When our plates are empty, I start to gather them. Lucy pushes to her feet, plucks the dishes from my hand,deposits them in the sink, then beckons me toward the living room.
“Come with me.” She moves to the couch, settles back against the cushions, and spreads her legs, pointing to the floor between them. “Sit. Shirt off.”
I blink at her.
“For a massage,” she adds, lips twitching. “Targeted therapy, I think you called it. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it professional. Mostly. You’ve taken such good care of everyone else today. Let me take care of you.”
I ease onto the floor, then pull my shirt overhead. “I’m so tired, I can’t even fight you on this.”
Lucy reaches for the lotion on the side table, squirts some into her hands, then rubs them together. The first touch is gentle, tentative, but firm. Her thumbs dig into the knots between my shoulders, and I can’t stop the groan that escapes.
“You’re so tense,” she murmurs. “Like concrete that’s been setting for years.”
“Long day.”
“Long life,” she corrects softly.
Her palms are soft but sure, lotion warming between us until it disappears into nothing but her touch. She works each muscle with care, learning the map of my day one knot at a time. My muscles unlock one by one, like she’s found some secret combination I never knew existed.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Your day.”
The answer to that has always beenno.
No, I don’t want to talk about my day. People hear the first ugly detail and check out. And if I let myself admit how heavy the rest of it is, I’m not sure I’d make it through the next shift.
But with Lucy?
Maybe it’s my full belly, or the way her hands are coaxing years of tension out of my shoulders, or maybe it’s just her… soft, steady, impossible to hide from. Whatever it is, the words I’ve swallowed for years start pouring out of me. I tell her everything. And once the details of the day are out, something deeper slips free—something I’ve never said out loud.
“I went into emergency medicine because I wanted to meet people on their worst day and have the answers. I wanted to be the person who doesn’t flinch at the ugly stuff. Someone who can hold the line when everything falls apart.”
My voice cracks, just slightly. “And Idothat. Those patients—the ones who look at me like I’m their last hope—they remind me why I’m here. Why I keep showing up.”
I swallow hard.
“But then there’s the rest of it. The administrative red tape. The insurance fights. The quotas and metrics and satisfaction scores. All this noise that makes me feel less like a doctor and more like a cog in a machine that cares about money more than people.”
The confession hangs there—heavy, unfamiliar.
I’ve never said this out loud. Not once.
Lucy’s hands still, then soften. “That’s what you were for me,” she whispers. “When I was there. Everything in my life was crashing down, and you were calm. You were steady. You knew exactly what I needed to hear, even when I didn’t like what you had to say?—”
“Or how I said it,” I mutter.
She laughs, warm and light. “Theremightbe a little room for improvement in your bedside manner. But Nash… you’re incredible. You show up every day even when it costs you something. I can feel how much you carry. I see how tired you are, how much you give, how little you keep for yourself. That has to matter. Itdoesmatter.”
The words hit like she pressed her palm right against a bruise I’ve hidden for years.
I breathe out, a long, shaky exhale, and something inside me—some tightly knotted thing—finally loosens. Her hands knead the stiff muscles of my back, and it’s like my armor, the careful layers I’ve built over a decade in the ER, finally split along their worn seams.
“Thank you,” I say quietly. “For seeing that.”
Silence settles—comfortable, weighted, full of things we’re both still learning how to say. Then, softly:
