Chapter Text
Jack had the scanner on before the door shut all the way.
Static tore through the speakers and filled the apartment before the silence could.
He stood there with his keys still hooked around his finger, breathing through the noise like it was something he could lean against.
Better than silence. Always better.
He’d told people he liked it this way. A smaller place with fewer things. He’d said it with a shrug, as if it wasn’t something he needed to survive the hours between shifts.
The scanner crackled with dispatch codes. Fender bender on the west side. Possible OD. Nothing he needed to respond to. Nothing he could fix. But it was movement. Proof that the world was still turning without asking him if he was ready.
It made it easier to pretend that was enough.
The apartment looked exactly the same as when he’d left it. Clean and sparse.
The house he and Cara had shared had never felt like this.
That place had been noisy in a way you didn’t notice until it stopped. Music would play as she moved through the kitchen, her voice drifting down the hallway.
After she died, it changed.
The floorboards still creaked, but wrong, like they were surprised to hear themselves. It was as if the house didn’t know what it was without her.
He lasted six months before he sold it with the furniture still inside. He told himself it was practical. One person didn’t need that much space. Didn’t need rooms that stayed closed.
The apartment was supposed to fix that.
It didn’t.
A coffee mug sat in the sink. A thin brown ring clung to the bottom.
Jack stopped short when he saw it.
Not because of the mess. Because of the voice that surfaced with it.
“You’re going to regret letting that sit,” she would’ve teased, reaching for the sponge.
He turned away before the thought could finish forming. He couldn’t let himself imagine her standing there barefoot on the tile, stealing a sip from his cup even though she hated her coffee that strong.
Instead, he nudged the volume on the scanner up a notch.
He should’ve gone back to sleep after therapy.
That was what his therapist kept telling him. Routine, rest, and regulation. The three R’s.
Jack nodded when he said it. He always nodded. He was good at listening, at repeating the words back.
They’d talked about Cara. About the letters he still wrote. About the rooftop and how his thoughts kept circling it no matter how hard he tried to redirect them elsewhere.
He didn’t tell his therapist how often he thought about not waking up.
Didn’t tell him how some nights the only thing that stopped him was knowing that someone would eventually find him. The thought of leaving that kind of mess behind made his chest seize.
He’d slept for two hours. Maybe less.
He woke up gasping, his heart hammering like he’d just hit the ground wrong. For a moment he thought he was back there again.
Sleep had never stuck with him.
The Army burned that out early. He had spent too many nights half-awake, counting breaths and waiting for the sound that meant everything had gone sideways. His body learned fast to always stay alert.
Cara had been the only exception.
Her hand in his curls when his breathing went shallow. Her voice in the dark, reminding him where he was and who he was, holding him without asking him to explain the wreckage in his head.
He’d tried to replace it. Music. TV on low. White noise apps his therapist swore by.
None of it worked.
Because it wasn’t sound he missed.
It was her.
Jack leaned back against the counter, his hands restless, like they were waiting for something to fix.
Seven o’clock felt impossibly far away.
His eyes caught on his kitchen table. It was covered in scraps of paper.
Jack pushed off the counter and sat before he could change his mind.
He reached for a blank sheet without thinking. Leaving it trapped in his head felt corrosive.
When the stack ran out, he didn’t stop. He wrote on the backs of printed articles and on receipts pulled from his pockets. Napkins. Envelopes. Anything flat enough to take ink. He didn’t care if it was legible. Didn’t care if it lasted.
It had started overseas.
Letters to Cara, written hunched over in the dark, flashlight clenched between his teeth, words rushed and crooked because someone was always about to call for movement. Sometimes he mailed them. Most of the time they stayed folded in his pack, stained with sweat and blood.
After she died, the letters changed.
They weren’t updates anymore. Just sentences that didn’t know where they were going.
Some nights his handwriting went stiff and clinical, as if keeping it neat might keep the pain contained.
Patient condition worsening. Prognosis poor. Intervention unsuccessful.
Other nights they read like last words.
Even now, years later, smelling of antiseptic instead of diesel, the habit stayed.
Jack uncapped his pen.
His chest clenched the way it always did at the start.
I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.
I think about the roof.
It’s not just an idea anymore. My feet know where to stand. I know how high it is. I know where the camera doesn’t reach.
Sometimes it feels less like wanting to die and more like wanting everything to stop asking things of me.
He knew what his therapist would say. Cross it out. Challenge it. Write a counterthought.
I am safe. I am choosing to stay.
Jack didn’t.
He dragged a hand down his face and leaned back in his chair until it creaked under his weight. He told himself he only thought about the roof after bad shifts.
Kids. Veterans with dog tags still warm against their throats. Patients who died alone because someone else needed him more.
Those were the nights the ghosts crowded closer.
Cara. The men he couldn’t get out. The names he carried even when he pretended not to.
And lately, Robby.
He remembered when Robby showed up after the funeral. Jack was on the bathroom floor, dry heaving over the toilet. His body couldn’t decide whether it wanted to empty itself or stop breathing altogether. Robby hadn’t said anything. He sat down beside him, back against the tub, and stayed.
They’d been doing that ever since, in different ways. A beer after a long shift. A text sent too late at night that didn’t say anything important but said I’m here.
They never called it support.
They didn’t have to.
After Pittfest, Jack started watching Robby.
That was the night Jack found him on the roof.
Jack spoke with a calm he didn’t feel, staring at Robby’s eyes and realizing he had carried that same expression himself.
The motorcycle came up a week later. Three months. No plan beyond north.
It had been weeks now since Robby left. Long enough that Jack’s phone had started to feel heavier in his pocket. Long enough that every unknown number made his stomach tighten.
Robby texted every few days. He asked about the department. About Jack.
Jack answered every time.
And every time he went to bed, he set his phone face up on the nightstand, like that might give him a few extra seconds if the call came.
He lowered the pen again, pressing harder until the tip nearly tore the paper.
His hand moved almost on its own, words forming before he’d decided to write them.
Samira does this thing before a code. She stills her hands. Just for a second. I noticed it because I do the same thing.
He stopped and blinked at her name.
Samira.
It wasn’t the first time she’d slipped into his writing. He hadn’t meant to let her in. But she kept showing up anyway.
She doesn’t rush. Even when someone’s shouting. Even when the room’s loud and everything’s going wrong. She moves when she’s ready. I trust her.
He stared at the words. His throat worked as he swallowed. For a long moment, he just sat there, pen still hovering above the page, feeling like he’d crossed some invisible line.
He didn’t know when it had started, this gravitational pull. She was supposed to be another resident. But Samira wasn’t. She didn’t collapse under the weight. She carried it.
She worked mostly days, but sometimes their worlds overlapped. Those hours were the only ones that felt real anymore.
He’d caught himself watching her sometimes. The way she lingered over charts long after she should’ve clocked out. Her eyes going distant when she thought no one was watching. She carried a kind of loneliness he recognized in himself.
He loved working with her. Not just because she was the smartest in the department, but because she cared. About the patients. About fixing the system. About doing it right, even when no one else had the patience for it. She fought for people, even when it cost her.
Jack remembered overhearing Robby once, muttering that she was too slow. Jack had shut it down before Robby could finish and told him she was the future of the department. He’d meant every word.
He’d told her things he hadn’t told anyone else. About Cara. About the nights that still woke him shaking. And she’d told him about her father. About what it meant to lose someone because the system failed them. Two people haunted by loss, orbiting each other across the ER floor.
Sometimes when he thought about the roof, he pictured her there too, pulling him back without knowing she was doing it.
Some days, she was the reason he got out of bed.
She didn’t even know it.
He found himself thinking about Pittfest again. The case with Samira.
It happened more than he liked to admit. His mind went there when sleep hovered just out of reach.
They had a victim with a gunshot to the thigh. Clean at first. Then it wasn’t. Air slipped into the femoral vein, moving toward the heart. A quiet kind of killer.
He’d shown her the case report from South Korea. The only ever documented case of the procedure. A five-French pigtail catheter, threaded into the atrium and ventricle. It was risky. Borderline insane. He wouldn’t have trusted anyone else with it.
But he trusted her.
He remembered the tremor in her hands and Emery’s voice cutting in, saying she’d stay in case it goes south. Jack had hated how fast Emery was to assume failure.
Samira slipped the catheter in and drew air back from the heart.
For one long second, the monitor screamed v‑tach.
Emery was reaching for the paddles, barking orders. Jack didn’t move. He kept his eyes focused on Samira.
“You got this.”
She pulled it back and the monitor eased back into normal rhythm.
The patient lived.
Jack remembered the pride hitting hard after. She needed that win. He could see it in the way she stood a little straighter after.
She didn’t know that same morning, Robby had found him on the roof.
The night before, a veteran had bled out under his hands. He’d stood there afterward alone, wondering why he kept doing this. Why he kept coming back.
And that same day, hours later, Samira reminded him exactly why.
She was part of the reason. Maybe she was the reason.
Cara used to do that. Pull him back without even trying. She’d tethered him when everything else spun out. Now it was Samira. He didn’t know what to do with that.
The pen moved before he could stop it.
I think about Pittfest more than I should.
Not because of what went wrong.
Because of how little I doubted her.
I watched her do it and knew she would finish it.
When she’s not on shift, I notice.
The days feel longer.
I’m more tired than I should be.
I don’t know when that started to matter this much.
I think I love her.
Cara’s face flashed behind his eyes. The hospital room. Her hand in his as she said, “You don’t get to stop living when I do.”
He’d promised her he’d try.
Back then it felt like mercy.
Now it felt like debt.
He almost crumpled the page and threw it across the room, but his hand wouldn’t move.
He folded the paper once. Then again. Slid it into the growing pile of pages without letting himself read it back.
Another thing she’d never know.
For a long moment, Jack didn’t move.
He sat there. Papers everywhere. Ink smudged where his hand had dragged through the page. The evidence of a fight he hadn’t won.
Writing was supposed to help. Get it out. Let the page carry some of it.
He didn’t feel lighter.
The hospital would fix this. It always did. A place that asked everything of him and gave just enough structure to keep him upright.
And Samira.
She’d be wrapping up soon. He might catch her at the hub or by the elevators, maybe five minutes before their worlds slid past each other again. It wasn’t enough time to matter.
Except it always did.
His gaze snagged on the article he printed out to give to her.
The article exchange had started by accident. She’d left one in the break room months ago, a study on post-trauma recovery. A Post-it stuck to the front: Thought you might find this interesting.
He’d returned the gesture a week later. Then another and another.
Now it was their ritual, papers passed between shifts like coded messages. At first, it was purely academic. But somewhere along the line, the margins had started holding more than notes.
Her looping questions: Do you agree with this?
His blocky replies: Only when I’m not on hour twenty of no sleep.
Sometimes she’d underline a sentence and add: This feels true or this reminded me of that story you told me.
They were learning each other through ink, through borrowed words buried between citations.
The one he’d read last night was a meta-analysis on social isolation and mortality.
A study that sifted through millions of lives and came back with the same answer anyway.
Jack hadn’t slept after reading it, just stared at the ceiling as the language of the paper flattened into something simpler in his head.
He’d written all over the margins.
“Social isolation and loneliness are critical factors associated with an increased risk of all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality.”
He had written beside it: What about people who choose it?
Jack knew he was going to spend the rest of his life alone. He told himself he’d made peace with that kind of ending. But when he thought about it, he didn’t just see himself. He saw her, Samira.
He sighed, gathering the cluttered pages into a rough stack. He slid the printed article into a folder, meaning to give it to her tonight. The folded page slipped in with it, unnoticed.
•••
The automatic doors sighed open, and the ER took him back.
It slid over him and settled in his bones, the familiar reset he counted on. This place asked things of him. It kept him moving. It didn’t care what he carried in with him.
Dana was at the hub, glasses perched halfway down her nose. She looked up as soon as she spotted him and smiled, the kind that came easily after years of shared disasters.
“Look who decided to grace us. You’re in early.”
Jack shrugged. “Didn’t have anywhere else to be.”
“Or you just don’t know how to be anywhere else,” she shot back.
He smirked. “Maybe.”
She reached into the clutter of the desk and pulled out a postcard, holding it up between two fingers.
“Robby sent this from wherever-the-hell he is.”
Jack leaned closer. “Yeah, what’d he say? He must be missing you.”
Dana chuckled. “Well, that’s a given. He says it’s been therapeutic. Don’t know if I believe that. I’m just glad he made it there in one piece. Hoping he comes back the same way.”
Jack nodded. “You and me both.”
“He reach out to you at all?”
“Yeah, he’s been texting.”
Dana hummed.
She slid the postcard back into her drawer and pointed at the board above her. “We’re doing good for now. Couple admits upstairs. One trauma en route.”
“Good evening, Dr. Abbot,” a voice came from behind them.
“Dr. Al-Hashimi.”
She gave a tired half-smile and ran through patients. Jack listened, but his eyes drifted anyway.
She wasn’t there.
He already knew where she’d be.
Baran finished her rundown. “You good?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it.”
She clapped him once on the shoulder and peeled away, already halfway back into the noise.
He could log in. Grab a chart. Dive in headfirst and let the shift swallow him whole.
Instead, he turned toward the stairwell.
If Samira needed air, if she needed five stolen minutes away from the noise, she’d be where the city fell away and the hospital forgot to breathe.
The roof.
Each step echoed under his boots, a rhythm that slowed his thoughts whether he wanted it to or not. He told himself a dozen things on the way up. That he just wanted to check in. That he’d head back down right after. That this didn’t mean anything.
He’d been lying to himself for a while now. One more lie didn’t change much.
The night air met him the second the door swung open, cool against his face. The skyline stretched wide, lights blinking in the dark. He exhaled slowly, like he’d been holding his breath since he left the apartment.
There she was.
Samira stood near the railing, a still point against the wind.
Her shoulders were rounded forward, her spine curved like she was bracing against something internal rather than the cold.
Jack hadn’t realized how tightly he’d been wound until then.
She didn’t turn when the door clicked shut behind him.
He crossed the roof and stopped just short of touching her. Close enough to notice the wind lifting loose curls from the nape of her neck.
“How was your shift?”
Samira kept her eyes on the skyline. “Long. Lost one I shouldn’t have.”
Jack leaned forward, resting his forearms on the railing, angling his body just enough that their shoulders almost touched.
“I hate those.”
“Yeah.” Her voice caught on the word. She cleared her throat. “It’s not even the worst one today. I just… I don’t know… I thought I could turn it around this time.”
He nodded. “Those ones usually hurt the most.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asked, her brows pulling together.
“No,” he said honestly. “But I know you did everything you could.”
She huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “We always say that.”
“Because most of the time it’s true.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“The rest of the time it’s still true. We just don’t like the outcome.”
Her fingers tightened on the railing. He noticed the tremor then, almost imperceptible, but there. His instincts flared. Combat medic brain. Assess. Stabilize. Touch.
He didn’t.
He folded his hands together instead, his knuckles whitening.
“You’re thinking.”
She shrugged. “When am I not? Maybe I should take up smoking. Dana goes out sometimes, and… I don’t know. Seems like the thing to do after days like this.”
“That’s not a habit you want to pick up. There are better ways to survive this place… even if you don’t know them yet.”
She gave a small laugh. “Yeah, maybe. I’m still figuring those out.”
“Good. Don’t trade one problem for another. You’re smarter than that.”
She glanced back at the doors. “It’s quiet down there.”
Jack knew she was trying to redirect. “Give it ten minutes.”
That earned him the faintest curve of her mouth. “Optimistic, I see.”
He kept his eyes on the skyline, pretending it deserved his attention. His awareness circled back to her, leaning slightly, unknowingly.
He’d told himself for months that it was professional respect. Admiration. Two people who worked well together, finding comfort in shared competence.
Standing here, it didn’t feel clinical.
It felt inevitable.
“I like it up here. It’s peaceful.”
Jack glanced at her, a corner of his mouth lifting. “That’s why I come up here.”
She turned toward him, sheepish. “I’m sorry for taking it over.”
“Don’t be. I don’t mind the company.”
“I don’t either.”
His hand twitched at his side.
Every instinct screamed to pull her closer.
He couldn’t cross that line. Couldn’t give in to the selfish, aching need to be the one she leaned on when he was already terrified of how much he needed her.
“You ever feel like this place takes more than it gives?” She asked.
“More than you know.”
“But you still come back.”
He looked at her then, the truth pressed hard against his sternum. He reached for the safest thing he had.
The folder.
“I, uh.” He slid the strap off his shoulder and pulled the article free, holding it out like it might combust. “I read this last night. Thought you’d want to see it. I made some notes.”
Her brows lifted. “Another one?”
“Yeah. This one’s a little depressing, to be honest. But good.”
“You really know how to sell things.”
“Years of practice. You should see my dating profile,” he joked.
She blinked. “Your what?”
He winced internally. “That was hypothetical.”
“Oh.” She nodded solemnly.
She tucked the article under her arm. “Well, thank you, Jack. Really.”
He shrugged, forcing his voice into something casual. “Anytime.”
It was safer to pretend her presence didn’t make the air thin. But as she lingered, the article pressed to her ribs, he realized this wasn’t just medicine. Maybe it never had been.
“See you tomorrow,” she told him.
He wanted to answer differently. Wanted to say stay or let me walk you down or you don’t have to carry this alone. Instead, he gave her the safe version of himself.
“Yeah. Tomorrow.”
She nodded, then turned, pushing through the door and disappearing into the stairwell. Her footsteps faded until there was nothing left but wind and the distant hum of the city.
Jack stayed where he was, his hands braced on the railing like it could hold him together. The air felt colder already, sharper without her beside him.
He told himself this was enough.
The overlap. The studies. The minutes stolen between shifts before their lives pulled them in opposite directions.
Enough to keep her close without crossing the line.
The truth rose anyway.
He wanted more.
Her laughter cutting through the static.
Her head heavy on his shoulder.
All the small, human things he’d forgotten he was allowed to want.
He exhaled slowly, watching his breath ghost into the night.
Tomorrow, he told himself.
Tomorrow was enough.
He stayed until the cold sank through his shirt, until the city blurred into light and shadow. Only then did he turn back toward the stairwell, toward the noise, the work, and the place that asked everything of him and never once let him rest.