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Samira Mohan is an exceptionally good doctor. She is smart and discerning and observant. She is a good judge of character. Excellent, even.
When she was twenty-one, Samira Mohan was none of those things.
When she was twenty-one, Samira Mohan fell hard for a man with freckles and curls and a grin that stopped her in her tracks. When she was twenty-one, Samira Mohan got married and immediately realized that she probably shouldn't have done that.
When she was twenty-nine, Samira Mohan's ex-husband rolled back into her life on a gurney with that same stupid grin on his face.
"Jack," he's gray now. He wasn't gray when they met, but now his auburn brown hair has faded to almost entirely silver. She imagines it would suit him if there wasn't so much blood in it. "to what do I owe the displeasure?"
Maybe it's a mean thing to say when he's actively being loaded out of an ambulance, but Samira really cannot bring herself to care. He's upright and breathing, so in the grand scheme of things, the situation can't be that bad. And you're allowed to be rude to your ex-husband—it's one of the big perks of getting divorced before you graduate med school. It's the participation prize of a failed marriage.
"Hey there, gorgeous." Jack sounds pained. She can practically hear the rattle in his lungs. He's wearing a C-collar and his paramedic uniform, but the entire left sleeve has been ripped off. The buttons have been undone in the front, and his white tanktop has been cut straight down the middle. Samira can't help but wince at the sight of his road rash. There's a wide, angry patch of exposed fascia across his arm, dotted with asphalt and detritus. Even from five feet away, she can tell his wrist is broken. His lip is split. He has contusions and lacerations to his face and, she would venture to guess, the rest of his skull.
He looks like shit, and he's grinning at her.
What an absolute asshole.
"You know this guy?" Trinity asks.
Samira rolls her neck, taking a long inhale. "I did a long time ago, yes. What have we got here?" She's only half listening as they rattle off his vitals because, just as she suspected, he's fine. Injured but fine.
She'll have to order a fuck ton of imaging. Someone will need to clean out all the lacerations on his face; the one above his right eye will need stitches. Someone will need to clean out his road rash and pick out all the asphalt. He's almost certainly concussed, but he's fine. He's certainly been in worse shape.
He's not bad enough to need a trauma room, but he's too messed up to sit in triage. Samira walks alongside him as Jack is rolled into an exam room. She can feel the stares of Trinity and Donnie sitting on her skin, burrowing under her scrubs.
"I told them to take me to Presby," Jack says. Maybe against her better judgment, she believes him because his shoulders are slumped, and his voice is half a step higher than it would typically be. There was a time when she felt like she could hear his thoughts. When she was so in tune with him that they breathed in tandem. But those moments were few and far between. Samira could recognize that, even through the haze of nostalgia.
She spent most of her time begging him to let her in. He spent most of his time refusing.
"You don't want to go to Presby," Trinity says.
"What even happened?" Samira asks, "I didn't think you worked in this district."
"I was driving back home after a shift. Watched a MVA happen right in front of my eyes," he says. "I had my go bag with me, so I pulled over to help."
Samira scoffs, and she can see Trinity's shocked reaction out of the corner of her eye. "You still keep that in your car?"
"Your MVA victim got here in one piece, didn't she?"
Trinity stands straighter, her hands grasping at either side of her stethoscope. "You did the field crike?"
Samira feels a little bit stupid for not putting it together herself as soon as their patient rolled in. He all but signed the woman's forehead. "I should have known. You're the only person brazen enough to try something like that." He looks obnoxiously proud of himself. "And then what happened?"
"I got clipped. Minivan sent me flying." Jack smiles again, this time his attention focused on Trinity. "Well, I got clipped first. Then I performed the cricothyrotomy."
"You're going to get yourself killed."
"You haven't done it yet." She swears his voice echoes.
Samira bites down on her tongue before she can say anything she'll regret when the dust of his sudden arrival settles. She grasps the sides of her tablet with all her strength, willing it to break in her hands. To shatter right here in front of Jack and Trinity and Donnie. Then, they'll have something else to gossip about. "Alright, Donnie is going to take your history and get you started on some fluids." Samira takes stock of him once more before they leave. His injuries, his frame, the pained but proud expression on his face. "No jokes asking if you'll be able to keep the leg. Donnie is busy. He doesn't have time for that."
"It's nice to see you, Mira."
"Don't start with the nicknames." She warns.
Samira turns on her heels, striding out the door as quickly as her legs will allow her. The department seems a notch too bright as she crosses through the door frame. Trinity is right behind her, literally stepping on the backs of Samira's shoes. "Who the fuck is that guy?"
What a question. "That is Jack Abbot."
She has never wanted anyone to stop speaking more than she wants Trinity Santos to stop speaking at this exact moment. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"
Samira sighs. Despite the December chill, the air in her lungs is hot. Her breath feels humid in the space in front of her. She had planned on never speaking about Jack with her colleagues. Ever. She didn't think about him. They didn't need to either. They didn't need to know he existed, but here he was, smugly existing. "Jack is my ex-husband."
"Funny."
"I wish it was a joke." Samira says.
"Samira, he's old," Trinity balks.
She braces herself against the Hub, letting her head hang limply between her shoulders. "Yeah, I know." The chaos of the bullpen continues on around her. Everyone else goes about their day. Samira tries to identify five things she can see, four things she can touch.
"Everything alright, Dr. Mohan?" Robby's disembodied voice asks as if she doesn't have enough problems to deal with.
"Samira's husband is here," Trinity says immediately. "He's ripped and old."
"Husband?" Robby asks in the same tone he uses when a teenager in triage swears they don't drink and don't smoke. A paternalistic sort of disbelief as if he might ground her for lying or for daring to hide something from him.
"This is my worst nightmare," Samira says more to herself than to either Trinity or Robby. This will be fodder for the nurse's station within the next two minutes. Maybe three, if she's lucky or if there's traffic. She stands back up, her hands still pressed against the counter of the Hub.
Robby has his arms crossed. "I didn't know you were married."
"Ex-husband. " Samira says. She looks at Trinity with as much weighty significance as she can manage. "Ex-husband. Can everyone keep their voices down, please?"
"Should I remove you from this case?" Robby asks.
His offering is almost kind. "No, it's fine," Samira says. "I don't want him annoying anyone else."
She was twenty-one when they met. Twenty-one and tipsy. It was pouring outside, rain coming down in warm, heavy sheets that rocked against the windows. The bar was quiet. Music droned low and familiar. There were only seven or eight people in the entire building. Samira's date had texted her fifteen minutes late to ask for a 'literal raincheck.'
She was two drinks deep when she spotted him at the other end of the bar. Curly hair frizzy from the rain, freckles, broad shoulders, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
'Yes,' she thought, draining her glass. 'Yes, you'll do.'
His eyes caught on hers as she approached. He was older than her. She didn't know at the time that he was fifteen years older, just that he was clearly not a college kid.
"Can I buy you a drink?" He leaned back in his seat, taking her in unabashedly. She felt a spark instantly, a pull like they were magnets. Like someone had stitched them together long ago and set them loose in the world without informing them that had ever happened.
Samira knew it was a bad idea, but he was handsome, and she had just shaved her entire body for a boy in the Pre-Law fraternity. She took the seat next to his. "You can buy me two."
He did right then, telling the bartender to put all of Samira's drinks on his tab. "What's your name?" He asked when her first drink–well, her third drink, really, was firmly in her grasp.
"I'm Samira."
"Samira." He turned over her name like it was something precious. He committed it to memory right there in front of her. "I'm Jack." He placed his hand on the back of her chair. "What's a beautiful girl like you doing in a bar all alone?"
"Tonight?" She asked. "Tonight, I'm being stood up."
"I find that hard to believe."
She really had been tipsy that night. A little too loose, a little too honest. "Me too. I'm going to be a doctor one day," She had said, a little overconfident. "Emergency Medicine."
"Yeah?" There had been no hint of amusement in his voice. No condescension, no disbelief.
Samira nodded. "Yeah."
"You're something else, Samira." Her name again, hanging from his lips like it belonged there. Like she had been named Samira just so he could say it.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It's not supposed to mean anything." He said.
She leaned forward a few inches, hooking her chin over her own shoulder. "Tell me about you, Jack. I get the feeling you're not a student."
"I'm a paramedic," He said simply. Like that was all anyone would need to know about him. That was his story in full.
"So you'll be bringing me all my patients?" Samira asked.
She'd never be able to forget the way he looked at her in that moment. The way his gaze dipped to her lips before returning to her eyes. She watched a swallow travel down the column of his throat. She felt his hand tighten on the back of her chair. "Only if I'm lucky."
Robby looks at her over his glasses, studying her like she's a rash he can't make sense of. "You really shouldn't work on family."
"He's not family," Samira says through gritted teeth. No one was ever supposed to find out about Jack. He was a blip. He was her crisis of faith. She was his mid-life crisis. There was no reason her coworkers needed to hear about it. "I barely know him."
Trinity attempts to disguise her laugh as a cough. "Jesus, that's a lot to unpack."
"I haven't seen him in four years." Samira pushes away from the Hub. "I'm getting back to work." The sooner Jack is treated, the sooner Jack is gone, she reasons.
He's laughing with Donnie when Samira approaches South 16. Of course, he is.
Jack Abbot has always been fine and always will be.
Jack Abbot always has his head firmly above water. He never needs help, not actually. He doesn't need anyone aside from himself. He doesn't need to let anyone in. Ever. Jack Abbot is both a man and an island, and he likes it that way. He prefers isolation. Thrives there, allegedly.
He liked Samira plenty. Loved her, probably. He liked Samira, just not enough to tear down any walls. Not enough to tell her anything. Certainly not enough to entrust her with his thoughts, or god forbid, his feelings. He didn't need her. It was always so important to him that she knew Jack Abbot did not need her.
By the looks of it, he still doesn't.
Good. It's not like she's ever needed him, either.
Glancing down at his chart, it seems like he was honest during his initial history with Donnie, which honestly surprises her. "You're in line to get a CT. I've ordered an X-ray for your arm, too. That wrist is worrying me." Worrying her because it is, undoubtedly, super broken.
"I thought you had excellent bedside manor?"
"I do." She says, "On a scale from one to ten, how's the pain?"
Jack considers it for a moment. "Five."
"Is that an actual five or a Jack Abbot five?" He doesn't respond, which answers her question immediately. Samira turns to Donnie, choosing to ignore his poor attempt at looking neutral. "Can we get him started on some low-dose morphine while we wait for imaging?" She takes a few steps closer to his bedside and slides her stethoscope from her neck. "Lean forward for me."
After glancing at her, Jack complies, grimacing as he leans forward. She presses the diaphragm of her stethoscope against his back. "Breath sounds are even." It's astonishing, honestly, considering he got hit by a car, but then she wouldn't expect anything less from him. "You can sit back."
Samira does a double take as he settles back into the pillow behind him. His right pupil is blown. Was it blown earlier, and she didn't notice? "Are you experiencing any dizziness?"
"I guess."
Samira pulls her penlight from her pocket. "Nausea?"
He huffs. "I just got hit by a car."
"Squeeze my fingers for me." Her pulse kicks up a notch as he attempts to squeeze her fingers. The strength on his right side is almost non-existent. She moves to the end of his bed. "Press against my hands with your feet." Loss of strength on the right. "Donnie, I need you to call down to imaging and bump him to the front of the line. He needs a head CT right now."
"Samira?" Her name sounds so familiar in his mouth.
"You've just picked up a patient who experienced head trauma. They're dizzy with uneven pupils, light sensitivity, and a loss of strength on one side of their body. What's your first thought?" He doesn't answer immediately. "Come on, medic, how many hours did you spend helping me study? Let's hear a potential diagnosis."
Jack attempts to cock his head in his C-collar. "Brain bleed."
"Excellent recall. Good sign." He used to sit on the bathroom floor and quiz her with index cards when she was in the bath. She learned the Krebs cycle while washing her hair. Does he remember that?
"They can get a tech up here in five minutes," Donnie says. It feels far too long, though Samira knows it's not. She knows that five minutes will not kill him. Probably. It will take fifteen more minutes for the scans to be read and analyzed. Five minutes will not kill him.
"Could be a concussion," Jack says.
"I'm sure you are concussed." Undeniably.
"Could be a migraine." He offers.
"Have you ever had a migraine before?"
Jack reaches out for her hand, and somehow, Samira allows him to intertwine her fingers with his. Their palms slot together in a way that is ancient and forgotten and familiar. Nearly half a decade since she's held his hand, and yet she knows that she'd be able to pick his hand out of a thousand others. She would know Jack Abbot in a crowd. In a dark room. At the ends of the earth.
They got married two months after they met. It certainly wasn't Samira's brightest idea, but she was young, in love, and lacking a fully developed prefrontal cortex. She couldn't tell you what Jack's excuse was, but now that she was four years removed from the entire situation with a fully matured brain and a medical degree, she had her hypotheses.
Hypothesis one: left grappling with the death of his first wife, the loss of his leg, and a traumatizing career as a first responder, Jack wasn't really thinking when he met her. He wasn't thinking when he married her. He wasn't thinking for the duration of their marriage. He might not be thinking now.
Hypothesis two: Jack saw Samira for exactly what she was that night at the bar. He saw a young woman desperate for attention, love, and approval. He saw how easily she could be swayed. He saw Samira's future in emergency med as an excuse to relive his glory days. He saw her as an opportunity.
Hypothesis three: Jack had loved her. Really, really loved her and knew he wanted to marry her two months in. He'd married her because he wanted to.
Samira didn't know which was worse, only that she didn't want any of them to be true.
"You don't need to worry about me, Mira," Jack says.
She can literally hear Donnie's eyebrows shoot up. "What did I just tell you about calling me that?"
"Memory loss is a symptom of head trauma," he says.
The portable CT moves in, scans, and moves out. Donnie leaves, returns, and leaves again. Samira begins to clean out Jack's lacerations. Jack is silent, his eyes softly closed. This is not a job she should be spending her time on as a Senior Resident. She can feel Robby peek his head inside the room at one point, but he mercifully doesn't say anything. She and Jack sit in silence as she picks grass and asphalt out of his wounds.
"How have you been?" He asks, voice low. He is familiar in a way that makes her bones ache. She wants to punch the teeth out of his mouth. Samira wants to drink him up like he's a glass of wine. His eyes are closed, but he's alert. She can feel the energy coursing through him, thrumming with pointed purpose.
Samira can't help but laugh. "Good. How have you been?"
"Fine," he says. "Can't complain."
"You're always fine, aren't you?"
He smiles. She really, really wants to punch the teeth out of his mouth and hear them scatter across the polished floor underfoot. "When I'm with you, I am."
Samira freezes with her tweezers in her hands. "You need to stop doing that."
"Doing what?" False innocence that used to drive her crazy. Drove her crazy back when she knew him. Before he was the gray-haired, blood-soaked stranger lying in front of her.
"Flirting with me."
Jack opens his eyes, and Samira almost flinches. His uneven pupils, set in hazel irises, look solely at her. "You'll have to put me under for that to happen."
In a twist of fate that honestly extends beyond cliche into farce, they got married in Las Vegas, Elvis impersonator and all. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. Unlike the night she met Jack, Samira was not drunk when they got married. Even in Vegas, there are rules against that.
She'd like to blame the entire ordeal on the July heat zapping all her intelligence. They were on a last-minute trip before Samira started med school in August. A long weekend in Las Vegas. She shouldn't have gone on the trip in the first place. Typically, she wouldn't have considered it at all. He was a man she did not really know. A man who graduated from college the year she graduated from first grade. They were only two months into their relationship, but things felt different with him.
That was always the justification she found herself returning to when Samira tried to make sense of her marriage. He felt different. Like he saw her. Like he loved her. Like he knew something about her that no one else did, and he wasn't scared by it.
Samira had proposed, technically.
She stopped in her tracks outside of one of the countless little white chapels. It wasn't even noon. She looked over at Jack and asked, "If I asked you to marry me right now, would you?" She never would have asked anyone that question. She wouldn't have dreamed of asking someone that question, but Jack was different. He was a piece of her that had been missing all her life.
Jack had just shrugged. "I will marry you right now."
And he did. Eighty dollars, twenty minutes, and one Elvis impersonator later, they were married. Samira Mohan had a husband. Samira Mohan had a husband named Jack Abbot. He loved her. He knew her. Samira loved Jack.
Samira knew nothing about him.
In their hotel room that night, Samira learned that Jack had been married before. That his wife was dead. That felt like something you should probably know about your husband before you marry him. Samira tried to ask about her. What was her name? How did she die? What did she do for a living?
Jack left without answering a single question. She didn't see him again until it was time to check out of their hotel. She read and reread the vows written in her notes app from her half of an otherwise empty king bed. She realized immediately that she was in over her head without anyone to call because no one had ever understood her in the way it felt like Jack Abbot understood her. He was who she would call in this situation.
A honeymoon well spent. A lifelong commitment wrongly made. A long plane ride home.
"Subacute subdural hematoma," Samira tells him. She should have seen it from the beginning. She should have spotted it from a million miles away the second he was unloaded from the ambulance. If she'd been listening to the paramedics when they unloaded him, she probably would have spotted it.
Samira Mohan is an exceptionally good doctor. She is smart and discerning and observant. Except, right now, she is none of those things. Right now, Jack Abbot has her feeling completely unmoored. She's in the wrong place. The space-time continuum has warped or shifted or done something similarly stupid because Jack is here, and she is somewhere else. She is floating, untethered, unsteady, unlike herself.
Everyone can tell. Robby has all but given up on her. After exactly two attempts to steer her back to the board, he stopped dropping by. As a Senior Resident, Samira should be running codes. She should be discharging multiple patients an hour. She has spent nearly every minute since his arrival in Jack's room.
Frank is also working today. It's not as if Samira is the only senior resident.
"Brain bleed?" Jack asks. She nods a bit unnecessarily because she knows that he knows. "Guess all those flashcards were worth it." Samira feels her breath catch at that, but she doesn't know why she cares that he remembers.
"They're going to take you up to surgery sometime in the next thirty minutes. Based on the imaging, Dr. Ballard thinks they can bypass a proper craniotomy and opt for burr holes instead. The recovery is faster, but it's still not fun. You'll need to stay for a few days after the surgery so the blood can continue to drain."
He attempts to sit straighter. "Why do you still look worried?"
"I'm not worried."
"Mira."
"No." She warns again. He doesn't get to waltz in on a gurney and start calling her pet names again. He doesn't get to be someone so familiar that she's knocked off her axis. He hasn't earned that right, and a head injury doesn't change that. "Dr. Ballard is great at her job. Very skilled."
"Why are you worried?" Jack insists.
"Because I worry about you, Jack." She lowers the tablet she has commandeered as a safety blanket. He is injured and broken and here through nothing but luck. He’s here and he still doesn’t get it. "Because you always do stupid shit like this, and it scares the hell out of me. You want to be in harm's way. You want to get hurt. You want to scare me, and then you do. You scare me."
He's quiet now, and part of her thinks good. It's a taste of his own medicine to be shocked speechless. How does he like being on the other end of a surprise? How does he like having the words stolen from his mouth because she had a secret? Salt rubbed in literal wounds. Samira wants it to sting. "Did you ever change your emergency contact? " Jack is still silent. Good. "I'm betting that if you died today, they would have called me to come identify your body."
Samira made a vow to do no harm, but she also made a vow to stay with Jack for the rest of her life. Maybe she's not a vow person. Maybe she's not the kind of person that can make a commitment and mean it. "I have been prepared to get that call every day for the past eight years. Have you ever thought about that? Did you ever think about me before you threw yourself into a burning building or scaled a mountainside or disappeared to god knows where for god knows how long?"
There's a soft knock at the door. Samira is suddenly aware that there are tears pooling in her eyes. She whips her head in the direction of the noise to find the neurosurgery resident. Alex or Alan or something like that. "Sorry to interrupt," he says in the way that contestants on The Bachelor do before they pull America's heartthrob into a corner filled with decorative candles. "But I'm here for a pre-op consult."
Samira wipes under her eyes with the back of her hand. "No, I was just finishing up. You're right on time. Mr. Abbot, this is Doctor…"
"Clayton," the resident supplies.
"This is Doctor Clayton. He'll be able to answer any questions you may have."
She leaves before he can say anything. Before he can call her Mira or grab her hand. Before he can look at her with unevenly dilated hazel eyes and say that he's sorry. He's always sorry. He's always fine. Samira is always there, a victim of the aftermath. A girl stupid enough to love him.
Jack used to disappear. She would feel the bed dip in the middle of the night. She would hear his footsteps retreat. Then he would be gone. The sun would rise, and he wouldn't be there. Samira would walk through their apartment alone, knowing that he wasn't going to be in the living room but hoping against hope that she would find him there anyway.
Samira used to fantasize about sneaking out after him. Stalking after him as he left the apartment and finding exactly what he was getting up to. She wanted to know what was stealing him away. Drugs, an affair, maybe he had an entire second family. Maybe he was in deep with the mob. She'd sort through every possibility and rank them in her mind.
He was always sorry when he came back the next day or the next week. He was so sorry. He was fine, too. Samira didn't need to worry about him. He was fine. He was sorry. She was his wife.
She was twenty-two. She was twenty-three. She was twenty-four.
She was worried.
He was fine. Jack Abbot was always fine.
Samira felt like she was screaming into the void. Pleading with a brick wall.
She wondered if he was just sick of her. If he got tired of being near her and just needed an escape. She pictured him standing on rooftops like he was Batman. Imagined him staring longingly into strangers' windows to get a taste of what his life would be like if he'd never married her. If he hadn't bought her that drink. Or the next drink. Or the next.
The truth was worse than anything she dreamed up. The truth made her want to throw up all over his shoes.
Jack was working.
He was pulling twenty-four-hour shifts in one district. He was picking up extra shifts in the next district. He was spending all his time in the backs of ambulances. He was sleeping in his car while a police scanner droned on his dash. He was driving to accidents and house fires and building collapses with his go bag in hand.
It wasn't sustainable. It certainly wasn't healthy. He thought it was a secret.
His job could be dangerous, she knew that. But she couldn't stomach the idea of him exhausted and undersupplied, dying in some attempt at being a good Samaritan. If he was injured— or worse while on shift, someone would find a way to tell her. She was his next of kin.
There was no chain of command if he snapped his neck trying to wrestle someone out from under a collapsed bridge two counties over. She knew he might disappear one day and never return. He might slip out the door and never come back.
Samira had confronted him about it during her last year of med school. She called out sick to her clinicals and paced the living room until he reappeared with bags under his eyes, fatigue clinging to his shoulders like a second skin. "You can't keep doing this."
"You didn't go to work?"
"You didn't come home."
He had tried to wrap his arms around her. He had actually tried to kiss it better. "Mira, I'm sorry."
"Are you sorry?" She pushed his arms away. She wanted to feel him resist, but he didn't. He didn't fight back. "I'm supposed to believe that you're sorry?"
He looked so tired. Did he not want to sleep next to her? Where had he been? Was he even wearing his dog tags? Half the time, they stayed on his bedside table when he snuck out of the apartment. Like he wanted to be a John Doe in a morgue somewhere.
He caught her hand, rubbing his callused thumb over her knuckles. "Sweetheart, I'll make it up to you."
"How are you going to do that?" She asked. She sounded desperate. She sounded terrified because she was. She always was. It came from some deep well within herself. He didn't answer. He couldn't answer, she suspected. "I need you to stop."
"I can't," he admitted. Part of her knew that already. Knew, deep down, that she was making an impossible request. She asked for something he couldn't give her because she wanted to be wrong.
She let him trace her knuckles as the next words left her mouth. "Then I'm leaving."
"Samira?" She’s crying in the locker room when Trinity finds her.
Samira wants to bang her head against the metal bench beneath her, but then she'd have a head injury, too, and what did that get her other than a psych consult? She sighs with her whole chest. Her ribs rise to her chin. "Yes?"
"Robby's looking for you." Trinity looks over her shoulder as someone yelps in an exam room.
"Perfect."
Trinity takes a few tentative steps forward. The shirt under her scrub top is red today. "Are you okay?"
If Jack got to say it, so did she. "Yeah, I'm fine."
Trinity didn't believe her. Samira wouldn't believe herself either. She presses her shoulder against the nearest locker, crossing one leg in front of the other. "Look, I don't want to spoil anything, but Robby's going to tell you that you can clock out early and go upstairs."
Samira can feel her breath sputtering, her body betraying her. "Why would I do that?"
"Last I heard, your ex-husband is getting brain surgery." Trinity offers.
"They're drilling burr holes."
"Because he has an intracranial hemorrhage."
“It’s a subacute hematoma.”
Trinity holds up a hand. "Is this making you feel better?"
If she hadn't felt Jack's hand in her own, Samira would be tempted to believe she was stuck in a bad dream. An anxiety and panic-fueled nightmare where her elementary school teachers show up to tell her she needs to drive a bus or run for president or something. It all feels so far out of reality. "You guys weren't supposed to know about him."
"Because he's old?" Trinity asks.
"Because he's something I don't like dwelling on." Samira rubs her hands across the front of her pants. "And he's not old, he's forty-five."
Trinity considers that for a moment before shrugging. "You're allowed to care about him even if it's complicated."
She used to study in the park behind their apartment. When the weather was nice, she would pack up her book bag and lay a blanket under the shade of the giant oak trees. Med school was so much harder than she anticipated, but every now and then, she could review her notes outside.
Jack would join her if he was home. On the weekends, he would make them both lunch and carry it down in a picnic basket they found at a thrift store in Chicago. Sometimes, he would help her study. Sometimes, he would just sit beside her. Bask in her company even when her attention was elsewhere. He would put his head in her lap, her fingers running through the curls that caught her eye the first night they met.
Samira would look down at him, tear her eyes away from her notes, and focus instead on the sun-dappled man in front of her. With her notes and their picnic and him, she would think, Yeah, I can see forever with you.
That's probably something you want to confidently feel before you marry someone, but on those afternoons, she did feel confident. Samira believed she could build a life around this man with freckles. They could buy a house. They could start a family. They could sit around a table in a kitchen filled with windows and memories and feed their children. She could have forever with him, this man who memorized every flash card along with her.
So what if he had secrets? He was her husband. She swore in front of Elvis that she would love him for the rest of her life.
She tries to avoid Robby as she clocks out, but she knows it's a lost cause. Samira can sense him looming behind her at the workstation before she sees or hears him.
"Dr. Mohan,"
"Dr. Robby," she shoves her hands in her pockets. She deserves to get yelled at. Part of her wants him to yell at her just so she can have a problem that isn't Jack. She'd like to think about something else.
Robby extends his hand, it's clasped in a loose fist. "I just wanted to give you these. EMTs found them in the ambulance." He gently lowers a set of silver dog tags into her palm.
Abbot
Johnathan M.
9913578420
O Neg
Catholic
He's threaded his wedding band onto the chain. If she wasn't standing in the bullpen, Samira suspects that she might just collapse to the floor and start sobbing all over again.
Jack Abbot has threaded his wedding band onto the chain that holds his dog tags. He's been wearing his dog tags. Wearing his wedding band, by extension. She can't tell if her hands are shaking or her vision. Robby places a careful hand on her shoulder. "Santos is going to walk you upstairs."
Samira nods. She doesn't know if Trinity has been standing beside her the entire time or if she's been magically summoned, but she is here, beside Samira. They take the trauma elevator up to the fourth floor. She comes to her senses in the waiting room. She waves Trinity away because the department is already down one resident, and Trinity should really get back to work. She finds the space to breathe and sniffle among all the other breathing and sniffling people.
She was always so scared this was going to happen.
That she would find herself alone in a waiting room. She was always worried that he would disappear only to reappear injured or dead or, somehow, something worse. In a way, he did. He disappeared for four years and still found a way to put her here.
Samira holds her head in her hands and thinks about sun-dappled Jack Abbot. Thinks about exhausted and missing Jack Abbot. A man she knew entirely and not at all. A man she loved anyway.
The resident, Dr. Clayton, updates her in the waiting room, and the first words out of his mouth are, "He's going to be fine." Samira laughs at that until the other families start glaring at her.
They lead her back to the PACU. Jack is intubated when she gets there, but he starts breathing over the tube quickly. They offer to let Samira extubate, and she has to admit that while she can intubate anyone they throw at her, she hasn't extubated someone since med school. Emergency medicine doesn't spend much time removing airways. She wraps his dog tags around her hand and tangles her fingers in his.
It takes him hours to come to. They assure her that it's perfectly normal. Samira assures them that she knows.
She's almost asleep when he squeezes her hand. "I'm sorry, Mira." His voice is a rasp.
"I know."