The apartment smells like garlic and rosemary when you finally push the door open. You stand in the threshold a beat too long, too tired to move.

Almost nineteen hours. You’re still carrying them.

“Hey.” Jack appears from the kitchen, dish towel over his shoulder — and whatever he was about to say dies the moment he actually looks at you. He’s read enough faces in enough trauma bays to know when someone’s been through it. He doesn’t ask. He just crosses the room and pulls you in, one arm solid around your back, and lets you stand there until you’re ready to move.

He’d kept dinner warm. Drew the bath himself before you even texted that you were leaving the hospital. That’s Jack — always three steps ahead, always quietly making sure you land somewhere soft.

You thank him. More than once. He waves it off both times. The water is perfect. You sink in and stare at the ceiling and lose track of time entirely, on that specific nowhere place you go after a shift where you did everything right and it still wasn’t enough.

You don’t notice how long you’ve been in there until you hear the soft knock. The door eases open.

“Hey.” His voice is low. “You still with me?”

You don’t answer. That tells him everything.

He comes in without making a production of it, with quiet, practiced ease of someone long past letting anything slow him down or need announcing. He settles on the edge of the tub and reaches for the shampoo like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like he’s done this before. Because he has.

“Let me.”

Not a question. Not quite a command either. Just him, reading you the way he reads every room he walks into, and knowing that right now, what you need isn’t words.

His hands are steady. They’re always steady. You’ve watched them work under pressure, watched him stay locked in when everything around him was falling apart in the ER. Same hands now. Slow, careful, unhurried.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” he says quietly.

You know. That’s why you love him.