Chapter 9
LAINE
Three-car pileup on the highway. Kitchen fire with smoke inhalation victims. A college student who mixed energy drinks with something he won't name. The board lights up like a Christmas tree and stays that way.
I love nights like this.
Not the suffering—never that. But the clarity. When everything moves this fast, there's no room for the noise in my head. No space to replay conversations or analyze what Blake meant when he said he loved me or wonder if Reid's really as okay as he says he is.
Just the work. Just the next patient. Just the thing I'm actually good at.
"Mitchell, bay four!" Dr. Martinez calls across the chaos. "Incoming trauma, two minutes out."
I'm already moving, checking supplies, prepping the space. Bay four is our primary trauma station—bigger, better equipped, closer to imaging. Whatever's coming is serious.
Joyce appears at my elbow with an IV kit. "Ambulance called ahead. Single vehicle rollover, driver ejected. They're bringing him in hot."
"Vitals?"
"Pressure's dropping. They've got two large-bore IVs running wide open."
I nod, mentally running through protocols. Ejection means spinal precautions. Dropping pressure means internal bleeding until proven otherwise. We'll need blood typed and crossed, CT standing by, probably surgery on deck.
The ambulance bay doors burst open.
I see the stretcher first. Then the blood—so much blood, soaking through the sheet, dripping onto the floor. The patient is a young man, maybe twenty-five, face obscured by an oxygen mask and cervical collar.
Then I see who's pushing the stretcher.
Reid.
Our eyes meet across the chaos of the trauma bay. For one heartbeat, everything else falls away—the noise, the blood, the urgency.
Then he smiles.
Not the desperate look from the fire station parking lot, or the sad smile from the hardware store.
This is the Reid smile I remember from our first night together, when he was cracking jokes and making me laugh despite fourteen overdoses in six hours.
That smile isn't about anything but me. I know that like I know my Mom loves me.
For a second, we connect, and it's real and warm.
Then he's back. All of him, right where he needs to be—on the kid, on the monitors, on whatever comes next.
If someone walked in right then and caught the tail end of that smile, they'd think he was heartless. Or just a colossal jerk. He's neither. He just let himself have one small moment of something human before turning back to the boy on the gurney.
"What do we have?" Dr. Martinez's voice snaps me back to the present.
Reid's partner—not Tony, someone I don't recognize—rattles off the report while Reid helps transfer the patient to our table.
"Male, twenty-six, unrestrained driver, ejected approximately thirty feet.
GCS was eight in the field, dropped to six en route.
BP ninety over sixty, heart rate one-twenty, two liters of saline on board. "
I'm already cutting away clothing, exposing the chest for assessment. My hands know what to do even when my brain is still catching up.
"Decreased breath sounds on the left," I report, pressing my stethoscope to the patient's ribs. "Could be a hemothorax." I'm not a doctor, but I know my stuff. And the doctor knows that thankfully, giving a quick listen and confirming it.
"Get me a chest tube tray," Dr. Martinez orders. "And call CT, tell them we're coming in five minutes whether they're ready or not."
Reid steps back from the table, giving our team room to work. That's protocol—once the handoff is complete, the paramedics clear out. But I catch him watching for just a moment longer than necessary before he turns to help his partner collect their equipment.
The stretcher wheels squeak against the floor as they pull it away. I keep my hands on the patient, keep my focus where it belongs.
"Tube's in," the RT announces. "Good color change, equal breath sounds—wait, still decreased on the left."
"Chest tube going in now." Dr. Martinez positions the scalpel. "Mitchell, keep pressure on that abdominal wound."
I press both hands against the gauze covering a deep laceration on the patient's lower abdomen. Blood wells up between my fingers, warm and insistent.
The work swallows me whole. CT scan. Splenic laceration. Surgery.
By the time the patient disappears into the elevator, heading for an operating room and a team of surgeons who will, God willing, spend the next several hours putting him back together, I've almost forgotten about Reid.
Almost.
Mrs. Delgado, seventy-three, fell in her kitchen and needs sutures in her forearm. But it needs to be cleaned first. Simple work. Necessary work. The kind of work that keeps the noise in my head quiet.
I'm gently wiping the blood when I glance through the bay's open curtain and see him.
Reid.
My hands still. The gauze hovers over Mrs. Delgado's wound, suspended in that space between one heartbeat and the next.
He's at the nurses' station, talking to Joyce.
Laughing at something she said, that full-body laugh I remember too well—the one where his whole face transforms and his shoulders shake and you can't help but smile just watching him.
His hair is doing that thing where it sticks up in three different directions, like he's been running his hands through it all shift.
He looks good. He looks fine.
I hate that he looks fine.
"Sweetheart?" Mrs. Delgado's voice pulls me back. Her eyes are kind, watching me with the sort of knowing patience that comes from seventy-three years of reading people. "You alright there?"
"Perfect." I force my attention back to the wound. To the work. "Just making sure I got all the debris out."
But my hands aren't quite steady anymore. The quiet in my head—that blessed, merciful silence I'd worked so hard to maintain—cracks at the edges.
Don't look up. Don't look up. Don't—
I look up.
He's still there. Still talking. Still completely unaware that I'm twenty feet away, hiding behind a curtain like a coward with gauze in my hands and my heart doing something stupid in my chest.
"You have gentle hands," Mrs. Delgado says.
I blink, refocusing on her face. She's watching me with the knowing expression that older women seem to develop, the one that sees right through polite pretenses.
"Thank you."
"My husband was a firefighter. Forty-two years." She glances toward the hallway, toward Reid and Joyce. "Those boys are built different. I know that look."
"What look?"
"The one you're trying not to have." She pats my hand with her uninjured arm. "I looked at my husband that same way. It's okay, dear. These things are complicated."
Ma'am, you have no idea.
Things quiet down, but Reid doesn’t leave.
I watch him duck into the EMS room—the small space we keep stocked for paramedics between calls. Coffee, a table and chairs, a couch that's seen better days. He's probably restocking supplies. Finishing his run report. Doing any of the dozen legitimate things that would keep him here.
Or maybe he's waiting.
I should find Joyce, ask what's next, keep moving through the endless stream of patients that a night like this provides.
Instead, I find myself walking toward the EMS room.
The door is open. Reid sits at the small desk, laptop open in front of him, typing with two fingers in the way that always made me tease him about being secretly eighty years old. He looks up when my shadow falls across the doorway.
"Hey."
"Hey."
Silence stretches between us. The fluorescent lights hum overhead. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor beeps its steady rhythm.
"Hell of a case," he says finally.
"Yeah." I lean against the doorframe, arms crossed. "He's young. Good vitals when we sent him up. I think he'll make it."
He's studying my face like he's trying to read something written in a language he's still learning, and it's making me all kinds of self-conscious.
"Good. That's good. How have you been?" he asks. "Really, I mean. Not the polite version."
I consider giving him the polite version anyway. Fine, busy, you know how it is. The words are right there, easy and safe and meaningless.
But Reid asked for real. And after everything, I want to give him real.
"Busy," I say. "Picked up extra shifts. Joined a book club that meets every other Thursday. Jamila and I have been doing sunrise yoga twice a week now on top of our regular Saturdays."
"Sunrise yoga." He winces. "That sounds painful."
"It's peaceful. The studio's mostly empty at six AM. Just me, Jamila, and this seventy-year-old woman named Gladys who can bend herself into shapes that defy human anatomy."
"Gladys sounds terrifying."
"She is. In the best way." I shift against the doorframe. "What about you?"
Reid leans back in his chair, and I notice the lines around his eyes. Deeper than they used to be. He looks better than he did in that fire station parking lot—healthier, more present—but the past few months have left their mark on him. You can see it if you know where to look.
"Working," he says. "A lot. Tony finally convinced me to stop picking up every available overtime shift, so now I'm down to a merely unreasonable number of hours instead of an actively insane one."
"Progress."
"Baby steps." He runs a hand through his hair. "Blake and I have been working on the house again. Insulated the garage last weekend. Started talking about maybe converting it into a proper workshop for him, something with better ventilation and actual insulation."
The mention of Blake lands in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples spreading outward, disturbing the surface.
"That sounds like a big project."
"It would be. Doubt It'll happen. He likes the workshop. But it gives us something to do together that isn't—" He stops, searching for the right word. "Isn't loaded. You know? We can argue about lumber dimensions and electrical codes without arguing about anything that actually matters."