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“Call it.”
Robby’s on the other side of the bed, upright and angled away from her—but his voice is like a gunshot in her ear. Loud. Ringing. She blinks.
“Dr. Mohan. Call it,” he says again.
She is silent. She doesn’t look at Robby, doesn’t look at Whittaker. She’s staring at the face of the man who just this morning was alive; who has a daughter and a wife who love him; who Abbot had gotten those home care supplies to. Just a few hours ago. A lifetime ago.
“Samira—”
“Time of death is 7:48 P.M.”
It’s Langdon who says it—a white knight saving her from another Robinavitch tongue lashing. She wants to throttle them both. She wants to scream and throw the crash cart across the room. She wants to beat her phone fifty times against the wall until the glass shatters into pieces.
But she hears the echo of Robby’s words from earlier: Do you need to go home? I don’t need the fucking liability. The cruelty eats somewhere at the core of her, turning the white hot anger in her blood into a coolant. Do you need to go home? Do you need to go home, Samira?
It infests her, and she lets it.
“Yes,” she says.
It feels like hours have passed since Orlando Diaz coded and died on the table in front of her. Her eyes dart to the clock hanging on the wall, just near the tilt of Robby’s head. It’s been seconds. Only seconds.
“Yes, sorry. Time of death is 7:48.”
She finally manages to look Robby in the eye, and she doesn’t waver when she says, “We’ll have to inform the family. He has a wife and a daughter who were with him earlier. We made sure they were aware of the risks if he chose to leave against medical advice.”
The words are razor blades, aimed to cut through Robby’s skepticism, his incredulity. He still stares at her, through her, and she wonders what it would feel like to carve her hands into his chest—to force his heart to pump at her command. To squeeze the insides of him until she found something worth having.
They continue this for another moment, another second of seconds, before he simply nods.
“You can call them, then. Since they know you already.”
“Yes,” she says—no, no, no. “Of course. I’ll just be a moment.”
She steps out of Trauma 1 and back into chaos. Dana is barking orders at someone while Javadi and Joy have their heads together at the whiteboard. Santos is at her desk, looking particularly despondent.
Family. Samira needs to call the family.
From her pocket, she pulls out the same cell phone she’d been avoiding all day. She’d silenced notifications on it after this morning, but her mother’s insistence had proven that wasn’t enough, either. It’s been turned off for hours now.
Family. Call the family.
“Dana,” she says, forcing each leg in front of the other as she approaches. “Can you get me the number of Orlando Diaz’s wife? He was admitted earlier today.”
“Oh no, the diabetic? He didn’t make it?”
“No, he did not.” The words bite, itch, crawl in her mouth.
Dana clucks her tongue, shaking her head as she starts sorting through papers and charts and whatever else is scattered under the desk. Samira stands still, testing her weight between the balls of her feet. Resisting the urge to scatter.
“Got it here,” Dana finally says. She hands over a piece of paper with sadness in her eyes. Then, concern.
“Thanks.”
“You okay, hun? It’s been a tough day for everyone, and I know—”
“I appreciate it, Dana, but I’m okay. Promise. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Dana says nothing; simply raises an eyebrow and nods. Samira nods back.
Family. Call the family.
She needs to get cell service. As she’s pressing the power button on her phone and moving towards the ambulance bay, a flurry of activity blocks her access to the doors. Trauma incoming; two adults from some car accident. Robby and Al-Hashimi surge toward the gurneys, calling for Whittaker, Javadi, Langdon. Not there—Samira can’t go out there. But she needs service, needs to call them now—
Despite her reputation to the contrary, Samira’s always been a quick thinker. So just as she’s taken a step toward the ambulance bay, she finds herself pivoting to the elevator, striding across the room and slipping inside before anyone can see her.
There’s service on the roof, of course.
When she makes it up there, navigating from the elevator to a dingy stairwell in the hallway to fresh air at the top, she’s almost surprised to find the sun still out.
It’s summer. Fourth of July. How could she forget, even for a second? The sun won’t set for another hour or two. The light, the heat, the humid thrum of the day will linger until you just can’t fucking stand it, and then some.
She wonders if there’s a chance the sun will never go down. If she’ll be forced to stand on this roof and wallow in the forever of this day, this particular fucking day. There’s not even a streak of orange in the sky yet. The night, and her relief with it, are still too far off to bear.
A buzz from her hand jolts her gaze away, and down. Her phone’s turned back on and everything’s coming through now. 15 missed calls from her mother. Double that in text messages. Even the boyfriend’s tried calling her.
Is this a panic attack because of your mommy issues?
Robotically, Samira swipes each notification off the screen. Unlocks her phone. Presses the correct numbers for Mrs. Diaz’s cell.
Time of death: 7:48 P.M.
Samira’s finger hovers over the call button. She is not here, in part.
She is not here with Orlando Diaz. She is there seventeen years ago, when they forced Appa to the ER for some upper back pain, and the doctors brushed him and his accented English and his distraught wife off. She remembers it all so clearly: him in the bed shushing Amma, consoling her even as his hands trembled and gripped at the bed. He was in agony. And then his eyes rolled back into his head and his whole body went rigid.
The machines went wild, and everyone was rushing into the room, doctors upon doctors, nurses upon nurses. Samira and her mother huddled up in the corner, crying and shaking in each other’s arms. Her mother was in her ear, What are they saying? What are they doing to him? Samira could only understand half of what they were shouting back and forth to each other, the panic and the medical jargon twisting their sentences into something unknowable.
She knows now what she could not understand quite then, that her father would not wake up ever again. Appa was gone the minute his eyes rolled back into his head. The heart attack was too far advanced. Maybe if the doctors had recognized the symptoms, if they had taken his pain seriously, they would have realized what was happening fast and helped him. He was saveable.
They called it at 7:38 P.M. She heard them say that loud and clear.
Her hand tightens around the phone. Orlando Diaz is not her father. She needs to call his fucking wife. She needs to put it all aside and be there for her patients, for her patients’ families.
Maybe I just don’t belong here.
Again, Samira looks to the sky. And without much thought, she is moving closer to the edge, to the sounds of the city below. Her hands go to the railing—curl around the hot metal, reveling in the burn of her palms.
She’s heard the rumors about Dr. Abbot and Robby. Knows they follow each other up here sometimes before they do hand-offs, talking each other down from the ledge. She’d never understood the urge before, to jump. Still now, at her lowest, she’s not sure she understands. Maybe she wants to.
Mechanically, Samira lifts her leg up and over the railing, letting herself slide smoothly down until her feet land on the other side. When she looks over the edge, she expects the fear to wash over her, that familiar swoop landing in her stomach. She’d never been particularly great with heights, and in this spot, she feels almost weightless—like the world need only send a gust of wind to knock her over and down.
But she feels nothing. No panic, no anxiety.
Today, Robby poured his doubt into her until she was all filled up; until there was no room left for her anger, her anxiety, her panic. He left behind someone else, something else. And after that, when she had nothing left to give, Orlando Diaz pushed the remains of her into a seventeen-year-old grave. Samira Mohan felt unsalvageable.
Maybe I just don’t belong here.
“Dr. Mohan.”
His voice reverbates, even up here in the open space, and Samira resists the urge to close her eyes to it. How did he find her? How did she know he was up here? He wasn’t even on shift for another twenty or thirty minutes.
She doesn’t ask any of these questions. The metal door swings shut behind him with a loud creak, though she hadn’t heard it open initially. She keeps her eyes forward. The phone in her pocket buzzes again.
“Dr. Abbot.”
His footsteps are muted as they walk towards her, but she would recognize them anywhere, even with the chatter of city life rumbling around them. She’d gotten particularly used to his gait over the course of their night shifts together, that particular one-two step of him on sheet vinyl. It always left her with a sense of calm.
Abbot never walked in a room with the intention of hurting Samira Mohan.
He finally stops just a few feet behind her, and she wonders if he’s nervous; if he thinks she’ll actually do it. That thought awakens her—brings that swoop of anxiety hurdling into the pit of her stomach. She leans back against the railing for a bit of gravity, a thing to grasp onto.
“Samira, will you please step back over the railing?”
Her first name in his mouth gets her head to jerk back, her eyes to find his. The look on his face is a devastating one—no smile, no gleam in his eye. He is deadly serious as he looks her over, his hand reaching out to her. He’s worried.
“I’m not going to…” she trails off, unwilling or unable to finish the sentence, for some reason.
Something again flashes over his face, sharp.
“Okay. I’d still like you to come back over the railing.”
If she jumped, he would grab her and pull her back. Or maybe he would simply jump after her. She’s so sure of it, her heart skips unpleasantly at the thought—at the danger of him falling over with her. That’s not what she wants. Frankly, his presence feels like a shock to her system. Like she had sleepwalked over the railing and he was just now bringing her back to consciousness.
Had she really planned to jump? No. No, that wasn’t why.
“Sorry,” she mumbles as she quickly throws her leg back over and yanks herself to safety. It’s not as smoothly done as before, but it gets her on the other side of solid ground.
Only once she’s there in front of them, away from the ledge and steady on her feet, does he ask: “What are you apologizing for?”
They stand face-to-face now, the ends of their shoes nearly touching in close proximity. She should move back, or to the side, maybe; or he should. Neither of them move a muscle.
“I’m sorry if I worried you,” she clarifies.
“Don’t be. I always worry about you.”
It’s a long beat where the words settle between them, and her heart is doing several things now, pattering insistently inside her chest. It’s not the same as her panicked heartbeats from earlier, when the walls had felt like they were caving in and her breaths felt numbered—finite. This was something far more pleasant, if not just as frightening.
“You do?”
He smirks then in that particular Abbot way of his, like she's made a joke worth laughing over.
“Samira, you’re the best resident we’ve got. The best doctor in this whole fucking hospital, actually. I’m always worried about you.”
“But I’m fine. I mean… before. I’ve been fine. I’m always—”
“—Fine. I know. That’s why I worry. This job eventually gets to all of us, and frankly, I’ve been waiting for it to get to you.”
She smiles, empty and joyless. “Yeah, well. Today’s the day, I guess.”
“What happened?”
His voice is kind, gentle, and it cuts her. God, she can build walls against the onslaught of Robby’s bullshit, against Dana’s sideways looks, against the whispered Slo-Mo she still hears when she walks by. But she is dismantled by Abbot’s understanding. His clarity.
“Everything. Just—my patient, the one we called the Uber for with the supplies? He died. Just a bit ago, he died. All because he couldn’t afford to be at this hospital. And my mom has been calling me all day to tell me she’s going on some cruise with a guy she barely knows, and she’s selling my childhood home and carting off the rest of my future with it. I had plans, Dr. Abbot. I had the job in New Jersey, I had everything. And now, I need to find a fellowship here, at PTMC, because I can’t go to New Jersey, and I have no idea who will take me—if anyone will take me! And I had a fucking panic attack in front of everyone, and Robby—”
She sucks in a breath painfully, trying to hold back the sobs insistent in her throat. Her fingernails cut into the skin of her palms as she balls her hands up tight, tighter than she can handle. But still, a tear escapes her, hot and shameful on her cheek.
“Robby humiliated me because I lost it. Because I couldn’t put my shit aside and do my job today. And it sucks, because I’ve always resented the fact that Robby thought he knew better. That he couldn’t see my potential here, my future as a doctor in emergency medicine. But fuck. He was right. He knew it all along.”
“Knew what?” Abbot asks, a sharpness in his voice.
More tears. The next breath between words is a hiccup.
“That I wasn’t cut out for this.”
Abbot makes a noise in his throat, pained, and his hand goes to wipe some of the tears off her cheeks. She can feel the sticky, wet streaks of them across her face, and his thumb follows their path all the way down to her chin. He won’t look away from her. She can’t tell if his intensity, his attention is hurting her more, or if she just has nothing left that doesn’t ache already.
“Robby is a grade-A fucking hypocrite. You think he knows how to keep his shit out of the ER? Hell, he’s running away from this place with his tail tucked between his legs because he doesn’t know how to get his fucking shit together. I love him, I do, but Robby is a broken, fucked up guy, and he’s taking it out on everyone else. Most especially you.”
“But he’s right—”
“He’s not,” Abbot interrupts, emphatically grasping at her shoulders.
“You are an incredible doctor, Samira. You come alive in that trauma room. I saw it happen during PittFest with the pigtail catheter, and I’ve seen it happen night after night since. You know how to pick apart the puzzle pieces in a second when diagnosing someone. You don’t hesitate—you just do. You save lives. You’re decisive, and creative, and your instincts are razor-fucking-sharp. You were made for this, and I could fucking kill Robby for ever making you think otherwise.”
She really starts crying, then, sobbing and gasping and shaking. She wants to tell him I’m okay I just need a minute, but she honestly feels like she might die up here. Her hands come to grasp at the front of his scrubs, desperate to feel, to find something solid to hold her up against this wave of devastation, and Abbot hesitates for only a beat before pulling her fully into his arms.
The sobs wrack her body violently, and Abbot doesn’t turn away, doesn’t falter—he simply holds her. Holds her like she’s back over the railing; like she’ll run away and jump over the ledge the minute he lets her go. She can feel the flex of his arms, the strength of him holding her together, and she just can’t stop fucking crying.
“My whole life is falling apart,” she croaks into his neck.
“Then let’s put it back together again.”
It takes a few minutes at least for the tears to subside, and a little longer than that for Samira to finally relent her grip on Abbot’s poor scrubs. In response, Abbot gently pulls away from her, but only just so—enough to look her in the eye.
“What do you need from me?” he asks, his voice rough but gentle.
She pauses, and then lets out a deep sigh, still wiping tears from her face and neck. Her hand shakes only a little now.
“I need to call Mr. Diaz’s family and tell them what happened.”
“I can do that.”
“No,” she says with a shake of her head. “I need to do it. It has to be me.”
A beat and then he nods. “Okay. Okay, you do that. Let them know. And then I’m driving you home, alright?”
“Dr. Abbot—”
“I think we’re on a first-name basis now. Don’t you?”
Samira sighs again, wondering how many more lines she’ll be crossing in her professional career today.
“Fair enough, I guess. Jack. I appreciate the offer, but I’m really okay. I can get myself home perfectly fine.”
“I don’t doubt that,” he says, “but I would feel much better knowing our best resident was delivered safely back to her place after a monumentally shitty day.”
“It’s a fifteen-minute walk home. I’ve done it a billion times with no trouble.”
“Again, I don’t doubt that.”
Samira’s phone buzzes yet again. She pulls it from her pocket and sees another text message from Amma. The preview shows her only: You are ignoring your poor mother for a job that doesn’t eve…
Monumentally shitty day might be an understatement.
“Alright,” Samira concedes. “Let me call Mrs. Diaz, and then you can drive me home.”
At this, Dr. Abbot—Jack, she corrects—finally smiles. A real smile, with teeth and smile lines and, oh God. Oh God. She likes him. She really fucking likes him. His smile somehow is a salve and a knife to her gut at the same time, and it takes physical restraint for her not to wince at the feeling.
“Great. I’m going to go wait right by the door, alright? Do what you gotta do. I'll be here."
She turns away from him and pulls up the dial screen again. This time, she hits the call button and puts it to her ear, steeling herself to do what she’s been dreading since she came up here. Since this morning. Since she buried her father.
Mrs. Diaz answers on the third ring.
And Samira does not need Jack there to do this, okay? She’s a good doctor—at least on most other days—and she’s done this before; has delivered this devastating news to so many people, in so many different ways. She knows the intonations best suited for this onslaught of grief, and uses the words she wished someone would’ve given her when Appa died.
But she won’t pretend that Jack’s presence at her back doesn’t steady her, just slightly. Just enough to keep the slight tremor out of her voice.
When it’s over, Jack hustles her downstairs and past the flush of patients and doctors. He tells her to get her things before making a beeline over to Robby, calling over his shoulder, “Just need two minutes, tops.”
Dutifully, she collects her few spare items from the locker room, and Jack’s back at her side before she can even walk back to the hub.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Later, after Jack’s driven her home and safely deposited her at her apartment door—“Can never be too careful”—and after she’s taking the longest, most boiling hot shower of her life, the doorbell rings.
Alarmed, Samira tiptoes to her peephole and looks to see someone leaving a plastic bag of—food?
Her phone buzzes in her hand. She looks down, and this time, the notification is not her mother.
UNKNOWN: You mentioned once you love that Chinese place down the street. I took a leap and ordered a little bit of everything from there.
UNKNOWN: P.S. I got your information off the employee directory. They still have an updated paper copy and everything. Hope that’s okay.
The salve and the knife.
Fighting the ache in her chest, or maybe reveling it, Samira bites her lip to hold back a smile. Collecting the food and hauling it back to her kitchen, she thinks for a long moment before responding.
SAMIRA: You did not have to do that. Seriously.
SAMIRA: … But thank you.
UNKNOWN: Anything for our best resident.
The first carton she opens happens to contain her favorite: General Tso’s chicken. Suddenly starving, she heaps a serving onto one of the disposable paper bowls in her cabinet. To commemorate the meal, she even deigns to sit at her folding dining room table instead of roughing it on the couch (as per her usual style).
Once she’s had a few bites, and the warmth from his last text has yet to fade, Samira thinks, Fuck it.
SAMIRA: I know this might seem like an incredibly inappropriate time to ask, but I was wanting to speak with you earlier about it, and after today, now’s as good a time as any. Would you be willing to write me a recommendation letter for an elective here at PTMC, so I can pursue a fellowship next year?
It takes him less than 30 seconds to respond.
UNKNOWN: I’ll write you anything and talk to anybody if it means keeping you here with us.
UNKNOWN: Let’s discuss tomorrow, once you’ve gotten some sleep and I’m off shift.
UNKNOWN: Coffee?
She doesn’t let herself hesitate.
SAMIRA: I would like that.
Sitting there, chewing down another bite of rice and General Tso's, she doesn’t even try to bite back her smile this time. She keys the contact into her phone, too, for good measure: Jack Abbot.
After storing the leftovers away in her fridge and crawling sluggishly into bed, Samira recognizes the fact that she just had the shittiest day ever. Her whole body pulses with the come-down of adrenaline, the exhaustion from the panic attack and the crying, and whatever the fuck else she was physically fighting off today just to survive.
Truthfully, Samira doesn’t know how she’s going to clock in tomorrow and face Robby. She doesn’t know how she is going to face the looming problem of her mother, and the ghost of her father. She doesn’t know what her future holds, or if PTMC will even be a part of that future. She doesn’t know if she’s going to continue working as an ER doctor. She doesn’t know how she’s going to live with the fact that Orlando Diaz died under her care, simply because he couldn’t afford the hospital visit.
Nothing’s fixed. Nothing in her life is untangled.
But still, that night, Samira doesn’t toss and turn with anxiety. She doesn't ruminate, doesn't torture herself. She simply hits the pillow and falls into a long, dreamless sleep.
Just another thing she needed to thank Jack Abbot for.