, but it was less prevalent during the day when she had at least one person to turn to when she needed it. Someone who, not once after their dinner together, walked away when she was in the middle of talking about something. Who didn’t cut her off or skip to the end of the story for her. Occasionally, Mohan had to say, “Hold that thought,” if an emergency sprang up as they did in the emergency room, but she always came back to hear the end of it when she had time. They grabbed dinner sometimes, the silence between them something comfortable to sit in rather than something either of them felt the need to fill. They got drinks, occasionally, at a bar down the street or very rarely in the park with some of the others after a particularly hard day.

But the job began to weigh on her too in ways she hadn’t expected. The ER, as fast-paced and chaotic as it was, left too many loose ends sometimes for Mel to cope with. Patients came and left without resolution, with or without stitches Mel placed, with or without any sign she’d touched them at all. They were wheeled upstairs to different specialists, to different wings, to surgery. They walked out the front door with a referral or prescription or discharge instructions clutched in their hands, skin still stinging from the IV that had been removed, to get better or not get better, to improve and fall in love and have a baby or to die, days from now, with no future ahead of them at all. Mel did not know and had no way of ever finding out, unless they ended up back here.

Their stories haunted her, some more than others, but all of them hooked onto her, dragging her down. Their health and lives, and happiness mattered. They mattered to her. But that mattering meant nothing because the world was cruel and magicless, and very rarely did she get to tie up the loose end that their meeting created. She was part of a terrible memory for them. Part of something painful and terrifying, something they fought to recover from for the rest of their lives. 

And, sure, yes, she sometimes saved people. Sometimes she brought someone back from the thin line that separates life and death. But she knew that wasn’t her, but the tool of her, that did that. That anyone in her place would do the same and may have a different outcome, because bodies did what bodies did, and all they could do was try their best. 

It was just, sometimes she wanted a conclusion. She wanted an outcome to cling to. She wanted proof that what she was doing made a difference in just one person’s life.

When her time was up, she rotated to neurology, working under Dr. Mehta. Once she got used to picking up on the tone of his voice when he was joking, she found she enjoyed it more than she thought she would. He was genial, as were the rest of his staff, and they welcomed her more than the Pitt had, getting her up to speed and checking on her often in her first few days.

She liked the pace of the neurology wing, too, with a balance of continuing care and new patients who all required detailed and meticulous attention that Mel was only too happy to provide. And it turned out she was good at it, good at the little things, good at comfort. 

Dr. Mehta didn’t mind it when she didn’t understand his jokes or when she had to ask if something was, in fact, a joke. He was just pleased she was there, that his whole team was, and wasted no time educating them when he could.

She and Mohan met for lunch or breaks sometimes, and a few weeks into her neuro rotation, Mohan paused, studying her while Mel talked her through a long-term patient they’d been trying to diagnose. “You’re talking more than you were before.”

“Oh, sorry,” Mel said, realizing all at once that she had stopped scaling herself back quite as much as she had been. Stopped waiting for the brush off or the flinch away.

“No,” Mohan said, shaking her head, “it’s a good thing.”

She learned from Mohan, in bits and pieces, what was happening in the Pitt. That Robby was starting to be himself again, scolding Mohan for her speed still, but in a way that meant he was getting involved again. That Dana debated quitting every day, still. That Santos rotated to surgery and the flirtation with Garcia soured almost immediately, Santos crumbling under the ire of her fury when it turned in her direction for the first time.

Mel did not want to know what, if not the scalpel through the shoe, earned Santos that, but she wasn’t exactly surprised. Relationships like that in the workplace only led to disaster. Not that she had any real experience with that, but she’d seen it more than enough times to know it wasn’t a good idea, especially as a student.

Mohan reported that, through McKay, Langdon was doing well and that he had asked about her again. “You should reach out,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Mel said, “I’m no one to him, I’m sure he’s just being polite.”

“Langdon, polite?” Mohan scoffed.

Mel blinked at her, not knowing how to reply. He had been polite to her.

Mohan shrugged. “Well, he was different with you. Write him a letter, maybe.”

“I’m sure he would rather hear from his wife and kids,” Mel said.

“I’m sure he could use all the support he can get,” she said simply before moving on to talking about Dr. Abbott and some life-saving procedure he’d performed the night before that wowed her. She talked, a lot, about his hands. Maybe Mel wasn’t the only one with someone she ought to think about reaching out to.

Mel did think about writing a letter that night when, once again, the endless night stretched out before her like T.S. Eliot’s etherized patient upon the table. She thought of the woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper", crawling in circles in the cage of her husband’s design, peeling the wallpaper from the walls. The ceiling fan spun.

She rehearsed what she might say in a letter, feeling stupid at the idea of it at all. Knowing she was nothing to him. That he’d think something terrible of her if she wrote one, would see her name on the envelope, and toss it aside. He’d cringe to see it.

He had a family, after all. He had McKay and any number of other friends checking on him. She’d only embarrass herself even more, and after the way she latched onto him before, the way he probably saw, and it had made him uncomfortable, she couldn’t afford more embarrassment in her life.

Mel rotated from neurology to cardiology, thrust back into the discomfort of new faces. She rotated to the ICU, finding it difficult but rewarding. She rotated to surgery and then the surgical ICU, working with Dr. Garcia, who did, in fact, soften her sharpness ever so slightly when she noticed just how much it bothered Mel. Mel tried not to take it personally when it slipped out, as it seemed want to do.

She found she enjoyed surgery, too, liking the simplicity of stitches, staples, of a beginning, middle, and end to the process. Scrubbing in was meditative, even, ticking all of her boxes so that everything felt right for once, even her.

Garcia was as complimentary as she was critical, doling out praise and what some of her teachers called polish in elementary school with a sharp eye for doing everything right. Mel found she got more positives than negatives, learning how not to be in the way, learning the process easily because it was simply a pattern she could recognize.

She started and stopped letters to Langdon, sometimes. In one, she just wrote, “We need you. I need you.” She never sent any of them, especially not that one.

One day as she wrapped up her surgical ICU rotation, more sad to see it go than she thought she would be, the news broke that ECQ America would be managing the Pitt starting in the new fiscal year. Robby turned down the offer for a cushy desk job, remaining in the physician role in the ER, but was none too pleased by the turn of events.

Mel rotated to oncology, a move that almost broke her, and then, at the end of her second year of residency, she was back in the Pitt on the night shift, breaking the news to Becca that their Friday night sleepovers would have to become Saturday morning breakfast dates, much to Becca’s chagrin.

“I don’t like it either,” Mel said.

“It’s okay,” Becca decided, after some consideration, “we’ll figure it out.”

“Yes, we will, just like we always do, right?”

“Right.”

In her time away, a new attending took Dr. Collin’s place as resident. Mohan only had positive things to say, though Mel had yet to meet her. Her first night shift, Dr. Abbott walked her through the quirks of working overnights, but otherwise left her to her own devices, observing and teaching with a measured surety she found calming.

Dr. Ellis and Dr. Shen were friendly toward her, including her in whatever conversations they were having if she was around, filling her in on backstory in a speech pattern that told her they spent way too much time together. Emergencies, for them, were just part of the job, and the particularly worrisome ones that came in in the darkest hours of the night hardly made them flinch.

They got her up to speed on Robby’s last-ditch attempt to keep ECQ America out of their ER. His half-hearted attempts at raising patient satisfaction without the budget or resources to back it up, putting up cheery signs around the room, and reminding them to smile more. It was, by all accounts, putting a band-aid on a bullet wound they all knew wouldn’t hold.

The night shift crew got breakfast after work sometimes and went out of their way to invite Mel, directly, every time, without her having to ask. Dr. Shen was usually the one to ask, leaning against the set of lockers or catching her as she walked out the door. His smile was one that graced his face easily, and she said yes, more times than not, liking the languid way about all three of them, liking that they sometimes were too tired to say anything at all.

Dr. Abbott was a stickler for breaks, for making sure everyone was fed and hydrated, pulling them away like clockwork to ensure they were taking care of themselves. Mel took on that same role for him, noticing almost immediately that no one was paying him as much attention, monitoring when he rubbed at his prosthetic and suggesting, gently, a break when he did.

“Langdon was right,” he said one day, “you’re good at this. Keep it up.” Langdon, Langdon, it all seemed to come back to Langdon somehow, even now.

Night shift brought a new brand of patients, one that Mel struggled to work with. They were irritable, having sat in the waiting room all day and into the night. The night seemed to change things, seemed to shift them to an unreal hue. They were louder, more unpredictable, and, at times, more violent.

Once, when she tried to leave a patient’s bedside to place an order for a prescription medication for his discharge, he wrapped his hand around her wrist and wouldn’t let go. Mel panicked, unable to call out for security, stuck in the presence of the pain of it, how hard he gripped her, how close he was to her face as he demanded she give him the medication now. No matter how many times she tried to explain to him that she had to leave the room to do that, he wouldn’t let go. The look in his eyes was wild, too wide, seeing but not seeing her as a person standing before him, in real pain that dwarfed all of the thoughts in her head to nothing.

Pain made her dumb. It made her silent. It made her weak. Even a small pain, like that, short-circuited everything.

Dr. Abbott passed by the bed, glancing over, before he yelled out for security. He ended up having to pry the man’s hand from her wrist, sending her on a break as he dealt with the rest of the patient’s discharge.

Mel sat in the break room, her arm placed on the table in front of her, the lingering touch of the man and the redness around her wrist that would become bruises for days to come haunting her. Dr. Shen came in soon after placing an ice pack gently on her wrist, but avoiding touching it himself. 

The ice helped minimize the ghostly presence of the man’s hand, but it didn’t get rid of it completely. She suddenly wanted, needed, craved someone to hold her there, for someone else, someone she trusted, to be the last one to have touched her skin. She had no one, though, to do it for her. She gripped her own wrist, tight, all night, over and over again even as she jumped back into working on patients. She’d catch herself, clutching her skin, twisting until it hurt just a little, pressing on bruises in the hopes it would erase the feeling of his skin on hers.

That morning, she had the distinct craving for weight on top of her, something to compress her down. She wanted something heavy enough that it made it ever so slightly hard to breathe. She wanted to become a creature that could only exist, only think about her next breath. Mel piled blanket after blanket on top of her, but it wasn’t the same. This, she thought, was the noise of a black hole singing that scientists heard all those years ago. This indefinable, untouchable hunger in her, in everyone.

She stared at the clock on her nightstand all day, trying to make math equations out of the numbers. A leftover habit from childhood, sitting in homeroom, willing the day to pass. 12:47 was one plus two plus four equals seven, but 12:48 was eight divided by four, which equaled two times one. Minute by minute, she tried to make the numbers work. Tried to make them satisfactory in a way that nothing else in her life was. She did it all afternoon.

On another night, a man with narrowed eyes looked her up and down the whole time she was in his room, evaluating him for generalized chest pain. He not-so-accidentally brushed his hand against her chest not once, but twice, Mel once again freezing in the face of it. She hated that she did, hated that she couldn’t pull a Santos and tell the guy off or call out loudly for security. 

She just continued on with her evaluation, later asking Dr. Shen for a consult when the results proved inconclusive. When the man did it again, in front of Dr. Shen this time, while making eye contact with Mel, all hell broke loose as Dr. Shen called him out immediately.

“You good?” he asked her, pulling her aside. He ducked down, trying to catch her eyes.

“Yeah,” she said, feeling so outside her body she didn’t think she’d ever come back into it. “It was just an accident..”

“That didn’t look like an accident to me.”

She spent the rest of the shift in a daze, feeling the touch of the man on her no matter what she did, unable to shake the weight of his hands. She was unfocused, needing something she couldn’t explain. She was stuck in that room with his hands on her, more embarrassed that it was made into a big deal than she would have been had it stayed a secret discomfort that no one laid witness to. Shen’s eyes on it, on her, made it more real than the actual hand touching her, somehow. Made it more shameful, more proof that she was too sensitive for this after all.

She slunk into the break room, sitting against the countertop, the handle of the cabinet digging into the back of her head in a way she relished. Her white noise, her lyrics, none of it helped. The buzzing in her head became unbearable. She could only wrap her arms around herself and wait, eyes closed, until someone came to find her. It took a long time for Dr. Ellis to come.

Shen and Abbott always seemed to be nearby after that, catching her eyes in a way that made her feel small and helpless. She didn’t want to be a thing that needed to be protected. She didn’t want to be something fragile in their eyes. But she was.

As she tried to sleep in the daylight hours, she began to imagine hands on her. Hands belonging to someone familiar. Hands erasing the grip on her wrist, the brushes against her chest. Hands that belonged to men she trusted, Shen and Abbott and Langdon. She dreaded closed doors, close spaces, the screaming that tended to happen more often in the wee hours of the night. She ate less and slept less, and worried about Becca. Her rent was raised, and so were the fees for Becca’s group home, stretching Mel’s paycheck thinner and thinner.

She paced, some days, until she had to go back to work, feeling less and less real. She and Mohan, now on different shifts, only saw each other in passing.

It was on one of those days when she walked her bedroom, back and forth, all day, that she showed up to work and found the new year’s medical students following the new resident around with a frantic look in their eyes. She changed and stored her stuff, a low-level thrum in the air that hinted something had happened that day to ever-so-slightly shift the thin line of tension of the room. The beds were full, chairs were full, but that wasn’t new. There was whispering everywhere she passed.

Joining the group semi-formed around Robby, she looked up and suddenly saw what it was. Langdon was back. And the sight of him brought back her fury, brought back her sadness, brought back her embarrassment so strongly she had to shake her hands at her sides to stop herself from fleeing. From running out the sliding glass doors and never coming back.

And he was already looking at her. She knew, somehow, he’d been looking at her for a while, possibly from the minute she walked through the door. His cocksuredness was gone from his eyes, looking far younger than he had nearly a year before when she’d seen him last. He eyed her like he was calculating an escape plan and didn’t know how she fit into it, and then he looked away, head ducked, as Robby began to speak.

“As you can see, we had some new faces join us today...”

Chapter Text

Rounds brought them up to speed, Robby and the rest of the day shifters recounting a relatively busy day with a waiting room full of barbecue grill burns, cool decking falls, and overtired kids with upset stomachs. The Fourth of July was the next day. People were drunk, tired, and angry at missing out on all of the pre-holiday fun. They were down a nurse, a tech, and, now, their sanity. Mel and the night shift team were in for it.

As Dr. Al-Hashimi brought them up to speed, Mel lingered in the back with Ellis and Chen, eyes purposely avoiding Langdon where he sat, head down, at the nurse’s station.

There was almost nothing worse than being faced by someone she’d built up in her head, built and built and built until he became something that wasn’t real anymore. Became a complete falsity until the experiences they had were warped beyond recognition because her loneliness made her hallucinate, made her pathetic, made her invent meaning from nothing. And he’d know somehow what she had done, she was convinced of it. He’d know.

But seeing him brought back how much she missed him, too. It brought back the way she was so aware of where he was in the room, no matter which bed they approached. Like a fishhook in an open eye, he tugged on her attention, insistent and painful.

He did not say hi to Mel. He did not, as far as she could tell, say anything to anyone. Everyone, it seemed, was waiting for him to decide how he’d be, how he’d reenter this space again.

After rounds, the groups separated, day shift to head home and nights to get into the swing of things. She glanced over to see Robby, towering over Langdon, the tense perpendicular lines of them spelling out trouble. Langdon looked up at Robby, devoid of anger or bravado or anything except, well, pain. He was a boy being scolded for striking out looking, a boy getting his hand slapped while he was still down on the ground.

He glanced over, catching Mel’s eye, and she averted her gaze. She was sorry she had seen them like that, sorry he had seen her seeing them.

As she and Ellis worked on dressing a man’s burn wounds, Mel felt that fishhook pull even then. Even with curtains and beds and walls between them, it tugged her eyes in his direction. “Your boy’s back,” Ellis remarked.

“Who’s my boy?” Mel asked, frowning, distracted still by the chance she’d see the outline of him passing by the open door. She glanced around, thinking Ellis meant a recurrent patient had turned up again. One regular had taken up a particular fondness for Mel, a middle-aged man who came in after he got superglue in his eye not once but twice in the last few weeks while trying to build his daughter a dollhouse.

“Oh, that’s how you’re going to play it?” Ellis said, laughing. “I see how it is, Mel Mel.”

“See how what is?” she asked, more confused than ever.

Mel looked up to see Ellis grinning at her like they were both in on a joke neither of them said aloud. Mel hated jokes like that because if it wasn’t said aloud, she was sure not to be in on it.

“What?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing,” Ellis said, wandering out of the room.

When Mel emerged a few minutes later, the nurse’s station was empty. She breathed out a sigh of relief, moving on to a little boy with food poisoning, a man who fractured his elbow falling while running away from a lit firework, a confused elderly woman who reminded her, just enough to rattle her, of her mother. It was her hands, she thought, and the way she held them like prized possessions in her lap. Mel’s mother spent hours painting her nails, rubbing lotion into her cuticles, keeping them pristine. When she held Mel’s hand, she felt honored to have been offered what was so clearly vital to her in some indescribable way.

All night, she felt off-kilter. All night her eyes traced the room without her realizing, staring out into the bay, staring out each open door in hope of something she couldn’t name and didn’t understand.

“Hey,” Shen said, sidling up beside her as she charted on an open computer. “Good stuff today, right?”

“Good stuff today?” Mel repeated, finishing her train of thought before looking up at him. He lounged against the countertop, weight on his elbows, peering down at her.

“Yeah,” he said. “Or, what, is there beef between you or something?”

“Between who?” Mel asked, brain racing to catch up. “Oh, I’ve never met the new medical students before.”

“No,” Shen said, a confused look on his face. “Langdon. I thought you guys were friends.”

“Oh,” Mel said, her cheeks flushing against her will. “I only really met him the day of the PittFest shooting, so I wouldn’t necessarily say we were friends, but friendly, I suppose. Though I don’t really have a frame of reference for who he considers a friend since, like I said, I only interacted with him for one shift.”

“Oh, right,” Shen said. “So true. But you’re glad he’s back?”

“Yes,” Mel said, exhibiting a great amount of restraint to not classify that statement with numerous caveats, too. “I’m glad he’s back.”

“Right on.” He, too, wandered away to make himself yet another cup of weak iced coffee in the lounge.

The next morning, she overheard a nurse whispering to another, “I can’t believe they let him work again.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that anyone would be mad he was here again, doing the work they all fought so hard to do. That anyone wouldn’t see it for what it was: a good thing that a man who was struggling got the help he needed and was deemed well enough to return. He was sure to be under strict supervision with a laundry list of rules under a diversion program, bowing to them all just to keep his job. He had placed himself under a microscope, eliciting scrutiny, ridicule, and public embarrassment just to try to keep helping people. 

If ER Ken, I-got-skills-baby Langdon placed himself in a position to endure all of that, well, Mel could only see it as a good thing. As proof that whatever drew him to this job, whatever impulse in him that wanted to heal the world one wild crike at a time, was alive in him still. And that impulse was valiant. It was good.

When the day shift arrived, Langdon one of the last in the doors, she tried to catch his eye, to offer a wave of welcome as she wrestled with her own shame in seeing him again and her guilt at having not been very friendly toward him earlier. But, even during rounds, he kept his distance and didn’t, as far as she could sense, glance her way at all.

It wasn’t as if he’d tried to say hi the afternoon before, either, now that she thought about it. He’d looked at her, but that was all he had done. He hadn’t even quirked his mouth up into the suggestion of a smile. 

The dust that had been settling between them for the last ten months, the dust she kept kicking up by going back to that day, warming herself against it over and over again, finally, finally landed. He was not her friend, and she was not his. He had only been nice for the sake of it or for something to do or because he felt bad for her and she had, as she always did, read too far into it because she was a hurt creature who couldn’t help herself, pushing into any palm offered to her just to feel something good for one fraction of a second before it was pulled, flinched, jerked away because it had been meant for someone else.

She did not know what was worse, the months of wondering or the instant confirmation that it had been nothing after all. The warmth had been artificial the entire time, a painted yellow glow, and she was too stupid to recognize the difference, as frozen as she was with want.

Mel wasn’t the best at taking hints, but she picked up on that one. She slunk home, dodging a breakfast invitation from Ellis on her way out. For once, she did not pace but instead lay flat and straight in bed, eyes closed. She was calmed, in a strange way, by the truth of the situation. There was no more wondering. There was no more possibility. There was only this.

She slept, some, and got ready for her shift early, heading to Becca’s group home to light sparklers with her to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday. It wasn’t quite dark enough yet to get the real impact, but neither of them minded, taking dozens of pictures with the two of them, sparklers held up in the daylight.

Dana called her, then, asking if she could come in early. There had been an explosion at a nearby steel mill. A rogue firework shot too close or some kids being stupid or coincidental timing of a mechanical inevitability. The cause did not matter.

“Becca,” Mel began to apologize.

“They need your help,” Becca was already saying, nodding. “Want me to call you during fireworks later?”

“Sure,” Mel said, “I might have patients, but I’ll try to answer, okay?”

“Okay!”

“Be safe,” Mel said. “Remember -”

“Stay far, far away from the fireworks,” Becca said, nodding. “I know! Go save people!”

Robby put Mel on chairs, and she was pleased to find out Mohan would be working them with her, the new med students in tow. The waiting room was overflowing, and ambulances began screeching in, sirens wailing, with victims from the explosion as soon as she arrived.

Mel saw Langdon across the room, trailing but hands off an incoming gurney. She noticed, in one second, the way he hung back. The way he glanced at Robby, just for a moment, before jumping into the fray. They wheeled the gurney into the trauma bay, and she lost sight of him.

She dressed burns. She stitched fingers, cut while slicing watermelon. She evaluated corneal abrasions and ruptured eardrums and alcohol poisoning. A six-year-old who slipped on the cool decking while trying to outrun a firework was the lucky new recipient of a dark blue cast on his arm. He asked her to sign it, looking up at her shyly.

“As long as your mom says it’s okay,” Mel said, kneeling down to meet his eye.

“Whatever you want, bud,” his mom sighed, the night deepening around them both. Mel lost track of what time it was, how long she’d been there, lost track of everything.

She drew a firework onto his cast, an amateur bundle of lines, really, but the boy was delighted. “Can she sign it, too?” he asked, pointing to Mohan.

Mohan readily agreed, telling him how brave he was as she added to Mel’s firework theme with another burst of lines. Before she could get them out the door, he was asking everyone who walked by, earning added artistry from Dana, Mateo, and an amused but only partially paying attention Robby.

“What about him?” the boy asked, tugging on Mel’s sleeve. She looked up to see him, pointing right at Langdon as he exited the trauma bay across the way, tossing his gloves into a bin as he did.

“Oh, well, he might be busy,” Mel said. “There are a lot of people who are really hurt and need his help.”

“Please,” the boy begged. “Pleaseeee.”

Mel hesitated, not wanting to interrupt his flow or to bother him, but feeling stupid for hesitating at all. He was a coworker, and it was just a little question, and the worst he could really say was no, and nothing terrible would happen at all.

As she worked up the nerve, scolding herself for having to do that at all, Langdon looked up and his face split into a smile. A smile she hadn’t seen in months. A smile that would, she was sure, stay with her all her life. It wasn’t for her, she knew, but when had that mattered? Mona Lisa smiled for herself, but still people traveled for hours, for days, to witness her quiet grin and were dazzled by it.

Langdon seemed to put the pieces of the equation together without needing to be asked, seeing the markers in Mel’s hands and the cast on the boy beside her. He came right over.

Mel wordlessly offered the markers in her hands, and Langdon crouched in front of them both. He took a minute to examine the artwork that already graced his arm, carefully turning it this way and that with a serious look on his face.

“What’s your name?” he asked the kid as he did.

The boy blinked at him through his eyelashes, a bashful smile on his face. “Patrick.”

“Nice to meet you, Patrick. My name is Frank.” He still hadn’t looked at Mel. “Now, Patrick, where would you like me to sign your awesome new cast?”

Patrick shrugged, burying his face in Mel’s leg, the force of his head almost painful in the soft skin of her thigh. She tried very hard not to flinch away from it. He was just a boy, and he didn’t mean to violate her personal space, and she, too, wanted to bury her face and hide away from Langdon, crouched before her, embarrassed by her own desperate craving for his attention, too.

“Oh, come on, Pat, let’s keep our hands to ourselves,” the boy’s mom said, her exasperation seeping through her tone, through the bent-over curve of her, through the way she gripped their discharge paperwork, desperate to go home.

“I’m not touching her with my hands,” he protested, peeking out from against her leg. “See?” 

He held up both of his hands as evidence.

“You know what I mean, remember we aren’t supposed to touch people without asking.”

“I’m sure my friend Mel here doesn’t mind,” Langdon said, still only looking at Patrick.

“Her name is Dr. King,” Patrick said, a stern look on his face.

“That’s right,” Langdon said, finally, finally looking up at her, a twinkle of amusement in his tired eyes. “That’s right. Now, do you think you could give Dr. King her leg back so I can sign your cast? What color should I use? All of them?”

They worked out the details of Langdon’s addition, Mel now freed from Patrick’s grasp. She nodded to the boy’s mom and made a silent retreat, leaving them, heads bent together, over the cast now scattered with fireworks. 

Outside, the real-life thing burst in distant thuds against the flat sky. An ambulance siren sailed in the night, but Mel couldn’t tell if it was coming or going. Langdon glanced up at her as she backpedaled, face unreadable, and then went back to his artwork.

She passed Mohan as she retreated. “Say what you want about the man, but that is very cute.”

Mel resisted the urge to look over her shoulder, moving onto the next patient who was very much not a cute six-year-old, but instead a very much inebriated twenty-something who got into a, by his account, patriotic fist fight resulting in a bleeding forehead laceration and an eye now swollen shut. He blinked at her as she introduced herself, as she evaluated his head wound, as she affirmed that he would, in fact, need stitches.

“Patriotic stitches,” the patient said. “For America.”

Mel had no response to that one. By the time she went to see if one of the med students wanted to do the stitches, Langdon and the little boy were gone.

At the steel mill, one victim remained trapped underneath wreckage after the explosion caused a section of the building to collapse. He’d been pinned for hours, but was, by the accounts coming in in the form of EMTs and patients watching the news in the waiting room, still alive.

Mel kept going, missing the first call from Becca as she and one of the medical students, Joy, worked up a patient reporting chest pain who crashed in front of them seconds after bringing him back for evaluation. The room filled around them, Mel starting chest compressions as they rushed to stabilize him. She realized, in the middle of it, she could not remember his name. 

She looked down to find it was her father, paling beneath her. She looked down to find she was a child again, a child asking God or the universe or whoever it was who had the power to to bring him back, bring him back, bring him back. In lieu of flowers. She was a girl on her knees. She was a wanting thing. But he wasn’t coming back, he was never coming back, and Mel kept moving anyway, demanding more time, doing the work of his heart with her hands. His fragile heart, her small hands.

“Clear,” someone called out, sounding a great distance away. Mel felt like Mary Katherine in her imaginary little house on the moon, looking down on the dead world where dads’ hearts, those invincible men, gave out just like that.

“Clear,” a voice said, again. Somewhere inside her, she begged, please let her be on the moon.

“Mel,” someone said, sharp, an arm wrapping around her, the contact causing her to flinch back into herself. She was not on the moon. She was here, in this hospital, doing her job, and she was good at her job, she worked and tried and killed herself to be good at her job, and the man on the table was not her father. Hunter, she remembered. His name was Hunter, and he came here alone, and she looked up to find Abbott beside her, eyeing her with his tired surety, hands up in the air, ever so slightly, to show her he wouldn’t touch her again.

She waited until he nodded and started compressions again. The next round of shocks brought him back. The room, still full, was too loud, too crowded, her adrenaline beating from the inside of her face and her head and every point of her body where Abbott touched her. She backed up, against the wall, trying to breathe.

“Good save,” Abbott said, over his shoulder. “We got this from here. Take five.”

Mel turned to the door to find Langdon, lingering there, his eyes on her. He said nothing as she passed by, making a beeline for the ambulance bay, for the sky, for the moon. She lay flat on the brick planter’s border, staring up at the bay’s overhang, pressing her shoulder blades, her heels, the back of her head into its rough texture, a dull pain singing through her like a sigh. On her phone, Becca texted her dozens of videos of fireworks, detonating in the sky from afar.

She did not expect him to come. She did not expect anyone to come. No one came. When a few minutes passed and she planted herself firmly on the Earth’s surface again, she went back inside.

Ten minutes or an hour or one hundred hours later, Mel could not say, raised voices floated over from behind one of the curtains. A male voice, louder than it needed to be, loud in a way that men did on purpose just so to show they could, just because they relished the way it made her eyes widen, the way it made her flinch, broke through the low hum of the ER.

Langdon emerged from the curtained bed, making a beeline for Robby, who had his hands occupied working on one of the explosion victims they were wheeling across the room. They murmured together, bodies tense, before Robby glanced around the room, meeting Mel’s eyes. “Dr. King,” he called. “Could you?”

She nodded, telling the patient in front of her that she’d be right back, and hurried over. She raised her eyebrows at them both.

Langdon nodded toward the curtain. “Kidney stone,” he said.

“Okay,” Mel said.

They both just kept looking at her.

“Sorry, what did you need me for?”

“Oh, um,” Langdon said. “I, uh, I can’t -”

“Mr. Riley needs an order for pain relief, and I’m a little busy,” Robby said. He called out orders to Mateo on the other side of the gurney.

Mel blinked at Robby. She blinked at Langdon. Mr. Riley groaned from behind the curtain, yelling out expletives.

“I can’t-”

“Please could you just handle this, Mel?” Robby eyed her like she should understand whatever it was that no one would say aloud and wheeled his patient into one of the trauma bays, leaving Mel and Langdon in silence.

Langdon turned toward the curtain, seemingly unwilling to look at her, still. While he’d made it clear they weren’t friends, not like she thought anyway, she didn’t think it was so bad that he couldn’t stand to be around her. That he couldn’t look at her face.

She understood, then. She recognized the signs, now. The signs of embarrassment and shame. The slouch of Langdon’s broad shoulders, the way he hovered in doorways, now, the glances at Robby before touching the patient on the bed before him. The reason she was called over here, in front of everyone. Langdon’s diversion program likely made him unable to perform certain actions, including, most prominently and logically, prescribing controlled substances like those used to treat acute pain.

Mel kept her eyes down. She stepped into the curtain, caught between trusting Langdon’s evaluation and needing to perform her own exam to determine treatment since her name would be the one on the order. She waited for Langdon to introduce her, but the patient began yelling the second they stepped in.

“Oh, great, you couldn’t help me, so you bring a little bitch of a nurse in here, that’ll fix things.”

“Sir, like I was saying-” Langdon started, anger flaring in his voice. He still wouldn’t meet Mel’s eye.

“I’m Dr. King,” Mel said, cutting Langdon off. “I'm new to the hospital, and Dr. Langdon thought this would be a good learning opportunity for me if you’d be kind enough to allow me to assess you? I’d be so appreciative, and I’ll just do a quick exam and we can see what we can do about your pain…”

She didn’t wait for Mr. Riley to respond. She asked about his pain, about nausea, about the onset and the progression, all in quick succession. The pain made him loud and mean, but it also slowed him down, and Mel understood pain, and she understood who she was as a person, what she looked like, and how she came across, and she understood that she could use that in this moment to help them all through a situation none of them wanted to be in. Lately, she felt like all she did was stop talking, pull back, predict the interruption, but this time she steamrolled through every curse word and complaint to get to the end goal because he was in pain and he needed her help.

He was in pain, and he needed her help.

Pain was never meaningless. Pain was a sign. Pain was a symptom. Pain was proof that he was alive and she was alive and the world kept turning around them or under their feet or however it was the world turned. Pain was horrible and unique from every other feeling in the entire universe and it morphed the people in it into animals of survival, animals of one goal: getting relief.

Mel knew there was pain that existed in the world and inside her that there never would be relief for. But this, she could help with. This, she could try to fix. This, she could calm, at least. She said the magic words she put the order in on her tablet. She knew, too, that this moment inflicted some level of pain on Langdon, and she did her best to minimize that as much as possible by exiting quickly as soon as the order was in.

The rest of the night shift trickled in. The man was still trapped at the steel mill, but yes, somehow also still alive. Most of the other victims had been stabilized and sent elsewhere, to surgery or a specialty or miraculously home with a great many things to recover from, but lucky, oh so lucky, to be able to try.

Mel caught Ellis and Shen up to speed, chatting with them by the nurse’s station. They told her about the fireworks they passed on their way in. She told them about seeing Becca earlier, showing them the pictures they took together in the daylight. Shen had developed a tendency to touch her, or anyone, in conversations sometimes, and he leaned in next to her, elbow against her elbow, to see the pictures over her shoulder. She found she didn’t mind it. She found it actually felt kind of nice, in a strange way, to feel the touch of someone, anyone, beside her.

“Nice,” he said into her ear. “Looks like you both were having fun.”

“We did,” she said. 

Ellis asked how her sister’s interview skills class went the day before, and she filled her in on that, realizing once again she was talking too long about something they surely didn’t care about, but she couldn’t seem to, didn’t want to, stop, and they didn’t stop her. They nodded and commented, and all of a sudden it hit her that these were, by some surface level of the definition, friends of hers. Work friends whom she only saw here, like this, but friends.

“Sorry, I’m rambling,” Mel said.

“We like it when you do that,” Shen said magnanimously, his coffee dripping condensation down his scrubs. He was still elbow to elbow with Mel, leaning against the countertop.

“Hey, man,” Shen said. 

Mel looked up to see Langdon passing by. Langdon eyed them, nodding in their direction, but kept walking with a half-hearted hey murmured over his shoulder.

“He good?” Ellis asked.

Mel shrugged. What could she say? “It’s been a long shift.”

“Hey, the fun’s just getting started,” Ellis said, grinning.

The fun turned out to be a long, busy night in a series of long, busy nights. Day shift went home mostly on time, Langdon disappearing sometime while Mel’s head was down. It was better that way, she supposed. No more fishhook’s tug.

The final victim was freed from the steel mill rubble, speeding to the ER in the dead of night. Abbott and Shen worked on him for hours, eventually stabilizing him enough to send him to surgery to have at least part of, if not all of, his pinned arm amputated. 

Mel found Abbott leaning against a wall in the ambulance bay, head in his hands. She touched him on the shoulder, gently, and left her hand there. She didn’t have to say anything. 

He survived, they breathed out, he survived. Pain made people stupid. It made people mean. But it also kept people alive.

For once, Mel went home and slept and slept. In the morning, she threw out the letters she wrote to a version of Langdon that didn’t exist and never had. It wasn’t fair to him. It wasn’t fair to either of them.

She’d let him, the real him, dictate what came next. And she’d simply try her best to stop adding to his embarrassment, to his pain.

Mel went to breakfast with Becca in the morning. The buzzing in her brain was quiet. She understood her role in the world, and it was this. This. She and her sister, eating pancakes in a crowded diner, the world outside not waiting for them in the least. So this is the world. I am not in it. It is beautiful.

Why fight it anymore, she thought. Why not just let her life be her life? Why not just feel what she had always felt and always would feel? She was not a fighter. She never had been.

This was enough. She didn’t understand why her restlessness, her itch for more, told her otherwise.  A little kid broke his arm and went home with fireworks on his dark blue cast. A man survived for hours underneath the pieces of a building, like this very building, like any building, feeling their weight in a way almost no one alive ever had. This was enough.

In the early morning hours of her third day on night shift in a row, the third day on night shift in a row in which no one had died under their watch, the knowledge of that threading a undercurrent of dread through every action and reaction they made all night, the sound of glass shattering started Mel as she bent over, listening to the heartbeat of a toddler with flushed cheeks.

She jerked at the noise, the kid under her gasping, startled, before his face crumpled into a cry. “What was that?” the kid’s father asked. He looked to Mel for answers.

She approached the curtain cautiously, fearing the worst, fearing the implications of any of the implements that could be used to shatter glass in an emergency room, the noise of it sharp against the tile floors. She peered out to see the outer set of sliding glass doors shattered, Abbott and Ellis and the night security guard peering out into the new morning.

Someone had thrown a rock through the doors. Someone had thrown a rock through the ambulance bay doors that served only one purpose: an entryway to help.

“It’s okay,” Mel said, trusting they would handle it. Trusting that if they were in danger, if more rocks were coming, they’d say something. She kept her tone measured and calm. “One of the doors out there broke.”

“How’d it break?” the kid in the bed asked, eyes wide.

“Just an accident,” Mel said, smiling. “I’m sure it was just an accident.”

Mel created a dating profile in a static frenzy between shifts one day, curiosity and a strange calmness washing over her one afternoon. Weirdly, the restlessness felt more normal in the daylight. It felt like resolve.

She debated her answers to the dozens of prompts she could pick from, the idea of someone, anyone, reading what she wrote daunting. Embarrassing. She couldn’t stomach being witnessed wanting anything, especially not love. She lost her resolve before she saved any of it. Besides, she didn’t have any good pictures of herself to use aside from a few selfies she took in the same spot in front of her apartment window. It would look, by all accounts, like she never moved an inch. Not in her whole life.

She saw Langdon in passing, mostly, as their shifts overlapped on either end. He kept his eyes downcast. He kept to the back of any group they wound up in. He lingered on the edges of the place, even as the days and weeks passed.

One day, as Mel arrived for her shift, Dana announced that a STEMI was headed in. Robby called for Langdon, nodding toward the siren’s call nearing from outside. Mel glanced over to see Langdon approach, a stab of excitement running through her at the memory of their STEMI the year prior, the way he couldn’t hold still at the thought of it, the radioactive confidence of a man who knew what he was doing and wanted to show Mel how to do it, too.

But Langdon didn’t spring toward the door. He lingered, on the other side of the nurse’s station, head down. She saw him breathe in, saw him, just for a second, hesitate. She counted, one, two, three, before he lifted his head and looked around, almost the exact same way he looked at her on his first day back, like he was seeking an exit sign in a smoke-filled room. Then, eyes passing her and everyone else in the room, eyes not seeing anything at all, he trailed Robby toward the doors.

That hesitation, minuscule as it was, slid under her skin like a needle. Like a knife. The sharp edge of it told her more about his state, about his pain, than anything. She’d been seeing it for weeks, but it hit her the most then when she had something direct, something exact, to compare it to.

She debated what to do with that. Debated if she needed to do anything. But doctors shouldn’t, couldn’t hesitate. Doctors studied and trained and learned and kept learning for years, for decades, so they could not hesitate. Even a second was the difference between life and death. Even one blink. And Langdon was good at his job. Langdon was amazing at his job. His hesitation was not a doctor who was in over his head. Was not a doctor who did not have the skills to back up his action. It was a sign of something else, something more painful and complicated.

The hesitation suggested his excitement, the love for the job or the thrill for it, if there was a difference in Langdon’s mind, was gone. And that scared her more than anything. That terrified her. Because that, she had always thought, was Langdon’s special sauce. His unwieldy confidence in his ability rooted in just how much he was so very alive in the moments when he performed it. If that was gone, if he did not have that, she worried he would leave and never come back, and all of the people he could have saved, could have comforted with his blinding confidence, could have helped in some way, would suffer without him.

It wasn’t often people seemed to do what they were meant to do. But Langdon and his hands? This was it. And if he left, she had no chance in surviving this place. That’s what scared her, really. That’s what she thought about all night.

Mel considered going to Robby, but what would she say? That she saw him take a breath across the room? That she saw him look around? Besides, she’d hate more than anything if anyone went to Robby about something like that about her, something so inconcrete, something so personal.

And, really, she did not know him. She could have been inventing false realities again. She could have seen nothing at all but a man who needed one moment in a room that demanded something inhuman of them all, a man who just needed a breath in an environment that asked them to not need oxygen.

She had promised not to add to his pain, hadn’t she? She had promised herself that.

Later that night, Abbott came out into the ambulance bay as she took a break in the dark, temporary quiet. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, pausing the ASMR video she had playing through her earbuds.

“You alright tonight?” Abbott asked. “You seem like something’s on your mind.”

“Oh, sorry,” Mel began, panicked at the idea that she had done something wrong, that she let what was on her mind, which was really nothing all that important, interfere with her work that night. She didn't even really understand why it bothered her so. Why that, of all things, was what she fixated on. “I didn’t mean to -”

“No, no,” Abbott said, “Nothing’s wrong. I’m not here as a boss, but as a friend.”

“Oh,” Mel said, pausing to consider what she wanted to say. “Oh. Well, um, I’m just worried about someone, is all. I guess not worried, exactly, but I just noticed something earlier that made me concerned for them, and I’m not sure what to do about it because it was such a small moment that saying something might make it into a bigger deal than it should be, but not saying anything doesn’t feel right either.”

Abbott stayed silent, looking out into the ambulance bay with her.

“It’s just - it’s nothing. It’s nothing, I’m fine, and I promise I won’t let this impact my work tonight, it’s really not anything at all.”

“I know,” Abbott said, smiling at her. “You’re doing great, really. I just wanted to check in."

“Okay,” Mel said. She was trying really hard to believe him.

“Don’t let me overstep here, but can I ask who it is?”

Mel paused, hesitating, wanting but not wanting to say because Abbott was in a supervisory position and if she said something to him, it was the same as saying something to Robby, and she didn’t, really didn’t, want anyone to get into trouble, especially not Langdon for truly nothing. For a gut feeling. She assumed, by a calculation of what she knew of the situation, that Langdon didn’t need any more eyes on him right now.

“Not as a boss?” she asked. “Reading nothing into it?”

He held out a pinky. She shook her head, but understood his meaning. “It’s Langdon.”

Abbott nodded, pausing. “Is anyone’s safety at risk?”

“No,” she said, quickly. If that were the case, she wouldn’t hesitate to say something, and she thought they both knew that.

“It’s just,” she scrambled for a way to summarize it so Abbott didn’t have to worry that some dark deep secret was lurking in his emergency room, that it was such a non-issue and it harmed no one but it still played over and over in her mind, the first clue that, seen in isolation, truly meant nothing unless more clues followed. “He hasn’t seemed himself since he came back.”

Abbott nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

They sat in silence beside each other for another minute, then two.

“Forget I said anything,” she said, now regretting the chain reaction she may have just set in motion.

“You’re worried he won’t get his spark back,” he said. “I think we all are.”

“Yes,” Mel said.

“Look, I say this with as little flippancy as I can, but either it will or it won’t. It’s not that simple, I know that, but it’s up to him. I hope it does, I really do. But, either it will or it won’t.” He stood from where he sat beside Mel, stretching his arms over his head. “And, if you’re concerned for him, maybe tell him that. Anything, especially a friend, might help. We could all use more friends, couldn’t we?”

“Thanks, Dr. Abbott,” Mel said as he walked back inside. He tossed a thumbs-up over his shoulder and disappeared from her field of vision.

Either it will or it won’t rang through her head the rest of her shift. When morning came, she saw two futures stretch out before her. One in which she left it alone. In which she passed Langdon and said nothing, and he did or didn’t get his confidence back, he did or didn’t hesitate again when it mattered, he did or didn’t crumple or quit or go running and never come back to something he was so good at it dazzled her in minutes, in seconds.

In the other future, she tried. She said something, anything. She tried, measly and weak as she was, to tip the scales in the direction of his staying. She was no one to him, and it was likely to be a misstep in a series of social missteps Mel played on repeat through her head when she couldn’t, inevitably, sleep in the afternoon when school let out and the children outside at the playground down the block began screaming.

But, well, she was good at awkward and at earnestness, and she really, really, needed Langdon to be a doctor in order for her to have any chance at making it herself.  Even if he never said anything to her ever again. Even if he hated her for the rest of his life.

When she saw him, later, getting ready for rounds, she let her feet make her decision for her, walking hesitantly in his direction. As she approached, heart hammering in the indent between her sternum and her throat, he looked up, eyes on her eyes, for the first time in what felt like years.

“Hi,” she said as she neared him, suddenly too aware of her hands and her body and what to do with them now that he was looking at her.

“Hi,” he said, eyeing her with the distrust of a dog in a kennel at a shelter who had seen too many people peer into his cage and keep walking to think anything of this new pair of eyes, now looming before him.

“Ah, Dr. King and Dr. Langdon, exactly the two people I wanted to see,” Robby said, startling Mel as he appeared, suddenly, beside them both.

Mel frowned, peering around the room for Dr. Abbott, panicked now that he had escalated what she’d mentioned after all, that he’d gone and told Robby, and now it was all about to come out, here, in front of everyone. But he was nowhere to be seen.

“Listen, there’s an Emergency Medicine conference in Salt Lake City in a few weeks and I’d like you both to go.”

Chapter Text

Mel agreed to go. Usually, a conference like this would be something she’d be looking forward to. And she was, she really was, but she was also keenly aware of the way it forced Langdon and her into a social dynamic neither of them seemed to want. They’d be sharing a hotel room because the hospital didn’t want to pay for two, they’d be flying out together, they’d be, well, spending a lot of time together listening to lectures and, as Robby emphasized, networking.

Mel loved learning. She loved hearing about how other hospitals ran their ships. Loved being able to bring back something new, something better, for the people in her care. But she hated that, often, learning came with a social component that made her question her presence there, that made her anxious. She wished she could just absorb the information without being a person in a room with hundreds of other people too, with lunches to navigate and dinners to gracelessly bail out of.

She spent the next few days thinking through it, every step of the trip, imagining what situations she may end up in so she could rehearse what to say and how to handle them. The flight, the taxi to the hotel, each day of the conference and dinners afterward. She ran through it over and over, deciding to let Langdon set the tone for how they did things, deciding to keep to herself unless otherwise invited.

She had seen the wariness in Langdon’s eyes when Robby asked them to go to the conference together. The silence that fell was slightly too long before Mel jumped in, saying, “Sounds great, I’d love to go.”

She lost her nerve to talk to him about anything else and walked away quickly so she didn’t have to hear if Langdon protested. It was fine if he did, she told herself. It was perfectly fine, and he was allowed to feel however he did about her. Some cruelties she’d rather not witness was all.

A few days before the conference, one of Mel’s patients died. A patient she had examined but determined was not at risk for a catastrophic failure. A patient she, on checking every box because she always checked every box, would have been discharged soon with antibiotics and instructions to get some rest and lots of fluids.

Mel had been working on another patient when he crashed, coming in to see compressions already started. Coming in too late.

She had to tell the family. Each time she did this horrible act, breaking the news of the worst thing in the world to those who trusted her to save them, she imagined the same conversation with her mom on the other end. Imagined her mom, two little girls by her side, sitting in that quiet room, hearing the collapse of the world, hearing the black hole singing, hearing the most mundane thing in the world: that someone she loved was gone.

Mel fought back tears as she told the man’s sister. This was not Mel’s grief, and she did not get to cry.

When she was done, though, she took a break in the lounge, piling pillows and blankets and anything she could find on her feet and legs to weigh her down into the stiff couch, to ground her, to feel the pressure in a way that made sense. She wanted to be reminded she was real, she was real, she was real.

She flung an arm over her eyes, pressing hard, and went back over everything, time and time again, looking for signs. Dissecting her every move. Needing to understand while knowing that she never would. One more time, the impulse itched at her, one more time, and you’ll figure out what you did wrong. One more time and she’d prove to herself, once and for all, finding that mistake, finding that fatal error, that she was in the wrong profession, the wrong city, the wrong room, the wrong life. Everyone and everything had been telling it to her in quiet moments all along. The emptying of rooms. The cutting her off. The checking on her, asking if she was okay, over and over, with eyes that expressed how certain they were that she was not.

“You okay?” a voice came from the direction of the doorway.

Mel almost laughed, except she couldn’t because a man had died today under her watch and sometimes that knowledge, no matter how inevitable a conclusion it was, felt like something that could only happen in a world in which laughter did not exist. A world she’d made a home on, a world she’d been sentenced to live on forever.

“I’m fine,” Mel said, keeping her arm over her eyes, relishing the darkness, relishing the way patterns formed, relishing not having to face whoever it was that was witnessing her in that moment.

“Alright, well, I’ll leave you alone then.” It was Langdon, she realized. It was Langdon.

“Wait,” she said quickly, sitting up. “Sorry, I -, one of my patients died and I just needed a minute. Don’t go because of me, I’ll get out of your way. Sorry.”

She started detangling herself from the pile of fabric on her legs.

“No, stay,” Langdon said. He hovered near the doorway, glancing down at her attempts at freeing herself. She had tucked her legs in, tight, with each layer that now, for some reason, refused to untuck in any graceful way. “Keep doing whatever it is you’re doing. I was looking for you, actually.”

“The weight helps center me,” she said. “I couldn’t find anything heavier.”

“Oh,” he said. He approached her slowly, eyes darting around the room. She watched as he neared her, opting to sit not in a chair at the table, but on the floor, back against the wall across from the couch, perpendicular to her.

“I’m sorry about your patient,” he said.

“Me too,” she said, turning to face him. “Why were you looking for me? Do they need me back out there?”

“No,” he said, “they’ve got it covered.”

“Okay,” Mel said, her question still unanswered. She resisted the urge to ask it again because she knew that annoyed people, knew that most of the time they had heard her question the first time and chose not to answer it intentionally.

Without thinking, she blurted out, “Welcome back.”

He huffed a startled laugh, quirking his head at her. “Thank you.”

“Sorry I didn’t say it before, I thought, well, it doesn’t matter what I thought, but I am sorry, and I am glad you’re back, and I just wanted to say that while I had the chance.”

“That makes one of us,” he muttered.

“You’re not glad to be back?” she asked.

He was silent for a moment, fingers tracing the square tile pattern on the ground. “It’s just been really hard.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve noticed.”

“You seem different,” he said, surprising her. He didn’t say it like an insult, but he didn’t say it like it was a compliment either. She knew, in an instant, she would think about those three words for hours, for days, for weeks. She’d worry over it like a piece of meat that wouldn’t ever break down, grinding it between her teeth forever.

“So do you.”

He blinked at her. Then, he shook his head as if to jog his memory or to change his mind about something or just for something to do. “Look, I just wanted to make sure you were okay going to this conference together. With me. Given…everything.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Mel asked, frowning.

“I’m not exactly anyone’s favorite person to be around right now, plus I’d be willing to bet Robby will task you with keeping an eye on me.”

“Oh, well, I’m okay going with you as long as you’re okay going with me.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he parroted.

“I don’t think I’m anyone’s favorite person to be around, either. Not even right now, just, like, in general.” She hadn’t meant to say it so sadly, but that’s the way it came out because a man had died today when her back was turned.

He went quiet, looking at her. Mel faced the ceiling, the pressure of his eyes lighting up her skin, her body, her every move.

“If you’re sure,” he eventually said, “I’ll pick you up Sunday morning, and we can carpool to the airport?”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I can call a cab. I don’t want to make you go out of your way.”

“How about you bring the coffee and I bring the ride?”

“That hardly seems like a fair trade,” Mel protested.

“Just say yes, Mel. I’d like to pick you up. It would make me feel better to know you’re not getting murdered by some crazy cab driver.”

“I have pepper spray,” she said quietly.

“Mel,” he said, “please.”

“Fine, okay, you can pick me up Sunday.”

“Thank you,” he said, a small smile seeping from the corners of his eyes. He stood then, adjusting his scrubs. “Need some help getting out of your mummification?”

“Yes, please,” Mel said.

He crouched on the far end of the couch, examining her trappings before he started to untuck. The weight of his hands, even through the blankets, sent a wave of pure, static calm through her. She closed her eyes, just for a second, the feeling intoxicating, and opened them to find him looking at her.

“What did you mean earlier with the whole welcome back thing?”

“I meant welcome back? To work? Here?” Mel said.

“No, what made you hesitate to say it before now?”

“Oh, it was nothing.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“It does to me.”

“Why?”

“It just does.” He freed her legs, now, and pushed the blankets and pillows to the side, sitting back on his heels. Gone was the Langdon of the downcast eyes, of the inability to look at her. He and his tired eyes met hers, head on, waiting.

Just then, the lounge door opened, startling them both. “Langdon,” Robby said, “incoming. I need you.”

Langdon held her gaze for another second, two seconds, three, before he stood and rushed out the door. 

Mel trailed behind, finding the emergency room operating just the same as it had before her break, just the same as it always did with or without her. Day shift had arrived, and an emergency was incoming, and it was time for her to go home.

The next days passed in an anxious whirl for Mel as she prepared for the trip, spending most of the time worrying about Becca, worrying something would happen, worrying she would need Mel and she’d be states away. She had never left the same state as her sister. She’d never gone that far.

Becca didn’t seem all that concerned, though, telling Mel she’d be fine, telling Mel to go have fun, telling Mel not to worry so much. Becca, Mel readily admitted to any time she could, always had been the smarter of the King sisters.

Mel, for once, decided to listen to her. She decided to try to enjoy the trip, something so far outside her comfort zone she almost felt like a different person when Sunday came around. She’d lean into the New Mel during these next few days, she vowed. And she’d keep her phone volume on in case Becca did, in fact, need her.

One day, she found a note taped to her locker’s sleek front surface. It was sealed on every edge with clear tape. She opened it.

Mel,

I stashed something under the couch in the lounge for you. I hope it helps next time you need it.

PS Before you worry, I didn’t steal it.

Mel went to investigate, confused by the message and the messy scrawl. The PS was particularly worrisome. Generally, you didn’t have to clarify whether something was or wasn’t stolen unless that fact was questionable at best.

Under the couch, where no one would find it unless they knew it was there or had dropped a pen cap and bent down to retrieve it, lay a lead apron. A lead apron that was big and real and heavy. A lead apron she could use to weigh herself down. Next time you need it.

She had never felt so seen by such a small gesture before and she knew it had to have been Langdon who had done it. She wished, suddenly, fiercely, she had been better to him all along. That she had welcomed him the way she wanted to. That she had written him hundreds of letters just so he knew someone, anyone, was in his corner.

Her last shift before the trip, Robby cornered her near the lockers as she packed up to go home. He made small talk, rubbing at the back of his neck, obviously uncomfortable with something that he wouldn’t just come out and say. He didn’t, often, try to talk to her one-on-one outside of an occasional verbal pat on the back, so wrapped up as he was in whatever drama was happening on the day shift or with the new med students or the hospital administrators. She was not someone on whom he paid any attention at all. Mel didn’t know if that was a compliment or not.

“I wanted to touch base with you since you’ll be with Langdon the next couple of days.”

“Okay,” Mel said, looking up at him.

Robby seemed at a loss for words, glancing over her shoulder, opening his mouth, and then closing it. He sighed, dragging a hand down his face. “Just keep an eye on him, alright?”

A tinge of anger flared in her stomach. She hated that this was even deemed necessary by Robby. That while yes Langdon broke Robby’s trust in multiple ways, had violated patients’ trust and the law and his own moral foundation by doing what he did, of which she knew very little of the details beyond what was whispered about for the months during his absence, she also firmly believed he deserved to be given the chance, a pure and genuine chance, prove himself trustworthy again. He deserved the chance the second he agreed to go to rehab, the circumstances of which didn’t matter. He went. And, more difficult, he came back. And he came back to this. To everyone, even someone like Mel who held no authority over Langdon in any sense of the word, watching him carefully for any sign of trouble.

She took great issue with what he did. She put patient trust above almost everything else in her life. She understood the wariness of Robby and the hospital and the medical industry as a whole when faced with the actions Langdon took, she really did. 

But she knew pain, too, and she knew what people in pain did, and while she didn’t know why Langdon did what he did, she was positive it was because of something hurt in him. The pain that she recognized the day they met that allowed him to say exactly what she needed in the moment she needed it most.

“We’ll keep an eye on each other,” Mel said firmly.

Robby smiled at her reply, looking quite pleased for some reason. “That sounds like a great plan. Call me if you, either of you, run into any trouble?”

“I will,” Mel agreed.

As promised, Langdon arrived at her apartment complex before the sun came up Sunday morning. Mel waited on the curb, two dripping iced coffees in hand, fulfilling her end of the bargain.

Langdon pulled up, getting out of the car to load her luggage for her, a tired silence draped around them both. She had slept poorly and very little, her body used to working all night. She kept waking up with a start, thinking she’d fallen asleep on the job, thinking she’d missed her alarm, thinking someone had died.

Mel slid into the passenger seat, watching Langdon duck into the driver’s side out of the corner of her eye. She was suddenly so aware that they were here, in a car together, a place they’d never been before. That they were two physical beings instead of disparate parts of a medical machine.

Silence fell between them, Mel watching Langdon navigate a block, two blocks, away from her apartment without really looking, getting the sense of him. He seemed tense, his shoulders up, his face forward, only forward, as the GPS on his phone read out directions toward the freeway.

“Hi,” Mel said, eventually. 

Langdon huffed out a laugh, turning to look at her. “Hi.”

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Langdon said, smiling, “I like your delayed hellos.”

“Oh,” Mel said, flushing. “Sorry, I-”

“No, genuinely,” Langdon said. “I like it. And no more apologies, okay? No sorries allowed this whole trip.”

“What if I accidentally step on your foot?” Mel asked, feeling out the terms of the rule he lay before her.

“Toes of steel, baby,” he said. And all of a sudden, he relaxed. His arm draped over the steering wheel, one knee leaning against the door with an ease about him she hadn’t seen in a long time. Outside the watchful eye of Robby and Dana and whoever else was tasked to place him under a microscope, looking for the cancer they were sure was in him, looking only for the bad, Langdon lost the tight string of awareness running through him. He loosened.

She’d only ever seen him in his real-life clothes in passing, coming in or out of the hospital. His airport attire turned out to be jeans and a loose-fitting t-shirt. His dad bracelet still decorated his wrist.

For the first time since his return, she noticed the lack of a wedding ring on his ring finger. She wished she hadn’t seen that, the detail seemingly so personal and complicated and painful that she felt as if she read a diary page of his, felt as if she’d overheard a conversation she shouldn’t have. She tried to block that out of her head, tried not to think of the implications of it. A fading tan line on a ring finger, a grief spiraling out, collecting other tragedies.

“What if I wake you up in the middle of the night because I snore and didn’t know it? What if I spill my water on you during a lecture and ruin all of your notes? What if I say something so awkward it ruins everything forever?”

“One, I’m up all night anyway. Two, a little water never hurt anybody. And three,” he said, pulling up to a red light and looking over at her, “you don’t have to worry about that with me.”

“Saying things I feel like I have to apologize for is kind of my specialty.”

“Just because you feel like you have to apologize for something doesn’t mean you actually do.” He tapped his hand against the steering wheel, the light still red, still red, still red. “Seriously, just for this week, no apologies.”

“I’ll think about it,” Mel said. 

She fought to the urge to say sorry that she hadn’t agreed readily to his request, trying on her New Mel persona. New Mel wouldn’t say anything awkward and would therefore have nothing to apologize for. New Mel would know that awkward wasn’t actually the worst thing in the world to be. New Mel would say what she was thinking out loud without feeling embarrassed about it because she was a person worth speaking the same as any other and she did not dissect what other people said, she didn’t notice when they said something weird or if she did it didn’t change the way she thought about them because that’s not what people, any people worth a damn at least, did.

“I’m really fighting the urge to apologize for not agreeing to your no apologies rule.”

“Of course you are,” he said, laughing. She liked hearing his laugh. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard it before.

It was strange, the way this felt almost like cutting class. Like they had snuck out and were running away from homeroom together the day of a big exam, headed for the bleachers, headed for the gas station, headed anywhere else. Being with a coworker, being with Langdon, outside the confines of the hospital made her feel very outside her body. Made her feel so aware of her body. Made her feel like everything was a dream. It felt wrong, but it thrilled her a little bit, too.

Outside the hospital, she was not a doctor. Was not a tool. She was a person, same as any other, and so was he.

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and the rest of the poem didn’t matter, didn’t apply here, never would. But that was enough. She was in a car with a beautiful boy, and that was the end of the story, but it was a good story anyway. It was the best story she’d get.

“What if I get ahead of some sorries I’d like to say now? How about I propose an amendment to your proposition that apologies are allowed while in transit?”

“I thought you were already doing that with the whole water spilling thought experiment?”

“I mean real things I want to apologize for, not hypotheticals.”

“You don’t have anything to apologize to me for.”

“Is that a yes to my amendment?”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, smiling. “What counts as transit?”

“The usual suspects,” she said.

“Hmm.”

They got on the freeway, the roads slowly filling around them as the morning began in full force. Days like this, changes in her routine, reminded her of how wide the world was around her, how one day, out of nowhere, she could be leaving the state or falling in love or being the tool that medicine made her into to save someone’s life, holding the very newest person alive in the whole entire world in her arms, and there would still be thousands of other things she had never done before, thousands of things she wished she could do, thousands of things she’d missed out on because she’d said no, because she’d been afraid, because she’d decided as a child that loneliness was better than the way grief smeared the defined edges of her mother into nothing, into putty, into ruin. 

The way it made her mom mean, sometimes, in ways she’d never been mean before. The way it made her mom, sometimes and always understandably and forgivably, oh so forgivably, selfish. 

The way it did it to Mel, too, until she was an abstract painting of a person who was made only of loss.

“What’re you thinking about over there?” Langdon asked.

“Nothing,” Mel said. Even New Mel knew no one, not even Langdon, wanted to hear about all of that.

He glanced at her but didn’t press any further. For that, she was thankful. She wasn’t sure, under the pressure of his gaze, if she’d spill her guts after all. If she’d crack and it would all come rushing out, reaching for the fresh air of freedom, of confession, of escape.

The car fell silent between them, the roads whizzing by. An ambulance raced in the opposite direction, both of them watching it in the rearview mirror until it was gone.

At the airport, Mel’s awareness of them, the space between them, the way they moved, heightened in the chaos of checking in, of getting through security, of finding their gate. Twice, she moved to find his body already there, brushing against him, nudging him by accident. She said sorry on impulse, earning a short laugh.

The second time, Langdon, his eyes dancing, said, “Two strikes.”

“What happens if I get a third?” she asked.

“If this were baseball, you’d be out.”

“And since this is very much not baseball?”

“Well,” he said, gesturing for her to sit in an open set of seats by the window, further from the gate so fewer people were around. It was exactly where Mel would have chosen to sit, had she been alone. “I don’t know. What do you think happens?”

“Nothing,” Mel said, looking out the window. “I think nothing happens.”

“Well, I’ll be disappointed. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“I technically never agreed to your proposition,” Mel pointed out. “And you didn’t rule on my amendment, so neither of those counted against me.”

“Playing hardball I see,” he said, laughing. “If I agree to your amendment, you’ll agree to the deal?”

Mel frowned, thinking it over in her head. It seemed so very unfair that she’d have terms for their trip, and he wouldn’t. But, she remembered, he did have terms and had terms of his entire existence for the last few months, and he was sitting there beside her, smiling, and she couldn’t say no. “Alright,” she said.

“Alright,” he said, raising a fist at his side in celebration.

“I need snacks,” Mel said, standing. “Lots of snacks.”

They took turns leaving their coveted seats to gather snacks, caffeine, to pee and then to pee again just before boarding so she wouldn’t have to use the horrible bathroom on the plane. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d flown anywhere, the mechanics of the whole thing overwhelming her.

The longer they sat there, waiting for their boarding group to be called, the more anxious Mel got. Not about anything, but about everything. The bigness of it all. The strangeness. The feeling that, even in her excitement, she’d have rather stayed at home because it was safe and quiet and everything was the same there every time and there were no loud announcements overhead or people crowding her or luggage that could possibly be lost. And her sister was at home, her sister who needed her, her sister who she needed so much it was impossible to put words to, but she felt it every second of every day.

She was leaving her sister behind in an act of selfishness, why did Mel think she deserved to go to a conference anyway, and the thing called guilt in her scratched at the confines of the moment. It screamed. She wanted to leave. She wanted to turn around. She wanted to bail like she always bailed on everything, on everyone, on herself.

“You okay?” Langdon nudged her arm, and the panic mounting in her broke in that very second, in that very touch. She took a deep breath and nodded.

“I’m just worried about leaving my sister for so long. I’ve never gone this far without her.”

He didn’t tell her not to worry. He didn’t say Becca would be fine. He just nodded and said, “That’s hard.”

He paused a moment, his arm still pressing against her arm. “We can leave? No harm done.”

“No,” Mel said quickly. “No, I want to go. Plus, it’s either go and worry the whole time or stay and worry the whole time, so it’s not like the worrying stops if we leave.”

“Alright, well, if you change your mind, I’ll be your getaway driver.”

“Thanks,” she said. “And hey, while we’re on the topic of deals, I have a counter proposition for you.”

“Okay, shoot,” he said. He was still pressing his shoulder against hers over the chair’s arm. She did not pull away.

“No more asking if I’m okay,” she said. “You do that a lot.”

“I do?”

“Well, you did,” she said, thinking back to their first shift together, thinking of all of the times he said it, each time when she was, in some level, very much not okay.

“Why can’t I ask if you’re okay?”

“Sometimes, it makes me think you think I’m fragile,” she said, “and I don’t always like being reminded that I am by you.”

She stared straight ahead, watching the gate agent speak to a man at the counter. She could feel Langdon’s eyes on her.

“How about only in transit?” he asked, softly.

“What counts as transit?” she asked.

“The usual suspects,” he said.

She laughed. “Deal.”

No apologies or are you okays were said on the plane, the whole system the antithesis of speaking to someone that neither of them tried. Langdon made Mel take the window seat after much protest, only relenting because the line of people behind her didn’t allow for negotiations. She was grateful for it, though, cramming a sweatshirt against the wall of the plane and closing her eyes, asleep almost as soon as they took off.

She woke hours later, bleary-eyed, glasses askew, to find Langdon, arms crossed in the middle seat, eyes closed. As she shifted, though, his eyes opened. He smiled at her, gesturing to his tray table where two drinks sat, fizzing.

“They came by with the drink cart, and I didn’t know what you wanted, so you get a choice.”

Mel beamed at him. “Which one do you want?”

“Lucky for you, I’m an easy man to please. I like both.”

“Equally?”

“Equally.”

Mel made her choice, analyzing his face for signs that she’d picked wrong, that she’d chosen the one he’d really wanted, and he was going to resent her for it forever.

Langdon, seemingly aware of everything she was thinking, picked up the drink left on his tray and took a large gulp. She could practically hear it over the airplane engine as he sighed in exaggerated satisfaction.

She rolled her eyes at him, laughing. He was laughing too.

By the time they made it to the hotel, Mel was all out of sorts. She had no sense of what day or time it was, had the desperate urge to get out of her clothes, and she was starving. Mel let Langdon take the lead, checking them in, navigating to the room, suddenly, intensely aware that she was going to be sharing a hotel room with Langdon.

There were, thankfully, two beds.

Mel freshened up in the bathroom, washing her face over the pristine sink. She changed out of her airplane clothes into a nearly identical outfit, unsure as to what came next, feeling awkward about it all.

When she emerged, she found Langdon sprawled on the bed closest to the door, grateful he’d left the further one for her.

“Hey,” he said when she approached, getting her stuff situated how she liked it against the far wall. She brought an extra bag for her worn clothes, set her shoes out so they weren’t getting shoe germs all over her stuff anymore, got out her phone charger and book, and set them on the bedside table, organizing everything neatly.

“Hey,” she said when she realized she hadn’t responded. She’d been distracted, trying to make sure she had everything after all. She flipped through each outfit, organized by day she’d wear it from top to bottom, to make sure she hadn’t forgotten something vital like a pair of pants.

She wanted to call Becca, but with the time difference, she worried she’d interrupt her play rehearsal. They only had a few weeks until their first show, and Becca took that time very seriously.

“You…good?”

Mel sighed. “That’s the same thing as asking if I’m okay.”

“That was a joke!” he protested.

“It didn’t sound like one,” she muttered. Though she wasn’t the best at being able to tell. She realized, then, that she was being rude, and she sat back on her heels.

“Sorry,” she said, “I’m fine, I’m just tired and hungry.” Sometimes, the way tired felt in her was unbearable. Sometimes it made her feel so heavy and irritable and done, she didn’t think anyone in the world had ever felt that way, or everyone would just be so sad and so awful all the time they’d never leave their beds.

“First strike,” Langdon said with a comical tsk.

“You first strike too!” she said, whipping around to face him. “You asked if I was okay!”

“Damn, I was hoping I could leverage your strike into choosing dinner.”

“Please choose dinner,” Mel said, flopping back against the carpeted floor. “I can’t take making a single decision right now.”

“On it, boss,” he said, picking up his phone to look for something within walking distance. Mel had poked around the area a few days prior, getting a sense of what there was, but she didn’t have the energy to remember any of it.

“Pizza?” Langdon asked, finally.

“Pizza sounds great,” Mel said. The tiredness in her, the weight of it, lifted just at the thought of it. Sometimes, it really was the little things that saved her life.

Mel knew with great certainty that she wasn’t an interesting person. It was partly because of her job, work and studying and demanding hours making it impossible for her to have hobbies that made people lean in, like traveling or going to events or doing any of the other things people talked about when they talked to other people. Mel had her apartment, she had her sister, she had her job, and that was, frankly, it. She loved her life, really and truly loved it, but it wasn’t a life that made people take interest in her. She knew that. She had known that for a long time.

By the time she slid into the booth across from Langdon, the seats sticky and damp from being freshly wiped down, she was out of anything to say. Anything that would be interesting, at least. She probably had plenty to say, too much even, about things that would bore him to death like her favorite Pride and Prejudice adaptation or the walks she sometimes went on when she couldn’t sleep in the afternoon, taking the same route every time so she could pass a house she’d recently become obsessed with because of the gargoyles dotting either side of the porch, because of the purple trim on the windowpanes, because the yard, framed by hedges on all sides, overlooked a hill so that it appeared from where she stood like the entire world ended there, in that very spot.

Mel had never gone past the gate even though the house seemed uninhabited, a for-sale sign in the front yard. She couldn’t bring herself to take that step, peering through the slatted gate from afar, imagining a life there, imagining the world dropping off and leaving her alone, imagining too much.

They peered over their menus in silence. Mel sipped at her water, tapping her phone screen to see if Becca had texted her, in a strange, repeated rhythm she could feel she was doing, but she couldn’t stop. She looked up to find Langdon watching her.

“It’s late back home,” he said softly.

“Yeah,” Mel said, shrugging.

They ordered, silence falling again when the waitress walked away. It rubbed at Mel, the need to say something, the need to be good at conversation, the need to entertain him because he had been forced into spending the next few days with her.

“Just putting it out there that you don’t have to spend the whole conference with me,” Mel said, “I’m sure there will be dinners or happy hours or something you’ll want to go to, which isn’t really my thing, so don’t feel obligated to do what I’m doing. I know it’s bad enough that you had to travel all day with me. I’m okay doing my own thing.”

“I’m looking forward to spending the next few days with you,” he said, meeting her eye. “I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, Mel,” Langdon said. “I have.”

She eyed him warily, looking for signs that he was lying. That he was making fun of her, somehow. That this was entertainment for him at her expense rather than with her as a willing participant. But she saw none of that in his face, in his demeanor, in his hands.

“Why?” she asked.

He tilted his head, an incredulous look on his face. “Because we’re friends and I’d like to get to know you better since we haven’t had a chance to spend much time together since I got back.”

Mel blinked at him. “You’d consider us friends?”

“I mean, I would. Work friends, at least. Do you not think we’re friends?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure,” Mel said. “We did only work the one shift together, and then when you came back…” She fiddled with the straw in her water. “I didn’t know what to think.”

“I like to think a shift like that bonds us for life,” he said, leaning back in the booth, draping an arm over the top of it with an ease about him that she envied.

“I would agree with that,” Mel said.

“You know I asked Cassie how you were settling in while I was in rehab.”

Mel nodded. “She mentioned it.”

“And that didn’t clue you in that we’re friends?” he asked, laughing.

“I thought you were just being polite.”

“I’m not really known for my manners,” Langdon said. “But if you need me to say it, then yes, I do consider us friends, and yes, I would like to hang out with you at this conference, and if something comes up that one of us wants to go to, then we’ll just talk to each other about it. Okay?”

“I always need people to say it out loud,” Mel said, smiling to soften the discomfort of saying that out loud, of asking that of the man sitting across from her, of asking it of anyone. “I’m not good at picking up on unsaid things.”

“Noted,” he said, grinning at her. “Next time you’re unsure about something, you let me know.”

Mel nodded. She mulled over whether she thought he meant it. In the end, she decided he did.

Back at the hotel, they danced around each other as they got ready for bed. It was strange, sleeping in the same room as someone again. After they each crawled under their separate set of covers in their separate bed, the lights out, Mel lay there staring at the ceiling.

Usually, she’d put a video on or listen to a podcast, but she didn’t want the light of her phone to bother Langdon. She worried that every move would prevent him from falling asleep, would wake him up, would disrupt him.

She stayed as still as possible, listening for his breathing to even out. But no telltale sign that he was asleep came. After what felt like ages, but was probably only a few minutes, she peeked over to find him, too, staring straight up at the popcorn ceiling.

She turned away, her back to him, and willed herself to sleep. Eventually, it came, but it was fitful, Mel jerking awake each time he moved in the slightest, so used to sleeping in a room alone.

In the morning, Mel dressed in her business casual attire early, showering in a mad rush so she could get out of Langdon’s way. She put a little bit of makeup on, since she wasn’t going to be running around an ER all day, and left her hair down to dry.

Langdon emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a navy-blue collared shirt and khakis, and stopped in his tracks when he saw her.

“Oh, sorry, am I in your way?” she asked. She looked around for what he might need, but nothing on her side of the bed appeared to be his. She tucked her hair behind her ears, looking expectantly at him for an answer.

“No, no,” he said, seemingly catching himself. He knelt to grab something from his duffel bag. “Though you did just earn yourself a second strike.”

Mel huffed.

She took the few extra minutes they had to step out into the hallway to video call Becca while Langdon finished getting ready.

Becca told her about her rehearsals and what she had planned for the day ahead. Mel did the same, talking about some of the courses she was excited to see. Behind her, the door opened, Langdon poking his head out.

“Ready to go? Oh, sorry to interrupt.”

Mel nodded. “One second.”

He went back inside.

“You’re with a boy?” Becca asked, beaming.

“That’s my coworker,” Mel said. “Langdon. I’ve talked about him before, haven’t I?”

“He’s cute.”

Mel laughed, rolling her eyes. She was insatiable when it came to boys. “I have to go, but text me, okay?”

“Say he’s cute, Mel! I know you think so.”

Mel knew this was a losing battle, so she didn’t fight it. “He is rather…nice to look at.”

“Ohhhhh,” Becca said, laughing.

They said their goodbyes. 

She went back inside, cheeks pink, worried Langdon had overheard their conversation. But if he had, he didn’t show any sign of it.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” she said.

On their walk to the convention center, they debated which presentation to attend first. There were at least ten to choose from every hour of the day, with a break in the middle for lunch.

“My votes on the cardiogenic shock one,” Langdon said. “What are you thinking?”

“Maybe this wellness initiative research forum,” Mel said. “But I’d do either.”

“Why don’t we alternate picking?” Langdon said.

“I really don’t mind separating,” Mel said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss out on something you’re really interested in.”

“I’m interested in all of it,” he said, and she noticed for the first time signs of giddiness in him like she’d seen when they did the STEMI together. A jitter of his fingertips against his thigh, a pep in his step.

“You sure to make a lot of deals with me,” Mel said.

“What can I say, I’m a reasonable guy.”

“Fine, we alternate,” Mel said, nodding. “Who picks first?”

“You, duh,” he said.

“What, why?”

He shrugged. “Because I want you to and because I like your hair like that and because I know you really want to go to that research forum.”

She touched her hair, suddenly self-conscious, suddenly realizing he’d never seen it down before because she always, always wore it in a braid to work. “Thank you.”

They went to the research forum and then, true to his word, they alternated picking sessions the rest of the day. At lunch, they walked to a nearby cafe for coffee and a sandwich before wandering around the exhibit hall until the next presentations.

Mel was thrilled to be learning like this again. Thrilled by the presentations, by the knowledge in the room, by the way they opened up her vision of her job and her role and what medicine could do. She couldn’t stop herself from rehashing what they’d learned already, talking about how they could use some of that in the Pitt, how she would use some of it in the way she approached her patients.

And Langdon listened and told her his own thoughts, and he had just as much to say as she did, and it was thrilling, all of it, being here, learning like this, walking beside him. It was thrilling.

“How fun is this?” she said to Langdon.

Langdon laughed, his eyes crinkling at the edges. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. It’s nice to see you excited again.”

“It’s nice to feel excited about something again,” Mel said.

In the afternoon, they sat in on presentations on patient flow, on triaging, on pain. A group whom they’d been running into on and off all day called out a casual invitation to a happy hour as they meandered out of the convention center for the day.

Mel kept her head down, not wanting to influence Langdon’s reply. But he brushed them off genially, and they started their short walk to their hotel.

“You really can go, I don’t mind,” Mel said.

“Nah,” Langdon said, “I hate those kinds of things. Plus, being at a bar isn’t the easiest to navigate right now with the whole sobriety thing.”

Mel hadn’t considered that. Hadn’t considered much of what his actual recovery entailed. She trusted that those who needed to know knew, and she tried to be a neutral place for Langdon, a blank slate where he could choose what he wanted her to know and not know.

“How has it been?” Mel asked, carefully, hoping she wasn’t overstepping.

Langdon shrugged, waving her question off with a flippant air that told her that it wasn’t easy. Not that she thought it would be, of course.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this means nothing to you or to anyone, but I, for one, think you’re doing great.”

“Yeah?” he asked, a boyish openness to his face that surprised her, given the brush off he’d given her question not a moment before.

“Yes,” Mel said. “I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” he said. “But I do now have a bone to pick with you.”

“What’s that?” Mel asked, a pit forming in her stomach, thinking she’d said something wrong, thinking she’d offended him somehow, thinking she’d gone and ruined everything like she thought she would all along.

“I think you just said sorry again, making that your third strike.”

“I wasn’t apologizing for something I did, though,” Mel argued. “Plus! We’re walking! Which is a form of transit!”

“Walking is not one of the ‘usual suspects’.”

“Well, what do you consider the usual suspects?”

“Plans, trains, and automobiles. You know, like the movie?”

“But we’re moving from one place to another. That’s the literal definition of transit!”

Langdon laughed a little, looking over at her as they entered the hotel doors.

“You’re not going to win this argument,” Mel said, matter-of-factly, steering them toward the elevators. “I happen to know a lot about what does and does not count as a mode of transportation.”

Becca had gone through a real transportation kick a while back, and Mel had been along for the ride, just as interested in the airport tour, the train museum, and the dozens of YouTube videos they’d hunted down to watch together.

Langdon held up his hands. “I yield.”

“Good man,” Mel said, quite smug with herself.

Back in the room, they changed into more casual clothes and debated where to grab food. Mel’s high from the day was softening now that she was here, in the quiet of the hotel room, just the two of them again.

They ended up going to a diner nearby, sitting at the counter side by side. It was strange the way she felt mostly comfortable with him. The way it felt almost natural for her to be sitting beside him.

That while, yes, she’d been worried about all the time they’d spend together and what they’d talk about for days leading up to this, now that she was in it, it was fine. Better than fine. She was enjoying herself and his company and it wasn’t as strained as she imagined it would be with the way things had been since he got back.

She watched his hands move as he talked. Watched the curve of his neck as he peered at the menu. Watched the easy smile he unfurled on the waitress leaning on the other side of the counter toward him, too close and for too long to be anything except flirting. Mel could see the way he was a magnet for that, could see that he paid it no mind, that it was a given for him for someone, anyone, to take interest.

They ate quickly, talking a little but mostly just eating. Mel was tired, her lack of sleep the night before catching up to her, and she wanted to not be a person in the world anymore. She wanted to be nothing. Erased. Pressed flat.

When they got back, she put her pajamas on, a pair of running shorts and an oversized t-shirt, and crawled immediately into bed. Langdon stepped out into the hallway to call his kids, Mel taking the alone time to rearrange her bedding how she wanted it, how she had wanted it the night before but was too self-conscious to do it under Langdon’s watchful gaze.

She arranged the pillows into a horseshoe shape, folding the comforter over on itself so it was heavier on her feet, a likely all but futile gesture, but one that made her feel better about trying to get to sleep.

By the time Langdon came back in, Mel was tucked into the middle of her pillow fortress, eyes closed, willing sleep to come. She didn’t feel like talking, so she didn’t open her eyes.

She heard his soft steps. Heard him lock the door, shushing the metallic sound of it under his breath. Heard the way he tried very hard to soften the sound of the refrigerator door as he grabbed a bottle of water from the mini one under the counter across the room. Heard the way he so very quietly tiptoed to his own bed and climbed under the covers. She fell asleep, a small smile on her face at his kindness.

The next day passed much like the first, a whirl of presentations and casual chatter and small talk with the folks they found themselves sitting beside. 

By Wednesday, the last day of the conference before they traveled back, Mel’s social battery was waning, and she was having a harder and harder time hiding it. She wasn’t used to being with people all day long. She was used to going back to her quiet apartment, used to having her alone time when she took her breaks, was used to spending most of her days tucked securely inside herself with her thoughts and her memories to keep her company.

That afternoon, while in a talk on household hazards, Langdon ducked his head down to check his phone. He tapped at it, set it down, picked it up again. His posture changed, his arms folding. When he picked it up again, he sighed, muttering under his breath.

“I’ll be right back,” he whispered, and Mel watched as he slunk from the room.

When five minutes, then ten passed and he still didn’t come back, Mel began to worry. She assumed it was a call from his kids or his wife or something, but it was taking a while now, and she wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t want to interrupt or interfere or insert herself, by any means, in his life and whatever was happening in it.

But when the talk ended twenty minutes later and he still hadn’t come back, Mel felt even more out of sorts and unsure. She grabbed both of their things and filed out with the rest of the audience, concern itching at her.

When she exited the conference room, she didn’t have a clue where to go look for him. She assumed, whatever the issue was, he’d want some privacy. She walked the entire floor, looking for him, when she saw a sign for a staircase to the roof.

Upstairs, she pushed through the glass doors, spotting Langdon immediately, sitting with his back against the rooftop’s railing, legs crossed, talking quietly into his phone.

Mel hovered by the doors, not wanting to overhear a conversation he didn’t want her to, and waited for him to notice her.

Eventually, he looked up, mouthing a sorry and dragging a hand down his face. She sat at a table near the door, texting Becca and doing her best not to listen to what Langdon was saying. His voice was tight and sharp with frustration.

“Hey,” he said, walking up to her after a few minutes. “I have to go take care of something. Are you going to be okay on your own for a bit?”

“Sure, yeah, but what’s going on? Is everything okay?”

“Yes, yeah, I just -” he sighed. “I just have to do something, and I’ll be back.”

“Okay,” Mel said, still confused. “Do you want me to go with you?”

“No,” he said, quick and sharp. He seemed to realize how it came across at the same time she did. “But thank you for offering.”

Then he was pushing back into the convention center, disappearing into the crowd. Mel felt stuck for a minute, worried and confused and a little frustrated that he didn’t tell her what was going on. But she understood she was not privy to his life and the things happening in it. She was only here with him by happenstance, not by choice, and their relationship was still, as he said, work friends, which did not mean anything as much as it seemed like it might these last few days.

She had two choices, now. She could go back to the conference alone, sit in on the presentations alone, for however long it would be until Langdon came back or she could flee, make a break for the hotel, sit in the safety of four walls with no one inside them. Old Mel might have taken that second option. Old Mel might have relished the way Langdon’s disappearance gave her the perfect excuse to hide away, allowed her to flee from a situation that was a little bit scary and a little bit intimidating.

But New Mel was on this trip, and New Mel would go to the presentations alone because alone was not an embarrassing thing to be. There were hundreds of people at this conference alone. What was one more? No one would even notice her, she knew. No one would even give her a second glance.

She went to a presentation on difficult airways, on immunocompromised patients, on resuscitation. Half of her attention was elsewhere, with Langdon wherever he was, eyes on her phone or the doors or the hallways for any glimpse of his return.

But there was no sign of him, no message or all, when the conference ended. One of the girls Mel was sitting with during the last talk, a genuinely nice woman named Bea, asked Mel if she wanted to grab a drink at a bar nearby. And Mel feeling worried and Mel feeling a little angry and Mel feeling tired of being the one always left out of the loop, said yes for once.

Mel had a drink and chatted with Bea, and it was a perfectly pleasant time. It would have been even more perfectly pleasant if she hadn’t been checking her phone every second for a text from Langdon that he was ok, but there was nothing she could do about that.

A text never came. She briefly considered calling Robby but felt like that was a drastic option reserved only for emergencies and, well, she didn’t know what this was.

Langdon was an adult. He said he had to take care of something, and so she’d let him.

She stayed for a second drink, the alcohol making her tongue a little bit tied, making her a little bit looser than she usually kept herself. She didn’t often go for a second one, but the warm buzz rewarded her for saying yes to this, too.

Bea was staying at the same hotel so they walked back together, Mel feeling almost giddy with the alcohol and this new, brief friendship she’d formed, and the way she could do this, she could do anything, on her own.

They parted ways in the elevator, exchanging numbers so they could keep in touch the way people did at conferences like these, and Mel scanned into the room to find Langdon sitting in the desk chair by the window, head down. He whipped up at the sound of the door.

“There you are,” he said. “I was worried when I got back, and you weren’t here.”

“I made a friend,” Mel said, grinning. “We grabbed some drinks after the conference ended since I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I wish you would have told me so I wasn’t worrying that something happened to you.”

“It’s not like you told me where you were or when you were coming back,” Mel said, frowning. She had thought she understood their dynamic, had thought she was taking her cues for how to behave from him. But it seemed as if she had gone wrong, somehow, by doing that.

“That’s not fair, I had something to do. Something I had to do.”

“And that’s fine,” Mel said. She could feel her brain working slightly slower, could feel the way her words were coming out less precise than they usually did. “I hope you got it figured out.”

“I did,” Langdon said, flatly.

“I’m glad,” she said. She kicked off her shoes, flopping onto her bed.

Langdon stood, going over to his duffel bag and rustling around, his movements sharp. Mel’s giddiness soured fast, the entirety of the conference, of the socializing, of the constant analysis and reanalysis of the enigma that was Langdon, crashing down on her. She was tired of feeling like, just as she found stable ground, it collapsed again, sending her scrambling.

“Are you mad at me?” Mel asked, half incredulous and half concerned.

“No,” Langdon said with his back turned.

“Okay,” Mel said.

He said nothing, still rooting around in his bag, which was not large enough to need rooting around for that long to find whatever it was he was looking for.

“This is one of those times that you need to spell out what the issue is,” Mel said. “I don’t understand.”

He sat back on his heels, sighing. Silence fell for a minute, then two, before he stood and came around the end of his bed to face her. He slid down against the edge of his mattress, landing on the floor, looking up at her.

“I’m sorry, it’s just it’s been a long day and I came back to the room assuming you’d be here, and when you weren’t, I was worried something terrible had happened to you out there because I had left you alone and that it was my fault.”

“And that made you angry?” Mel said.

“No, that made me,” he paused, “feel like a real asshole.”

Mel understood the way fear, guilt, insecurity could turn into the protective shield of anger so quickly, especially for someone like Langdon who had to use his shields often. Shields that he had been strengthening for a long time, for years now, that were ingrained into his system, fused to his personhood, the same way her grief was. They were so very heavy, she was sure, but impossible to set down, too.

Sometimes a cage wasn’t the worst thing in the world because it was familiar, and it was safe, and the enemies inside were recognizable. This, now, was new territory for her, and she felt like she was fumbling through it, felt like there was a new obstacle at every turn, felt like she wanted to go back into her cage.

“I was worried about you, too, you know,” Mel said.

He blinked as if that hadn’t been something he’d considered. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve fucked this all up.”

“No, you didn’t,” Mel said. “I was just confused. I thought I understood how things worked between us, but I was wrong.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked very quietly.

“Sometimes I don’t understand people’s reactions to things. It confused me.”

“No, about how things worked between us.”

“I just meant I’ve been taking my cues from you on what to do, how to be with us, so when you didn’t text or call to let me know where you were, I assumed that’s how you wanted it to be and I followed suit.” 

The alcohol still buzzing in her stomach made her want to say more. So, she did. “That’s why when you came back, not now but when you came back to the Pitt, I didn’t say hi right away even though I wanted to because I was embarrassed about how the PittFest shooting shift went and then you didn’t say anything to me so I thought you didn’t want to talk to me, thought we weren’t friends like I thought we were, and I didn’t want to add to what was already a really stressful situation for you so I left you alone like it seemed like you wanted me to do.”

“Wait, wait,” Langdon shook his head. “So many questions. Why were you embarrassed about that shift? You killed it that day.”

She was sorry she had brought it up. She wasn’t about to explain the way she latched onto what he’d said, latched onto him as a figure of her strength, him as a pillar of her character, him as proof one way or the other that she belonged in medicine after all. Wasn’t about to tell him the way she turned that day over and over in her head until she saw that it hadn’t been intended that way, that she had built her pillar out of a grain of sand.

She shook her head. “That’s not important.”

“If it made you think I didn’t want to talk to you, then it is.”

“You made me think you didn’t want to talk to me,” she said.

“I was trying to let people decide how to treat me,” Langdon said, a sharp defensiveness lurking in his tone. “I couldn’t come in the same way I left. So many people were so pissed at me, I couldn’t tell who wasn’t.”

“I wasn’t mad at you.”

“I didn’t know that for sure, and I didn’t want to force myself onto anyone who didn’t want to deal with me. Some people really fought to keep me out for good, and I understand that, I really do, so I was trying to, you know, lay low.”

The wariness she saw in him when he first returned, the way he held to the edges of every group so as not to draw attention looked different, now. She just hadn’t been used to that, her only comparison for his behavior the grandiose bravado of a Langdon in his prime, in his element, seemingly untouchable. What she now recognized as insecurity, as self-preservation, as shame even, she had seen as a slight against her, as a judgment on the basis of their friendship, as proof she had read it all wrong.

“See, this is why I need people to say what they’re feeling out loud.”

“I can see how that might have been helpful in this situation,” he said.

“So, you weren’t just saying all of that stuff that you said when we worked the PittFest shooting day to be nice or because you felt bad for me?”

“What?” No.” Langdon said. “That’s what you thought? I don’t know if you know this, Mel, but I’m really not known for being nice.”

“I think you’re nice,” Mel said.

“Well, you’re easy to be nice to,” he said.

Mel stared at the ceiling, processing the day, processing what he said, reframing everything all over again. That was the issue with the way she thought and thought and thought about things sometimes. She changed the structural integrity of everything by going back to it over and over again, banging on the walls of it until it collapsed, and then pointing at the rubble as if to say, see, it was weak all along. But if she had just left it alone, if she had just let it be what it was, it would still be standing, wouldn’t it?

She rested her hands on her stomach, her hair falling over the edge of the bed toward where Langdon still sat looking up at her. She turned her head to face him. “What did you mean when you said I seemed different?”

“What did you mean when you said I did too?”

“I asked first,” Mel said.

“That’s true,” he said.

“Usually, a conversation follows a pattern where one person asks a question and the other person answers it.”

“Usually,” he nodded, laughing a little.

“You’re not a very usual person sometimes,” Mel said. She flushed, realizing it might have come out wrong. Her brain felt sluggish in her head, her stomach growling, the day a whirlwind that finally died, leaving her feeling windburned.

He laughed. Thankfully, wonderfully, he laughed. “Thank you, I think.”

She laughed too.

Then they were just looking at each other, the unanswered questions hanging in the air. Out of nowhere, Langdon reached out and touched the ends of Mel’s hair that hung over the edge of the bed, just for a second, before he let his hand fall to the carpet again. Like an impulse, like the quick jerk reaction of a boy who saw a shiny thing in a store aisle and couldn’t help but feel it. He met her eyes, expression unreadable.

She understood, in this moment, why Maggie Nelson spent a whole book writing about the color blue. The color of the sky, the ocean, of Langdon’s eyes. That this blue exists / makes my life a remarkable one / just to have seen it.

She thought she understood how it worked between them until he did something like that, and then she was back to not understanding. He was married, as far as she knew. He was ER Ken. He was Langdon. It didn’t calculate in her mind the way sometimes the numbers on the clock just didn’t add up, no matter how many ways she tried to make them work.

She sat up, now aware of how her shirt rode up, exposing a glimpse of the skin of her hips, of how she was slightly tipsy and her hair was down, and she was in a hotel room with a man with blue eyes and a quick smile who said it was easy to be nice to her.

“Not to ruin this moment,” Mel said, “but I’m starving.”

Langdon looked up at her, his hand still resting against the carpet where he’d let it fall. “Well, then, let’s get you something to eat.”

They ordered room service, a thought that hadn’t occurred to Mel at any point because it wasn’t something she did, not once in her life. The mechanics of it, so casual and so easy, made her giddy, reminding her that there were so many wonderful things in the world that she hadn’t encountered yet.

Langdon put something on TV, some action movie Mel hadn’t seen before, and they ate, cross-legged on their respective beds, eyes glued to the screen. During a commercial, Langdon suddenly said, “It was a drug test.”

“What?” Mel asked, mouth full of the burger she’d ordered. It was a fine burger, a good burger even, made better by the fact that it was brought up here to her by a man who revealed it to her from beneath a silver cover like a magic trick.

“That’s where I went, earlier. I have an app as part of my program that tells me when I need to do a drug test. It’s random, and today of all days, I was the lucky chosen one, so I had to call my coordinator and find somewhere to get it done here before the deadline.”

“Oh,” Mel said. “That sounds stressful.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I was just caught up in my own stuff, and I thought it would be better if you didn’t get pulled into it too.”

“You don’t owe me an explanation,” Mel said. “I know some things are personal.”

“I want to explain,” Langdon said. “I want you to know. I had really hoped this trip could be a break from all of that, but of course not, of course that was stupid to think, and I was angry because I felt like I ruined the whole thing for both of us.”

“You didn’t ruin it for me,” Mel said. “I had a great time.”

“Yeah?”

Mel nodded. “Yeah. Even tonight turned out to be fun.”

“I forget, sometimes, that other people, that you, wouldn’t do anything but try to help me.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Mel said. “And just for the record, I think you’ve said sorry like one million times in this conversation so, by baseball rules, I assume you’ve lost or struck out or whatever happens when there are three strikes.”

“The apologies thing was only for you,” he protested.

“That’s why I said just for the record,” Mel retorted, taking another bite of her magic burger.

On screen, some building blew up, bursting into orange flames.

Mel woke up later than she planned, spending the rest of the morning packing and repacking her suitcase in a low-level frenzy to make sure she didn’t leave anything behind. Sleep weighed on her, stuck with her, made her eyes feel heavy in a way that soured her mood. She was out of any social battery at all, unable to muster her baseline chipperness to cover it up like she normally would.

It turned out traveling back home was far less exciting than traveling in the opposite direction. Now, in the aftermath of the conference and of spending so much time with Langdon, with anyone, she was at her limit. The flight felt hundreds of hours long, Mel unable to focus on any movie long enough to pass any time at all, unable to get comfortable enough to sleep, unable to settle her legs.

By the time they made it to Langdon’s car, Mel was so desperate to be home that tears gathered in her eyes.

As they began the final leg, the final half an hour, Langdon navigating out of the parking structure, he turned to look at her. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Mel said. She had her arms crossed, leaning against her headrest, peering forward out the windshield.

“You sure?” Langdon asked.

“I thought you weren’t going to ask me that,” Mel said. Sometimes, there was nothing worse for her bad mood than someone asking her about it.

“We are in transit, aren’t we?” he said.

“We are,” Mel confirmed.

She realized how she was coming across and who she was with, and that it wasn’t appropriate to be grouchy with her coworker like this, and it also wasn’t kind.

“I’m just not used to socializing that much,” Mel said. “I live alone, and I spend a lot of my days alone, and so now, after all of that, I’ve got no social energy left.”

“One silent car ride coming up,” Langdon said, saluting her with a cheeky grin.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Hey,” he scolded.

“Transit.” She held her hands up.

“Transit,” he nodded.

He dropped her off at the curb, offering to bring her stuff upstairs, but Mel refused, so desperate for alone time that she couldn’t take another minute of someone, anyone, being with her. After unlocking the lobby door, she sighed, and the weight somehow lifted a little already as it shut soundly behind her. Langdon’s car idled outside for another minute before she heard it pull away.

She realized she hadn’t even said goodbye.

Upstairs, she texted him.

Bye!

Twenty minutes later, she got a return text.

Delayed goodbyes are even better.

She pictured him laughing. She pictured his eyes, crinkling at the corners. She pictured him too long. She read and reread the text, warmed by what she’d consider an inside joke now born between the two of them. It hit her then that she was, just a little bit, screwed.