Chapter 9 #3
"Reid."
"Yeah?"
"Finish your paperwork. I have patients waiting."
He laughs again—a real laugh this time, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes. "Yes ma'am."
I push off from the doorframe, turning to leave. But something makes me stop. Look back.
He's watching me go with an expression I can't quite name. Not the desperate intensity from the fire station. Not the careful restraint from the hardware store. Something softer. Something that looks almost like peace.
It's a really good look on him.
"Goodnight, Reid."
"Goodnight, Laine."
Joyce appears while I'm restocking bay four. She leans against the supply cart, watching me count gauze pads with an expression I can't quite read.
"What was that honey?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about." I so do.
She snorts, shaking her head. "Don't you play dumb with me, Missy."
I keep counting. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. "He was finishing paperwork. I was being a professional amount of friendly."
"Right." Joyce doesn't move. "Because that's definitely what I saw. Just professionalism. Nothing personal at all."
Darn it. Where was I? Start over. One, two, three.
"Honey, I've been watching people fall in and out of love in this hospital for thirty-five years. You think I can't tell the difference between professional and whatever that was?"
My hands still on the gauze. The fluorescent lights hum above us, and somewhere down the hall a monitor keeps up its steady beep. I should have something for that. A redirect, a pivot back to the work.
But Joyce has this way of cutting through the noise, and I'm too tired to pretend.
I set down the gauze and turn to face her. "I don't know what I'm doing."
God, that's a relief to say out loud. All these weeks of careful distance, of bracing myself every time an ambulance pulled in, of telling myself I was fine—and now this. One conversation in an EMS room and suddenly all my carefully constructed walls feel like tissue paper.
"Join the club." Joyce pushes off from the cart, but her eyes stay on me—kind, steady, the way she looks when she's about to deliver news they need to hear but don't want to.
"That's pretty much the human condition, Mitchell.
None of us know what we're doing. We just keep showing up and figuring it out as we go. "
"He scared me." I can feel my pulse picking up, the same spike I used to get every time those bay doors opened.
"Made me afraid to come to work. I started planning my schedule around avoiding him.
Me. The woman who's lived in fourteen countries, who's worked in war zones and refugee camps—and I was scared to walk into my own ER. "
"I know that too." Joyce's voice is soft. No judgment. Just acknowledgement.
"But tonight—" I shake my head, trying to sort through the tangle of it all.
The easy rhythm of working trauma together.
The way he'd stepped back without being asked.
The laugh in the EMS room—not desperate, not loaded, just him.
"Tonight felt like before. Before everything went wrong. Before Blake. Before all of it."
For a moment I let myself remember what it was like when Reid was just Reid.
Before the workshop, before the fight, before I learned that loving someone could mean watching yourself disappear bit by bit.
There was a version of us that worked. A version where his intensity felt exciting instead of crushing, where being near him felt like home.
Tonight, for ten minutes in that EMS room, I'd caught flashes of that version.
Joyce is quiet for a moment, those experienced eyes reading my face the way she'd read a difficult chart. Then she says, "You remember what I told you? About watching yourself around him? Monitoring your reactions?"
"Yeah." How could I forget? That conversation had been a mirror I hadn't wanted to look into.
"Did you feel like that tonight?"
I think about it. Really think. The trauma, the blood, the precise choreography of saving a life.
The conversation afterward—his careful questions, my honest answers.
The way he'd laughed when I told him to finish his paperwork.
At any point did I feel like I was making myself smaller?
Watching my words? Calculating which version of myself he needed me to be?
"No," I say slowly, finally figuring out where she's going with all of this. "I just felt like... me. Doing my job. Talking to someone I—" I stop.
Someone I what? Someone I loved? Someone I lost? Someone who's been living in the corner of my mind for months no matter how hard I tried to evict him?
"Someone you what?" Joyce prompts.
"Someone I used to know." I meet her eyes. "Someone I'm maybe starting to know again. Or—not again. Differently. Like meeting someone new who happens to look exactly like someone from your past."
"Hm." Joyce nods once, slow and considering. "That's something, then."
"What do I do with that?" The question comes out a little panic-y. "What am I supposed to do with that, Joyce?"
"That's not my question to answer." She squeezes my shoulder as she passes. "Bay six needs vitals. We're still slammed."
I get back to work. The night continues—more patients, more crises, more opportunities to turn off that wondering part of my brain and focus on being useful.
But underneath it all, like a current running beneath the surface of a river, I keep coming back to the same thought.
I missed you too.