Chapter 9
NINE
FINN
“Dr. Maddox thinks I’m an idiot,” I said.
“I’m sure he doesn’t.” Tessa leaned across the table to pat my shoulder while Khai made a mildly commiserating noise.
All contrast, they were tucked together on one side of the diner booth, sharing fries and a salad—Tessa’s firecracker energy offset by Khai’s calm air, her pink hair and purple dress next to his black T-shirt and simple jeans. Cute.
I tried not to envy them.
Yeah, they’d had it easy while the state of my romantic affairs was a mess.
But I wasn’t even looking for a relationship.
Sure, the theory sounded nice—someone to turn to, that one person who’d have your back no matter what.
Not exactly my experience, though. Friends?
Yeah, I’d been mostly lucky with that. Guys, though? Eh. Complicated.
Case in point? Jesse. Not that I could share the full story with Tessa and Khai, so venting my insecurities felt like a tightrope act.
“No, but he does,” I said. “He reminded me to control my face in front of patients and told me to eat and sleep.” I tipped my head back for a groan, embarrassment a hot pull in my belly. Yeah, Jesse had been kind about it, but somehow, that only made it worse. “Like I said, he thinks I’m an idiot.”
“Doubt it.” Khai, this time. “He was part of the panel that crowned you the Suture Bowl winner, wasn’t he?”
He gave me a four.
I didn’t say that—I wasn’t supposed to even know it, after all. Instead, I flashed Khai a small smile. For all that he’d initially been a little down about his performance during the practical part, he’d been cheered up by some written comments from judges that praised his technique.
“I guess so,” I said. “Or maybe he thought I was an idiot even then but was outvoted by the others.”
“Hey.” Tessa tossed a fry at my head. “At least you didn’t freeze. So shut up, okay?”
Okay, fair point. I grinned at her, slightly apologetic, then snatched the fry from where it had dropped into my salad and reached over the table to dip it in ketchup. “Fine,” I said. “Me and my bruised ego are done. Let’s hear all about your amazing first few days.”
“They really were.” Tessa’s eyes lit up.
“Like, yesterday, we had this patient come in, late sixties, totally convinced he’d had his thermometer stuck all the way up his ass.
One of those mercury ones, right? He was rambling about how he always does it like that, much more reliable than under the armpits and whatnot, never had an issue, and the old ones are much better than all that electrical crap. ”
“Always trust the classics.” Khai nodded, lips twitching, while around us, sticky booths and greasy air carried the noisy chatter of a Saturday night crowd.
“Yep, he sure did.” Tessa took a breath and a bite of salad.
“So, anyway. He gets a rectal exam—nothing. Dude gets more and more panicky, starts shouting about how it’s poisoning him, how it must come out now, now, now.
Nurse tries to calm him down, I try to calm him down. No use. He just keeps shouting.”
“Sounds like a scene from some movie where the screenwriters were on drugs,” I tossed in, and Tessa grinned.
“Not far off. Only, you know—we then get him set up for an abdominal X-ray. And it shows… nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She paused, bright with laughter. “Turns out he went to the bathroom before he came to the ER. He’d got it out all by himself.”
Khai’s face was mostly amusement. “I mean, it’s better than fixing a leaking colostomy bag. Which I got to do on day two, so hurray.”
It occurred to me that this was not a normal dinner conversation by most people’s standards.
“Glamorous,” I said dryly.
“Peak existence, right there.” He beamed around a mouthful of fries. “On the bright side, they let me throw a stitch at the end of a chest-tube placement today.”
“Nice.” I offered him a high five that he accepted, his smile sheepishly pleased. At the next table over, someone spilled their drink and hooted like it was an accomplishment.
I was glad they’d had a good start. Really, I was.
They seemed to be happy, thriving. I just…
wasn’t. Every time I thought of Jesse, something in me went tight and warm all at once—the careful way he addressed me like he might need to defend it to an HR panel, his competence, how calm he was with patients and their parents.
It felt like I’d wandered into someone else’s story only to end up center stage without a script.
I’d come here planning to work hard, stay focused, earn my place.
Instead, I’d been knocked off-kilter from the start, fighting for professional balance.
Also fighting a low-key crush on the guy holding my surgical future in his hands.
Best-laid plans, huh?
Eventually, we cleared our table and stepped outside into the August night, streetlights bouncing off rain-slick pavement.
Khai peeled off toward the A train while Tessa headed for the 1.
I waved them off, then started the walk home.
The city pulsed around me, heat still clinging to buildings, music spilling out of bars, shadowed couples wrapped around each other as if intimacy was easy.
I liked it here, but I missed stillness—missed trees instead of scaffolding, the quiet hum of bugs, mornings that smelled like damp grass instead of hot concrete.
This wasn’t home. Not yet, anyway.
It got easier. At least in the way a sweltering summer day either drives you crazy, makes you want to just rip off all your clothes and jump into the nearest lake to make it stop—or you learn to live with it.
Monday bled into Tuesday, into the back half of August, and a rhythm set in.
Most days, I beat Jesse to the floor. He greeted me with a quick nod, printed the patient list, and assigned tasks with the efficiency of an air-traffic controller.
I followed a step behind and recited vitals whenever he called on me, striving for the same clean, confident air he exuded.
When I missed something, he slid in a correction so smooth it barely even registered as a sting, then moved on.
Dr. Maddox to me, Dr. Hayes to him. Professionals.
Professionals—if not for a few scattered slip-ups, so small that I might have imagined them.
The conjoined-twins imaging review, for one.
Our department head, Dr. Novak, clicked through high-resolution 3D reconstructions, with Jesse sitting up front, arms folded.
When Novak asked about the specific risks for each twin like it was a test, Jesse turned his head, caught my eye, and asked, “Dr. Hayes?”
My answer earned nods from both him and Novak, and I floated through the rest of the discussion, glowing with approval and the thought that Jesse had known exactly where I was, two rows behind him in a darkened room.
There was also that time I paged him at two in the morning, heart in my throat, because what if I was wrong? What if I woke him up for nothing, what if I’d misread something harmless as a possible bowel obstruction?
He showed up in scrubs, hair a mess but eyes clear. “Good call,” he murmured after examining the little boy, voice pitched just for me—and then immediately turned to the senior resident, discussing next steps as if I wasn’t even there.
Yeah. Okay.
Once, I rushed into the workroom and caught him with a spoon in his mouth—peanut butter, of all things. He froze, gaze flicking to mine as if I’d caught him mid-crime, and tried to hide the jar behind his elbow. I looked away so he wouldn’t catch my smile.
Guess we all had our private little comforts when a shift dragged. Me? Lemon bars. Him? Peanut butter, apparently. The crunchy kind.
Another time, he corrected my chart—just a phrase he reworded to something more surgically precise, along with a typo that had slipped past me.
Who even did that? Jesse, apparently—perhaps overcorrecting against any impression of lenience, or maybe just…
whatever. Either way, I tried to laugh it off. “Guess I need more coffee.”
He gave me this look, as if he was memorizing the lines of my face. “Or maybe a day off,” he said, low and gentle. Before I could reply, he’d moved on to the next page.
Later that day, we reached for the same bottle of hand sanitizer in the workroom.
His hand brushed mine, and God, it wasn’t—didn’t mean anything.
Just an accident. He paused, eyes on mine.
I held my breath while one corner of his mouth lifted.
Then he stepped back, smooth like butter, and mentioned something about how the boy in Room Four finally tolerated full feeds to Dr. Carter.
As if nothing had happened even as I kept replaying it in the elevator.
Professionals.
Time blurred into small repetitions—Jesse adjusted my retractor angle and I handed off lab results; at home, I practiced two-hand ties until my fingers cramped.
There was the dubious arch of his eyebrow when I reheated my forgotten coffee in the microwave; parent updates where he stood just behind my shoulder, silent backup in case I needed it.
Everything normal, nothing to see here. Just a senior fellow coaching an intern.
Only—fuck. It felt like living behind glass.
Like almost. Like some part of me still looked for the version of him who’d once called me beautiful.
Jesse, though? He made it look easy, as if his ribs didn’t press down on his lungs the way mine did for me.
Maybe they didn’t. Maybe for him, that night was just a blip he’d filed away under “safely handled, thank God.”
I told myself it was fine. That I wasn’t thinking about all his competence translating elsewhere—hands, mouth, the way his voice dipped low. Fine, yeah.
It was.
Right up until an underground cable fire knocked out power in most of Upper Manhattan and the glass wall shattered.
Between one blink and the next, the ceiling panels snapped dark. What—? Air handlers cut to silence.
A second of total black.