You learn to love the night the way some people love silence—because it doesn’t ask questions.

The emergency department at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center hums like a living thing after midnight, fluorescent lights buzzing, monitors chirping, gurneys rattling over tile. You move through it on instinct now, ten years of muscle memory carved into bone. Blood, noise, chaos—it used to feel like something you chose. Lately, it just feels like something you survive.

And then there’s him.

Dr. Jack Abbot stands across the trauma bay, sleeves rolled, voice steady as he calls orders like nothing in the world can shake him. War carved that steadiness into him long before you met him. Before the prosthetic. Before the quiet way he favors one side when he thinks no one’s looking. Before the ring he still wears, even now—three months after everything fell apart.

You used to think that ring meant something unbreakable.

Ten years of marriage. Two kids who still draw pictures with all four of you in them, like nothing’s changed. You were twenty-five when you married him—young enough to believe exhaustion was temporary, that love could outwork distance, that different shifts wouldn’t turn into different lives.

But nights got longer. Conversations got shorter. And somewhere between saving strangers and losing sleep, you started losing each other.

Her name didn’t help.

Samira Mohan.

You tell yourself it wasn’t jealousy. It was timing. It was fatigue. It was the way the 4th of July fireworks sounded like something breaking apart as you walked into an empty room and found him shirtless, her hands on his shoulder, careful, clinical—too careful.

“It’s not what you think,” he’d said.

Maybe it wasn’t.

But you were tired of not knowing what to think.

So you left.

Three months later, you still work side by side like nothing ever happened. Professional. Efficient. Strangers with shared history stitched into every glance you don’t hold long enough.

Until tonight.

The shift is brutal—pileups, overdoses, a kid who reminds you too much of your own. Someone brings beers to the park across the street after, the grass damp, the city quiet in that rare, fragile way. You don’t remember deciding to stay. You don’t remember deciding to go with him either.

—

Your eyes crack open.

The ceiling is different.

Not your house. Not the kids’ nightlight glow bleeding under the door. No scattered toys, no half-folded laundry you never finished.

Your stomach drops.

You push yourself up on your elbows too fast, the room tilting slightly. A chair in the corner. A jacket you recognize draped over it. A prosthetic leg resting beside the nightstand like it belongs there.

Your breath catches.

No. No, no—

You turn your head.

And there he is.

Jack.

Close enough that you can see the faint lines time has carved into his face, the tension he never fully loses even in sleep. One arm is still loosely slung across your waist, like his body remembered something yours didn’t.

“…you’ve got to be kidding me,” you whisper.

“Good morning to you too,” he rasps in response, voice rough with sleep.

“Don’t ‘good morning’ me,” you mutter. “What is this?”

Jack sits up slowly, dragging a hand across his face. He looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

“You came home with me,” he says carefully.

“I didn’t ‘come home’ with you,” you shoot back immediately. “I stopped making decisions at some point after the second beer.”

A faint exhale—almost a laugh, but not quite, “You were coherent enough.”

Your voice comes out sharper than you mean it to. “Divorce usually means people don’t do shit like this anymore.”

That lands differently.

“I know what divorce means,” he quips quietly.

“Apparently not.”

His jaw tightens slightly. Not in anger. Something more contained.

Then he looks away for a second, like he’s deciding whether to say something he can’t take back.

When he turns to you again, his voice is lower.

“I missed you.”