I leave at eight, shower at my apartment, change into fresh scrubs, and drive to Ruby Memorial for a noon shift.
The whole drive I'm replaying things—his mouth, his hands, the way he saidI'm not sorrylike it was the bravest thing he'd done in years.
My body still feels like it belongs to someone else.
I grip the steering wheel and tell myself to focus because I have patients who need me to be a professional and not a woman still feeling last night in her thighs.
I check on Haley Briggs first.
She's been moved out of the ICU—still in the hospital, still weak, but breathing on her own.
Her mother is at her bedside, red-eyed and exhausted and holding her daughter's hand like if she squeezes hard enough she can keep her in this world by force.
I've seen that grip a hundred times. It never gets easier.
"She's doing well," I tell the mother. "She's strong."
"She's sixteen," the mother says. "She shouldn't have to be strong."
I don't have an answer for that. I never do.
My shift is brutal—a car accident, two chest pain cases, a toddler who swallowed a quarter, and another OD that we catch early enough to reverse before it goes sideways.
The rhythm of the ER takes over, the way it always does, and I let it carry me.
There's comfort in the work.
There's comfort in being needed, in being useful, in being the person who shows up when everything falls apart.
But for the first time, being needed doesn't feel like enough.
Not after last night. Not after waking up in a bed where someone wanted me—not my skills, not my steadiness, not what I could fix.
Justme.
By the time I get off shift, Garrett is waiting for me at the clubhouse.
Not inside. On the front steps. Sitting with his forearms on his knees and his hands clasped, which is Garrett's version of a bomb about to detonate.
He's in his cut, grease on his forearms and when I walk up, he doesn't stand. "Sit down, Leah."
I sit. Not because he told me to, but because I can hear what's coming and I'd rather face it sitting.
He's quiet for a long moment. "You didn't go home last night," he says.
It's not a question. I don't treat it like one.
"No. I didn't."
"I know where you were."
"I know you do."
Another silence.
He's staring at the parking lot, his jaw working.
The tattoos on his forearms are dark against the grease stains, and he looks so much like the boy who pulled me out of a fire twenty-four years ago that it actually hurts.
