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You’ve been eating her cooking for over a year. The fact that you still can’t tell the difference is a genuine embarrassment.

I’m a budding psychiatrist. I read minds, not marinades.

Go home.

I lock the phone and sit in the quiet with the three conversations I’m not ready to have sitting in my pockets. Rosa’s sticky note. Luke’s six words. Saturday, 10:00, comfortable shoes and a champagne fridge.

Something is building. I can feel it in the architecture of the days, the way you feel a diagnosis before the labs come back. The apartment is too small. The conversations keep surfacing and diving. My father is planning something involving stairs and a bathtub of suspicious dimensions. My mother-in-law is knitting.

And I am sitting here, holding an empty Tupperware, trying to figure out the exact moment our happy little life started needing more rooms.

Chapter 2

The Brownstone

LUKE

The construction worker comes in screaming, which is the first good sign.

The quiet ones are the ones you worry about. The screamers have blood pressure, airway, and enough fight left to be angry about what just happened to them. This guy – Garza, forty-six, scaffolding accident, rebar through the forearm – is furious. He’s swearing in Spanish, which I catch in fragments because my mother raised me bilingual whether I wanted to be or not, and what he’s saying about his foreman is creative, anatomically specific, and probably justified.

“Bay Two! Move.”

The ER’s already running hot – a three-car pile-up on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway(BQE), every bay full, triage backed up to the waiting room. The break room coffee ran out at 09:00, which means the floor’s running on adrenaline and spite.

My residents today are Rodriguez and Hoang. Rodriguez is solid. Hoang is smart but green, and she’s been staring at the rebar since Garza rolled in, which means her brain has left the building and her body’s standing there holding a suture kit we don’t need.

“Hoang.” I snap my fingers. Not unkind, but sharp enough to land. “Eyes on me. Not on the metal. Distal pulses, every ninety seconds. If either drops, you don’t think, you yell.”

She blinks. She moves.

“Rodriguez – vitals, two doses of morphine, titrate. He’s loud because he’s awake, not because he’s dying.”

“Got it.” Rodriguez is already hanging the bag.

Garza’s face is grey under the construction dust. He’s gripping his own forearm with his good hand, holding the injury steady – he’s been hurt on a job before.

“Doc.” He locks eyes with me. “Am I keeping the arm?”

“You’re keeping the arm.”

“Yeah? Because the last guy who said that was my foreman, and he also told me the scaffolding was code-compliant.”

“I’m not your foreman. I’m the guy who’s going to fix it while OSHA tears your foreman a new asshole. The steel missed the artery. Your hand’s pink and your fingers have feeling – that’s the part that matters. We get pictures, then ortho pulls this thing out the right way. Right now, hold still and tell me about the foreman. I want to hear the rest.”

Garza almost laughs. It comes out wet and pained, but it’s a laugh. “You don’t want to hear the rest, doc. It’s not polite.”

“Listen, I’m from Queens. Nothing shocks me.”

I page radiology and keep him talking, because a patient who’s talking is a patient who’s conscious, breathing, and oriented.

Jax appears in the bay. He doesn’t announce himself – he materialises, six-foot-two, built for carrying people out of burning vehicles, which he has in Afghanistan. Protein bar in one hand, chart in the other. He takes one look at the rebar, takes a bite of the protein bar, and whistles appreciatively.

“Nice entry angle. Clean steel?”

“Brand-new industrial rebar. Smooth.”

“Films?”