"Stop."
She stops.
I stare at the chaos. Hundreds of files. Years of patient records, meticulously organized by surname, now scattered in a system that makes sense to exactly one person.
The door chimes.
Mr. Whitfield shuffles in, leaning on his cane. Eighty-three. Diabetic. Weekly glucose check.
"Afternoon, Doc." He squints at the mess. "Spring cleaning?"
"Something of the sort." I turn to Jessica. "Pull Whitfield's file."
Her face goes pale. "Last name Whitfield?"
"Yes."
"So that would be under... W?"
"In a normal system, yes."
She starts frantically searching through the piles. Papers fly. Folders cascade. A stack near the edge of the desk gives up entirely and crashes to the floor.
I take Mr. Whitfield back to the exam room and do his check from memory.
When I return to the waiting room thirty minutes later, Jessica is on her hands and knees, surrounded by a semicircle of files, tears streaming down her face.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm so sorry. I thought I was helping. I thought..."
"Go home."
Her head snaps up. "What?"
"Go home. Come back tomorrow." I crouch down and start gathering files. "I'll fix this."
"Let me help. Please. I made the mess, I need to..."
"You'll make it worse." The words come out harsher than I intended. Her face crumples. Guilt twists in my chest. "Jessica. Go home. Get some rest. Start fresh tomorrow."
A knock on the door makes us both jump. Carlos pokes his head in, takes one look at Jessica's tear-stained face and my rigid posture, and immediately backs up.
"Nope. Whatever this is, I'm not qualified." He starts to leave.
"Carlos," I growl.
"I can come back. I'll come back in an hour, or a day, or whenever the crying stops and everyone's wearing fewer feelings on their faces." He's still backing away.
"Get in here."
Carlos sighs dramatically and enters, closing the door behind him. "Okay, but for the record, I want it noted that I'm very uncomfortable with emotions that aren't my own. What happened?"
"She reorganized my files," I say flatly.
"Oh." Carlos looks at Jessica. "Oh, that's... I mean, that's kind of your thing, isn't it? Organization?"
"I messed up," Jessica wails.
"Okay, no, that's not true. Jess, hey, look at me." Carlos crouches beside her. "You didn't ruin everything. You reorganized one filing system. In the grand scheme of things, that's a two out of ten on the disaster scale."
