Maggie’s head snapped up.
“Don’t.”
The word cut clean through the room.
Evie froze, color flooding her face. “Sorry.”
Silence stretched between them, tight and brittle.
Maggie hated the way her pulse raced. Hated that Evie’s concern had reached somewhere it shouldn’t. Hated that for half a second she’d almost let it.
She turned away, tablet clutched too tightly in her hand.
Some rules existed for a reason.
And this one—distance—wasn’t negotiable.
Not yet.
4
EVIE
Evie Brooks had survived worse moments than being toldDon’t.
She’d survived attendings who made sport of humiliation, residents who treated transfers like intruders, hospitals where you learned quickly that brilliance didn’t protect you from politics. She’d learned how to swallow embarrassment, how to reroute adrenaline into focus, how to keep going even when your chest felt tight with the fear of being one wrong move away from exile.
Still.
This one lingered.
She replayed it as she scrubbed her hands for the fourth time in ten minutes, the scent of antiseptic sharp in her nose. Maggie’s voice—low, clipped. The way the word cut the air. The way the room had seemed to shrink around it.
Don’t.
Not loud. Not cruel.
Worse—controlled.
Evie dissected the moment the way she dissected cases.
What assumption did I miss?
What line did I cross?
Was it the name, or the concern underneath it?
Her jaw clenched.
She hadn’t meant to be familiar. She hadn’t meant to claim anything. She’d just… reacted. Seen something off in Maggie Laurel—tension, distraction, something human beneath the steel—and named it without thinking.
A rookie mistake.
Except Evie wasn’t a rookie.
And that was the problem.
She leaned back against the counter, breathing slowly until the buzzing in her chest settled into something manageable. She couldn’t afford to spiral. Not here. Not now. Oakridge didn’t reward fragility. It rewarded results.
