Chapter 32
chapter
thirty-two
The automatic doors of Metro General slid open with their familiar whisper, and I stepped into the controlled chaos of shift change.
The fluorescent lights felt harsher than usual, cutting through the exhaustion that had become my constant companion.
I'd picked up this call shift because the alternative — sitting alone in my apartment, staring at walls that still held echoes of Izzy's laughter — was unbearable.
The elevator ride to the ER felt endless. Almost two months now since Cap's funeral. Since I'd watched the strongest woman I'd ever known look at me like I was a stranger who'd destroyed her life. Three weeks of perfect, hollow competence that left me feeling like a ghost haunting my own existence.
The elevator dinged, and I stepped out into the familiar chaos of the emergency department. But something was off. Sophia was standing at the nurses' station with Carly, both charge nurses looking up as I approached with expressions I couldn't quite read.
"Oh, gosh, Jimmy," Sophia said, her voice carrying a note of apologetic surprise that didn't quite ring true. "My mistake. We double-scheduled tonight. We don't actually need you."
I stopped walking, my exhausted brain struggling to process what she was saying. "What?"
"I know, I know. Total screwup on our part." She exchanged a glance with Carly that lasted a fraction of a second too long. "We'll pay out your call-time anyway since it's our fault. Sorry you drove all the way in for nothing."
The disappointment almost shattered me, desperation rising in my chest. The prospect of twelve hours of methodical, mind-numbing work had been the only thing getting me through the day. Now I'd have to go home, back to the silence and the memories and the constant replay of every mistake I'd made.
"Are you sure?" I asked, hearing the desperation in my own voice. "I could work anyway, help out with — "
"We're fully staffed for tonight," Carly said firmly. "Go home. Get some rest."
I nodded numbly, turned around, and headed back toward the elevator. Behind me, I caught a fragment of whispered conversation between Sophia and Carly, something about "had to try", but the words felt distant and unimportant.
The parking garage was dimly lit and mostly empty, my footsteps echoing off concrete walls as I made my way toward my car. All I wanted was to get home, maybe drink myself into unconsciousness, anything to stop the endless cycle of self-recrimination that had become my default state.
"Dalton."
The voice cut through the silence like a blade. I turned to see Kellen standing beside a beat-up Chevy Silverado, his expression as unreadable as ever. He was wearing a zipped hoodie and navy blue EMS-style cargo pants.
"You're coming with me," he said. Not a request. Not a suggestion. A statement of fact delivered in that flat, emotionless tone that was his bread and butter.
I stared at him, too tired to be surprised, too hollow to argue. "What? Where?"
"Just get in the truck, Dalton."
Something in his voice — a note of authority that brooked no disagreement — made my legs move without conscious thought. I climbed into the passenger seat of his pickup, noting the meticulous cleanliness, the lack of personal items, the way even his vehicle seemed to reflect his emotional distance.
Kellen started the engine without another word, and we pulled out of the garage into the night.
The drive took us through parts of the city I barely recognized.
Industrial areas filled with warehouses and chain-link fences, neighborhoods where the streetlights were sparse and the buildings looked like they'd given up on better days.
Kellen navigated the empty streets with obvious purpose, never explaining where we were going or why.
We pulled up in front of a squat, windowless cinderblock building with a single flickering neon sign that simply read "BAR." No name, no decoration, just a statement as blunt and uncompromising as the man who'd brought me here.
"Come on," Kellen said, climbing out of the truck.
The interior was exactly what the exterior had promised — dark, smelling of stale beer and industrial-strength bleach, populated by a handful of people who looked like they'd been carved from the same unforgiving stone as the building itself.
The bartender, a woman who appeared to have been working here since the Earth was young, looked up as we entered with the kind of practiced indifference that suggested she'd seen everything and been impressed by none of it.
Kellen steered me toward a booth in the back, the kind of scarred wooden table that had probably absorbed decades of bad decisions and worse conversations. I slid into the worn vinyl seat, still too confused and exhausted to question what was happening.
"Two glasses, please," Kellen told the bartender when she materialized beside our table.
I watched, my confusion deepening, as he unvelcroed a leg pocket on his cargo pants and withdrew a bottle that made my eyebrows rise. Blanton's. Single barrel bourbon that cost more than most people spent on groceries in a month.
"Hey, buddy, you want to drink here, you buy it here. State Beverage Commission’ll fine the shit out of us," the bartender said, unimpressed by the expensive liquor.
Kellen pulled out his wallet, extracted a one-hundred dollar bill from it, and placed it on the table. "Two glasses, one with ice. We don’t need anything else. Thanks."
His voice carried that same flat authority that made attending physicians instantly defer to his judgment. The glasses appeared with only the briefest delay.
When we were alone, Kellen poured two generous measures of bourbon, the amber liquid catching the dim light from the flickering fixture overhead. He pushed the glass with ice toward me and raised his own.
"Drink," he said.
I took a sip and immediately started coughing. The bourbon was smooth but powerful, burning its way down my throat with the kind of authority that demanded respect. Kellen drained half his glass without so much as a wince, then set it down evenly.
"Jesus," I wheezed, my eyes watering.
"Good stuff, isn’t it," Kellen said, a statement rather than a question. He topped off my glass without asking. "Drink up, Dalton. We've got things to discuss."
I took another drink, feeling the warmth spread through my chest. "What things?"
"You've been different lately," he said, his flat voice making it sound like a medical diagnosis. "Going through the motions. I've been watching you."
The bourbon was starting to soften the edges of my exhaustion, but his words made me defensive. "I'm fine. Just tired."
"Bullshit." Kellen's expression didn't change, but there was something sharp in his voice. "I've seen tired. This isn't tired. This is something else."
I took another drink, larger this time, feeling the alcohol burn away some of my resistance. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"The hell you don't." He leaned back in the booth, studying me with the same clinical assessment he brought to difficult diagnoses. "You used to light up the whole department. People looked forward to working with you. Now you move around there like a ghost."
The bourbon was making me feel loose, unmoored. "Maybe that's just who I really am."
"No." Kellen's voice was firm, certain. "I know who you really are, Dalton. I've watched you with patients, with the new grads, with families having the worst day of their lives. You're not this hollow thing pretending to be a nurse."
I finished my glass and reached for the bottle. Kellen didn't stop me. "You don't know anything about me."
"I know you're in love with that firefighter," he said, and the words landed like a sledgehammer. "I know you're walking around here like a man who's lost everything that mattered to him. And I know you're doing exactly what I did years ago."
"What's that?"
"Trying to protect yourself from caring by pretending you don't." He poured himself another drink, his movements deliberate and controlled. "How's that working out for you?"
The bourbon was making my tongue loose, my defenses crumbling. "I'm fine."
"You're a liar." But there was no anger in his voice, just a tired certainty. "And you're an idiot if you think shutting down is going to save you from the pain."
I felt something crack open in my chest, a fissure in the wall I'd built around my grief. "You don't understand."
"Oh I don't, do I?" Kellen's eyes met mine across the table, and for the first time since I'd known him, I saw something human there, a flicker of amusement. "Tell me, then, Jimmy. What don’t I understand?"
The way he said my first name — gentle, almost paternal — broke something in me. The bourbon and the exhaustion and the weight of carrying it all alone for weeks finally overwhelmed my resistance.
"I failed someone," I whispered. "Someone who trusted me to keep them safe, and I failed them."
"Tell me about it."
So I did. The words poured out of me like blood from a wound. Lisa Harris, the domestic violence case, the promises I'd made that I couldn't keep. The way she'd looked at me with desperate hope when I'd given her those useless resources. The phone call from legal affairs telling me she was dead.
"I tried to save her," I said, my voice breaking. "I gave her everything we're supposed to give them … safety planning, resources, phone numbers. And three weeks later she was dead because I wasn't enough."
But I wasn't done, and in short order, it all came tumbling out.
"And then there's Izzy," I continued, the words coming faster now.
"The firefighter. I was in love with her, and I thought.
.. God, I thought I could help her, too.
She was being passed over for promotion because of politics, because she's a woman in a good ‘ole boys' club, and I wrote this letter to her battalion chief.
Three pages about how amazing she was, how unfair they were being. "