And that scared her far more than challenging the wrong attending ever could.
3
MAGGIE
Maggie’s life and career was all about rules.
Not the kind written in hospital policy manuals or laminated and stuck to walls. Hers were quieter, harder-earned. They lived under her skin, enforced by habit and necessity rather than oversight. Rules kept her safe. Rules were familiar.
Do the work.
Don’t flinch.
Never, ever let anyone see how much something mattered.
That was the way she prevented getting hurt.
Oakridge Hospital made those rules easier to keep. The pace demanded competence, not confession. The hallways were always loud enough to drown out feelings if you walked fast and kept your face neutral.
Maggie walked fast. And she always hit 10,000 steps a day.
She crossed the skybridge toward Internal Medicine with long, purposeful strides, tablet tucked under her arm, white coat buttoned neatly. Below her, the city sprawled in every direction—Los Angeles restless and alive, indifferent to the lives being fought for inside the glass-and-steel shell of Oakridge.
Her mind should have been on the day’s admissions.
Instead, it snagged—unwelcome and persistent—on a detail she refused to examine too closely.
Evie Brooks.
New transfer. Sharp eyes. Sharper mouth. A peculiar sense of curiosity washed over her.
And the way she’d looked at Maggie in the hallway the day before—not with awe or fear or deference, but like she was trying to read something Maggie had spent years keeping locked away.
Maggie tightened her grip on the tablet and pushed the thought aside.
There were patients to see. That was all that mattered.
The morning list was long, the fallout from the freeway pileup still rippling through the hospital. Injuries that had seemed manageable at first now complicated by infection, by chronic illness, by bodies that didn’t heal as cleanly as textbooks promised.
Maggie preferred this stage of medicine. The slow unraveling. The decisions that mattered because there were no easy answers left.
In the conference room, residents clustered around the whiteboard, voices low and tense. When Maggie entered, conversation died instantly.
Predictable.
She scanned the group without lingering, cataloguing faces, posture, readiness. Evie stood slightly apart from the others—not defiant, not withdrawn. Alert. Prepared. Arms folded loosely, weight balanced on the balls of her feet like she was ready to move.
Maggie didn’t like how much that pleased her.
“Good morning,” Maggie said, opening the charting app. “We have six discharges pending labs, three new admits overnight, and two ICU step-downs that should’ve been transferred yesterday.”
A few residents groaned.
Maggie let it pass. “Save your energy for the patients.”
She began assigning cases, voice even, efficient. Straightforward admissions went to the interns, complex management to the seniors. She reached the final name on the list and paused.
Carter, Daisy.
