Eight
I hate the ER. Everyone who knows me professionally knows it, and those who know me well know why. They know something broke during my residency, which drove me to walk out of emergency medicine and into psychiatry. They’ve also learned not to ask.
Everything here is consequence, but I prefer what comes before. The slow, quiet unraveling of a mind, not the physical rupture of a body on a trauma bed.
There’s time in psychiatry. Sometimes not enough, but time. Time to notice a change or to ask another question.
I push open the ER doors anyway.
I find Beckett at the nurses’ station, wearing dark blue scrubs, with three patient files open in front of him.
“Beckett.”
He looks up, his dark eyes assessing me for a second before dropping back to the chart. “What are you doing down here? Did you lose a patient, or did you just get lost?”
“Consult for the liaison service,” I lie, resting an elbow on the counter. “Following up on admission notes.”
It’s not even a good lie. The liaison team has its own office two floors up. Beckett knows that. I know Beckett knows it. Apparently, we’ve agreed to let me embarrass myself at my own pace.
He nods. “Fascinating. Do it upstairs next time. You’re ruining the ambiance down here.”
I glance at my watch.
11:28 a.m.
I have a stack of patient charts waiting on my desk upstairs, two grant proposals due by five, and a department head who expects me to be coherent at an afternoon budget meeting. I’m too busy to stand in an emergency department corridor on a Thursday morning, fishing for information.
I schedule my days in fifteen-minute blocks. Rowan Callahan has somehow become an unscheduled twenty-seven.
I could do without the distraction of a stubborn painter who refuses to follow standard intake protocol, but until I understand what she’s doing in my study, she remains an unresolved variable.
I dislike unresolved variables. Particularly redheaded ones.
The problem is figuring out how to get the information I need without raising any red flags with Beckett. He’s spent years watching me analyze human behavior. The second I ask a targeted question about someone’s personal life, he’ll know something is up.
Subtlety is required.
I clear my throat. “How was the trauma rotation last night? You guys look slammed.”
Beckett doesn’t even look up from his chart. “Fine.”
“Get any sleep?”
“Two hours on a cot in the breakroom.” He flips a page. “Hudson, if you’re trying small talk, stop. It’s unnatural.”
Fair. I once worked with Beckett for fourteen straight hours before realizing he’d gotten engaged. I’m not known for being conversational.
I need something completely innocuous that wouldn’t make him suspect I’m tracking a specific five-foot-four data-integrity hazard.
“So,” I say. “How’s wedding planning going?”
He finishes his signature, snaps the binder shut, and turns to face me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“What? I’m your best man.”
“You told me three days ago that your responsibilities begin and end with ensuring I arrive.”
“I’ve reconsidered the scope of the role.” I shift my weight. “How many people are we looking at?”
“A hundred and twenty.”
“Callahans?”
“Mostly.”
“Madison’s siblings?”
Beckett’s eyes narrow.
“Generally,” I add quickly. “I need to know who I’m dealing with.”
“You’ve met all of them. I mean, you carried one of them home after our engagement party.”
“Nothing happened. I told you that.”
“And now you’re standing in my ER, asking questions about my fiancée’s siblings.”
“I’m asking about the wedding.”
I should leave. I’ve already pushed this too far, and Beckett’s bullshit detector has been annoyingly accurate since medical school.
Unfortunately, I came down here for an answer.
“Are you giving everyone plus-ones?”
“Madison handles numbers.”
“Right.”
“Ask Madison.”
Absolutely fucking not.
He looks at me the same way he did back in our third year of residency, right after I pulled out of the trauma rotation. He has a very specific look for when he catches on to something and is just waiting for me to admit it.
A slow, obnoxious smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“Noah is a lone wolf,” he says. “Why? Interested?”
I shrug. “He’s a handsome man.”
Beckett lets out a dry snort. “Pretty sure Griffin is about to buy a ring for Piper. Rowan is single.”
Single.
I knew it. She’s a therapy crasher.
“Right.” I push off the counter. “Good to know for the seating chart.”
There is no universe in which the best man needs the relationship statuses of individual bridesmaids for a seating chart. Beckett knows this. Judging by his expression, he’s enjoying watching me figure it out.
“What?”
“You asked whether Rowan has a plus-one.”
“I asked whether everyone has a plus-one.”
“After coming down four floors to a department you hate. Isn’t she a little young for you?”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Excuse me?”
He immediately holds up both hands. “Nope. Never mind. She’s twenty-six, and you’re thirty-seven. You’re both adults. I don’t care.”
“You’re eight years older than Madison. Eleven years is not—”
Too late. I register the defense I’ve just constructed. Nobody asked for a defense.
This is getting out of hand.
I don’t care that Rowan is twenty-six.
I don’t care that she’s single.
Actually, I care very much that she’s single because she’s sitting in my study.
Data integrity.
That’s why I came down four flights of stairs.
That’s why I asked about a wedding.
That’s why the word single produced an entirely inappropriate amount of satisfaction.
Data integrity.
Not her hair.
Not the fact that she’s beautiful.
Not the eleven-year age difference I have apparently just defended to a man who never accused me of wanting to sleep with her.
Fuck my life.
“I’ve got a two o’clock intake,” I tell Beckett.
He glances at the clock above the nurses’ station. “It’s eleven-thirty.”
“Pre-session prep.”
He laughs, shaking his head as he points the closed chart at my chest. “You’re a terrible liar, Doc. Always have been.”
I turn on my heel and head toward the exit.
Rowan is single. Or, at the very least, her future brother-in-law believes she is.
That doesn’t prove anything. People hide their relationships from their families all the time.
But it doesn’t fit. Nothing about her does.
The way she sat in that room, the blank sections on her paperwork, her refusal to contribute, the sketchbook.
She didn’t look heartbroken. She looked trapped.
I’m just not ready.
Maybe she meant exactly what Webb thought she meant. Maybe she has someone.
Or maybe Littlest Callahan is full of shit.