I open the door.
Leah's standing on my porch in jeans and a sweater—not scrubs, not coming from work.
Her hair is down for the first time I've seen, falling past her shoulders, lighter than Garrett's. Her eyes are red-rimmed.
"Haley?" I ask immediately.
"Stable. Still critical, but stable." She pauses. "I lost a patient tonight. Not Haley. Someone else. A man, forty-two, father of three. Same shit, different batch. He didn't make it."
She's not crying. Mercers don't cry.
But she's standing on my porch with her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes raw, and her whole body carrying something she came here to set down, and she chose my porch.
She choseme.
"Come inside," I say.
She comes inside. I close the door.
The house is dark except for the kitchen light and the glow from the porch, and she stands in my hallway looking smaller than I've ever seen her—this woman who holds people together for a living, who runs trauma bays and talks down overdose patients and never flinches, standing in my hallway with her arms crossed and her chin trembling.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I shouldn't have—it's late, and you've got enough going on, and I don't even know why I'm here?—"
"Leah."
She stops.
"You don't have to explain why you're here."
Her chin stops trembling.
Her eyes find mine in the low light, and what I see in them is the same thing I've been carrying all day—exhaustion, fear, grief, and underneath all of it, the desperate need to be near someone who understands.
Someone who carries the same weight. Someone who won't ask you to explain why you're falling apart because they're falling apart too.
"Do you want coffee?" I ask.
She shakes her head.
"Tea?"
She shakes her head again.
"What do you need?"
She looks at me for a long time. Then she says, very quietly, "I need to not be strong for five minutes."
Something in my chest cracks wide open.
I cross the space between us. Two steps. That's all it takes—two steps to close the distance I've been keeping since the night on the porch, two steps to reach her, two steps to do what I should have done when I had her hand in mine and her eyes on my mouth and the whole universe holding its breath between us.
I pull her into me.
She resists for about half a second—one last gasp of Mercer stubbornness—and then she breaks.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
She just folds into my chest and her hands grab the front of my shirt and she holds on like I'm the only solid thing in a world that won't stop moving.
