6. Kristen
KRISTEN
My body is shaking.
My back is against the wall and I can't move.
He's standing right in front of me, so close I can see the vein in his neck pulsing.
This man who once looked at me like I was his whole world is looking at me now with something I don't have a name for.
It's not anger—that burns out. This is colder than that.
This is ownership that's been challenged, and it's the most dangerous version of him I've ever seen.
"So this is what you're going to do, huh?" His voice is low and controlled, which is so much worse, because yelling means he's lost control, but controlled means he's choosing this. "Because I won't let you leave, you're going to make cold food? You're going to disrespect me in my own house?"
He pulls his fist back, and I brace for the pain. Every muscle in my body locks up, my eyes squeeze shut, and my breath is hot in my chest.
The pain doesn't come.
The punch lands next to my head. The door cracks. Splinters and wood dust rain down on my shoulder, into my hair, and the sound is so loud it swallows every other sound in the room.
I scream.
And my eyes open.
I'm in bed. My bed. My room. The ceiling is dark and familiar, the curtain half-open, the phone on my nightstand glowing with a random notification.
Another nightmare. Or more like a memory that has become my nightmare. My body knows the difference between the two, because nightmares fade when you open your eyes; memories just get sharper.
I don't sit up. I just lie there, one hand pressed to my chest, feeling my heart race under my palm. I focus on my breathing. Slow. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
"I'm fine," I whisper to the dark. "I'm okay. I'm safe."
I say it again and again, until the words start to feel less like a lie and more like something I might believe by the time I get out of bed.
The phone says 4:53, so I give up on sleep and get up.
I shower until the water goes lukewarm because the heat helps loosen the tension that's knotted itself between my shoulders.
I dress, make coffee, and drink it moving around the kitchen because staying still feels wrong this morning.
I go through the motions until the motions start to feel normal again, until my hands are steady and my breathing is even, and the memory has been pushed back down to wherever it lives when I'm not sleeping.
By the time I leave for work, the sun is up, and I'm fine. I'm always fine. That's the deal I made with myself when I left. You get up, you go to work, you do your job, and you don't let the nights bleed into the days.
Priya is already in the lounge when I get there, two coffees in hand, which means she either had a good morning or had a terrible one and is compensating.
"You okay?" she asks, handing me one, instead. "You look tired."
"I'm fine. Just woke up early."
She studies me for a second, decides to let it go, and says, "Okay, so. Good news or bad news, depending on how you take it. Rounds with Dr. Maxwell are canceled. He's got an emergency operation, so Dr. Hills is covering."
I nod. I should be relieved. No one to interrogate me before 8:00 AM, and no stern eyes finding me in a crowd.
But I'm not relieved. A part of me wanted to be distracted by him today.
Wanted to feel that familiar pull, the thing that only happens when he's asking me something and waiting for me to rise to it.
After the night I had, I wanted something to push back against. Something louder than the memory still lingering in my chest.
Instead, I get Dr. Hills, who is perfectly nice and perfectly forgettable and asks the group a question about postoperative ileus management that I answer on autopilot.
I throw myself into charting, into rounding on my patients, into the steady rhythm of morning tasks that usually pulls me out of my own head.
Mrs. Delgado in 401 is being discharged after her appendectomy, and I go through her aftercare instructions twice because she's nervous about going home alone.
I sit with her for an extra five minutes and tell her what to watch for, what's normal, and when to come back in.
She holds my hand when I stand to leave and says, "You're so sweet, Doctor.
You've really helped a lot. Thank you so much.
" I smile—a real one. Moments like this are why I fought so hard to be here.
Why I clawed my way back into medicine after so many years.
Because helping someone heal and watching them walk out the door better than when they came in makes everything else worth it.
This afternoon we have rounds with Dr. Eleanor Vance—I always look forward to hers.
She's a senior attending, only a few years older than me, but she carries herself like someone who figured out the things the rest of us are still fumbling through and decided not to make a big deal about it.
She's poised and she speaks softly, but every word is heavy and none is wasted.
And she's effortlessly beautiful. The female residents admire her, and the male residents can barely form sentences around her.
Priya leans toward me and mutters, "I want to be her when I grow up."
I nod because I agree.
Eleanor walks us through a case and stops to ask Rathbone about the differential. He stutters, then goes completely blank, mouth open, nothing coming out. Eleanor waits three seconds, patient but not merciful, then moves on.
"Dr. Anand?"
Priya straightens up and delivers the answer cleanly. Eleanor smiles at her, warm and approving, and Priya's whole face lights up.
She grabs my arm as we're walking away. "She smiled at me. Did you see that? Dr. Eleanor Vance smiled at me. This woman is making me question my sexuality."
I laugh, and I needed it because the morning I had is the kind that usually follows me all day, but Priya makes it hard to stay in the dark.
Later, I'm heading toward the lobby to grab food from the café across the street when I see a familiar face.
Not anyone from this hospital. A face from before.
David Kaplan. He was a second-year at St. Andrew's when I was there.
We weren't close, but we ran in overlapping circles, and he knew about my relationship because everyone at that hospital did.
My ex's company was a major investor. His father's name was on the donation wall in the atrium.
When my ex came to visit me at work, people noticed, and when he stopped coming, people noticed that too.
David was friendly with some of his associates—friendly enough for lunches and favors, friendly enough to pick up the phone when someone called asking about a former colleague.
He's standing in the lobby, white coat on, his ID badge clipped to his pocket.
Maybe he's here for a consult. Maybe a conference.
Maybe just visiting a friend. It doesn't matter because the second I see his face, every good thing about this day disappears.
The warmth from laughing with Priya five minutes ago, the calm I'd built all morning, patient by patient, smile by smile, telling myself I was okay, that the nightmare was just a nightmare, that today was going to be fine. All of it, gone. Just gone.
We make eye contact. His face shifts with recognition. He opens his mouth, starts to call my name, and I don't think, I just turn and speedwalk toward the elevator and press the button.
I turn, and I can see him trying to get through the lobby, but there's a group of visitors between us, a family with a wheelchair, people signing in at the desk. The doors open and I dive in, then frantically press the button like that's going to make the doors close faster.
Hurry up. Close close close.
They shut.
I lean against the back wall, and my heart is going so hard I can feel it in my throat, in my wrists, behind my eyes.
He saw me. He definitely saw me. And if he recognized me, then he knows I'm here, and if he knows I'm here, he could tell someone, and if he tells someone, then he'll know exactly where I am. And it'll all be over.
All of it gone in the time it takes one person to send a text.
I'm already writing the message in my head.
The one David sends. Hey, you'll never guess who I ran into.
Just gossip. He wouldn't even think twice about it.
He doesn't know what it means. He doesn't know that a text like that is a map with my location pinned on it, handed to a man who has been looking for me since I left.
The elevator moves. I don't know what floor I pressed. I'm standing with my back against the wall, the cold of the steel doing nothing to calm me down. I'll have to transfer again. New hospital, new city maybe, start over from scratch.
I know when the doors open, when they start to close again, and when a hand reaches in to stop them, but when that hand touches my arm, I flinch so hard I slam myself into the elevator wall.
My shoulders smart from it, my hands come up, and my body braces.
My breath is coming too fast, and the elevator is too small, and I'm not here anymore.
I'm back in that apartment. The door with the hole in it.
The sound of knuckles through wood. The calm voice explaining why this is my fault.
"Hey." Logan's voice. It's low, steady, and close, but not too close. "Hey. It's me. Are you okay?"
I try to answer, but my voice won't come, so I just nod. My hands are still up, so I force them down, force my shoulders away from the wall, force my body into something that looks like a person who's fine.
"Kristen." My name, not Portland. My actual name said so gently, so carefully, that it pulls me back inch by inch. I look at the elevator, then the buzzing light above us, and finally, his face, concerned but calm. "Are you okay?"
I take a breath. Then another. His voice helps. His face, too, familiar in a way I didn't know I needed right now. He's just standing there, two steps back, hands at his sides, not pushing, just present.
Then I realize what I must look like. Wild-eyed, pressed into the corner of an elevator, flinching from a touch like a wounded animal. In front of my attending. In front of Logan.
"Yes. I'm fine. Sorry, I just…" I shake my head. "Excuse me."
I push past him and walk fast until I find an empty supply room.
I close the door, lean against it, and just breathe.
My hands are shaking, and I press them flat against my thighs until they stop.
The floor is cold through my shoes. The shelves are lined with gauze and saline bags and IV tubing, neat rows of things that make sense, that have labels and purposes and never do anything unexpected, and I count them because counting helps.
Because counting is something my brain can do when everything else is a mess.
It takes two minutes, maybe three, for the shaking to stop. My breathing evens out and I'm back.
And as the panic ebbs, if only for the moment, my brain returns to the way Logan looked at me in that elevator.
There was no confusion, no annoyance, no demand for an explanation.
Only concern. I was spiraling and pathetic, and he didn't look at me like I was broken or crazy or someone he needed to report to the administration.
He looked at me like you'd look at a friend who needs a little grace.
He used my first name, too. He's never done that before.
When I step back out, I'm functional. Barely, but functional.
Every sound feels louder than it should, and every set of footsteps behind me makes my shoulders tense.
I chart, check on patients, and smile when people talk to me, but underneath I'm scanning every room I walk into, checking every face, tracking every exit.
I'm rounding a corner too fast and I walk straight into Brennan. His charts go everywhere, papers scattering across the floor.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry." I'm already crouching to pick them up.
"No, no, that was totally on me." He drops down too, scrambling for the pages. "I wasn't looking where I was going."
"It was me. I was distracted."
"No, seriously, I was buried in my charts, I didn't even see you—"
"Brennan." I hand him a stack. "It's fine. We're both fine. Nobody's at fault."
He blinks at me. "Right. Yeah. Sorry."
"You just apologized again."
"Sorry." He winces. "That was the third one. I'll stop."
“You good?”
He smiles.
I smile back. He clutches the papers to his chest like they might try to escape again, and gives me a small, sheepish nod before hurrying off down the hall.
Something about the sheer awkwardness of it loosens the knot in my chest, just a fraction. Not enough to fix anything, but enough to keep moving.
The shift ends. I change out of my scrubs in the locker room, pull my jacket on, check my bag twice for my keys, my phone, and my pepper spray.
I always check twice. I head toward the bus stop five minutes away, and the evening air hits my face, cool and clean, so I think, okay. You made it. You're out. Just get home.
It's dark and the street is quieter than I'd like. Most of the day shift left an hour ago. The streetlights are on, but they only cover so much, and the gaps between them feel longer than they should.
I have only taken a few steps when I hear them. Footsteps behind me. Fast, like someone closing the distance.
My stomach clenches. The sidewalk is half-empty, someone is walking toward me too fast, and my brain doesn't process who or why. It just processes a threat.
My hand goes into my bag and closes around the pepper spray. My thumb finds the trigger. I've carried it every day since I left, but I've never had to use it. I always thought when the moment came, I'd hesitate.
I don't hesitate.
When the footsteps reach me and a hand grabs my shoulder, I spin and press down.
Direct hit.
"ARGH!"
My heart drops through the floor.
Logan Maxwell is doubled over in front of me, one hand clamped over his eyes, the other gripping his knee. His glasses are hanging from his collar where he must have tucked them after work hours, and his face is scrunched.
The only thought that survives my scattered brain is I just pepper-sprayed my attending.