Chapter 9 What Are Friends For?
What Are Friends For?
Theo
Harry was worse than usual, which was saying something given his baseline had been declining for months.
The tremor in his hands was new, or at least newly visible, and the yellowish tinge creeping into the whites of his eyes told her his liver was starting to lose the argument it had been having with the rest of him for years.
Thankfully, his vitals were holding, but only barely.
Theo set his chart on the side table and pulled up a stool so she was at his level. She'd learned a long time ago not to stand over people when you were about to say something they didn't want to hear.
"Harry." She kept her voice low. "Please, talk to the social worker."
He tried to smile, but it came out as something closer to a wince.
"Your labs are showing liver damage that's accelerating," she said. "We can't keep patching you up and sending you back out. At some point, that stops being treatment."
His eyes drifted away from hers, toward the curtain, toward anywhere else. "Already told you, Doc. I'm not doing rehab. Tried it three times."
"So we try a fourth." She held her voice steady, even though she could feel the urgency of it pressing against her chest. "Three decades on the waterfront, Harry. You're telling me you can't do thirty days?"
Something moved across his face, defensiveness or shame, probably both, sitting uncomfortably alongside each other.
"I had a reason to stay sober back then."
"You have reasons now." Theo leaned forward a little. "People here ask about you when you go quiet for a few weeks. You know that, right? You matter to us, Harry."
She was watching his face so closely, looking for any sign that something was landing, that she didn't hear Morrison until he was right beside her.
"Dr. Brennan. A word."
Her shoulders went rigid. She’d been under his supervision long enough to know that specific tone.
She squeezed Harry's arm before standing and followed Morrison out to the hallway. He waited until they were clear of the bay before he turned, and the look on his face made her want to take a step back.
"How many times have we talked about appropriate boundaries?"
"I was just—"
"You were getting emotionally involved with a chronic substance abuser who's been through our doors ten times in six months.
" His voice stayed level throughout, which was somehow worse than if he'd raised it.
"I heard you in there. Telling him he matters isn't medicine, Dr. Brennan.
That's therapy. And you're not his therapist."
"I was trying to motivate him toward treatment—"
"You were making promises about staff caring when the truth is, half the nurses avoid his charts because they're exhausted from watching him refuse help and come back worse.
" Morrison crossed his arms. "This is a pattern with you.
You find patients who are drowning, and instead of throwing them a proper line, you jump in after them. That doesn't help anyone."
She opened her mouth, about to explain that caring was what made her good at this and that detachment wasn't the same as professionalism, but he wasn't finished.
"Emergency medicine means you treat, you stabilize, you hand them to the next level of care.
You don't carry their burdens home. You don't promise to catch them every time they fall.
" He paused, and something in his face shifted.
Not softening exactly, but moving back from the edge of it.
"You're a talented resident. Your instincts are good, and your technical skills are solid.
But if you can't learn to draw a line, you're going to burn out before you finish your training.
I've watched it happen to better doctors than you. "
He let that sit for a moment, then said, "Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
She nodded, and he turned and walked away, his footsteps fading down the hallway. Theo stayed where he'd left her, her hands not quite steady at her sides.
Her parents would have handled Harry differently.
She knew that without having to think about it, they had that quality, both of them, the ability to discuss a difficult case over dinner without it touching them, to move from one patient to the next without carrying anything between.
Clean lines. Her mother called it discipline.
Her father never called it anything because it didn't occur to him that it needed a name.
Maybe that was the thing she was missing. Maybe caring this much wasn't a strength so much as a flaw she'd dressed up as one.
"Theo."
She looked up. Natalie stood a few feet away and didn't ask what had happened. She'd clearly seen enough. Instead, she stepped closer, positioning herself between Theo and the rest of the hallway.
"I'm fine."
Natalie gave her a look that made it clear she wasn’t going to dignify that with a response.
“He’s not wrong,” Theo added before Natalie could say it herself. She heard the crack in her own voice and hated it.
"He's half wrong, which with Morrison is actually pretty good." Natalie's hand found her shoulder. "He's brilliant at what he does. He's also been doing it so long he's forgotten that the way he does it isn't the only way."
"But if I'm making promises I can't keep—"
"You didn't promise Harry anything unreasonable. You told him he mattered, which is true. You encouraged him toward treatment, which is appropriate. That's not overstepping, that's just—" she searched for the word, "—being a person. Some patients need that. Harry especially."
Something loosened a little in her chest. She blinked hard. "He said I'm going to burn out."
"You might," Natalie said. "We all do, eventually. The trick is burning out slowly enough that nobody notices until you're already a consultant." She paused. "Or so I've heard."
Theo almost smiled.
She nodded and let herself accept it, even as some quieter part of her kept turning Morrison's words over.
Because the thing was, she couldn't fully dismiss it.
She was soft, too invested in outcomes she had no control over.
She'd known that about herself for a long time. She’d just hoped it was the kind of thing that looked like a flaw up close but a strength from further away.
Standing in this hallway under these lights, she wasn't so sure anymore.
The rest of her shift passed the way bad shifts do.
Not slowly, just in pieces. One thing and then the next, her hands doing what they knew how to do while the rest of her stayed somewhere else.
She treated, she charted, she made decisions.
She was fine. She was professional. She was exactly what Morrison had told her to be, and it felt like wearing a coat that didn't fit.
By the time she clocked out, the exhaustion had settled somewhere deep, the kind that sleep doesn't really touch. She hunched into her jacket and walked toward The Lenox without letting herself think too hard about anything.
The lobby was quiet. She crossed it with her bag tugging at one shoulder, stepped into the elevator, and pressed fourteen. The doors slid shut, sealing her in with her reflection. She looked terrible. That tracked.
When the doors opened, her feet knew where they were going, even if she was still pretending she hadn't decided yet. She stopped outside 14D and stood there for a moment, staring at the numbers on the door.
She nearly talked herself out of it, because what would she even say, I had a bad day? My attending thinks I'm too soft to last in this job? I just want to be near you because, for some reason I can't fully explain, you make everything feel less loud?
She could still go. Her own apartment was three feet away, and she knew how to be alone with something.
She'd had plenty of practice. Catherine didn't need to see her like this, so far from the version of herself that had come across in their notes and dinners, the one who was funny and capable and more or less had it together.
But before she could finish the thought, the door opened.
Catherine was in her navy silk robe, hair loose around her shoulders like she'd been sitting somewhere quiet and running her hands through it without thinking. She looked—Theo didn't let herself finish that thought.
Catherine's eyes went wide for just a moment before she collected herself, but Theo caught what was underneath it. Something that looked a lot like recognition.
"I was—" Catherine's eyes moved over her face slowly, taking inventory. "I heard you in the hallway."
Of course she had. The walls were thin enough that Catherine could probably track the shape of her comings and goings without trying. It should have felt strange, being that well-known without realizing it. But, it didn't.
Theo opened her mouth and found she had nothing.
All the explanations she'd been half-composing in the elevator had gone somewhere she couldn't reach them.
She just stood there in the hallway, in her coat, with her bag still on one shoulder, looking at Catherine's face and feeling something embarrassingly close to relief just at the sight of her.
Catherine stepped back from the door.
"Come on," she said, and that was all.
Theo stepped inside without giving herself time to reconsider.
The apartment was dimmer than usual, just the one lamp on in the living room, and it made everything softer: the edges of the furniture, the shadows, Catherine herself standing a few feet away in her sleepwear with her hair loose and her feet bare against the floor.
Theo hadn't seen her look like this before.
So…Unguarded. Like she'd been caught in the middle of a quiet evening and hadn't had time to compose herself.