chapter
four
The witching hourin the ER isn't midnight; it's the dead space between two and four in the morning. It's when the city's fever finally breaks, leaving behind a strange, quiet stillness punctuated by the rhythmic beeping of monitors and the occasional soft groan from a curtained-off bay. It's when the exhaustion really settles into your bones.
"How are you holding up?" I asked Chloe, keeping my voice low. We were catching up on charting at the main nurses' station, the glow of the computer monitors painting our faces.
"I think the edge is wearing off," she whispered, her eyes wide. "Everything feels … weirdly quiet. It's creeping me out."
"That's just the night shift settling in," I said. "Don't worry, it never lasts."
As if on cue, the triage doors slid open and a young man, probably early twenties, shuffled in, holding a bloody rag to his upper arm. He was doing a poor job of acting casual, his eyes darting around the empty waiting room as if he expected a SWAT team to rappel from the ceiling.
"I'll take him," I said, nodding to Chloe to follow me.
I led him back to an empty bay, the scent of iron from the blood already sharp in the air. "What's going on tonight?" Iasked, my voice calm and neutral as I pulled on a fresh pair of gloves.
"Uh, roofing injury," he mumbled, not quite meeting my eyes.
"Roofing injury?" I kept my tone conversational, reaching for gauze. "What kind of roofing injury?"
He shifted on the gurney, wincing slightly. "It was, uh... a roofing nailer."
I carefully pulled the rag away from his arm. It was a clean, circular wound. A through-and-through. "A roofing nailer," I said, my tone perfectly even. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 2:15 a.m. "At two in the morning?"
"Yeah," he said, a little too quickly. "Night job. Construction deadline."
"I see." I cleaned the wound, my movements efficient. "That's an interesting diameter for a roofing nail."
The kid just shrugged, his jaw tight.
I dressed the wound. It was superficial, clean, and wouldn't require much more than a good cleaning and some antibiotics. But we both knew what it was. Chloe, standing behind me, knew what it was. The kid knew we knew. But the word "gunshot" was never spoken. Because if he said "gunshot," I'd have to call the cops. The unspoken agreement hung in the air between us:I'll let you call it a roofing nail if you let us stitch you up and keep you from getting a nasty infection.
After he left, with a prescription for antibiotics and strict instructions for wound care, Chloe turned to me, her expression a mixture of confusion and frustration.
"That was a bullet wound," she said, her voice a hushed accusation. "We should have called the police."
I led her to a quiet corner of the nurses' station. "You're right, it was. Looked like a 9mm to me. And you saw how he was looking over his shoulder. He's scared. He's probably in trouble. But our job isn't to be detectives, Chloe. Our job is to treat the patient in front of us."
"But he lied to us!"
"Probably. Maybe hewasroofing; heck, we don’t know. But if he lied, it was because he was afraid," I countered gently. "Gun violence in this city is endemic. Guns are everywhere. But if we start pushing people, if we make them feel like this isn't a safe place, they won't come. He'll go home, pour some whiskey on that wound, and show up here in a week with a raging infection, septic or worse. We have to be a sanctuary. By our very nature, the ER has to make itself vulnerable to be a place people aren't afraid to come to in their most desperate moments. We treat the wound, not the story."
Chloe was quiet for a moment, processing this. I could see her wrestling with the ethical complexity of what we did here — the gray areas that nursing school never quite prepared you for.
"Come on," I said, gesturing toward the supply room. "Let's restock while it's quiet. Night shift rule number one: always be ready for the next wave."
We spent the next twenty minutes refilling the crash carts and checking expiration dates on medications. It was the kind of mundane task that gave your mind time to process what you'd just seen, to file it away in that mental compartment marked "things that happened but we don't talk about."
Around 3 a.m., we got a straightforward case — a middle-aged woman with a kidney stone, writhing in pain. I walked Chloe through starting the IV, drawing labs, and administering pain medication. Within thirty minutes, the woman was resting comfortably, tears of relief streaming down her face.
"Thank you," she whispered, grabbing my hand. "Thank you so much. That was worse than when I had my son."
"Just doing our job," I said, but Chloe caught my eye and I saw her understanding something — that sometimes our job was about more than medical care. Sometimes it was about witnessing someone's pain and making it stop.
We were back at the nurses' station, Chloe practicing her documentation while I reviewed lab results, when Carly appeared looking harried.
"I need a coffee," she announced. "This shift is testing me. Mrs. Patterson in Bay 6 has asked me four times if we can call her psychic to consult on her diagnosis."
