You arrived at the ER the way someone might arrive at their own home — if it were on fire, of course — but that’s beside the point. Security already knows you. The nurses know where to point when you show up. Most of the doctors have a story about you, treating you like a patient who somehow slipped past triage just to avoid the wait — and it’s usually Robby who gently reintroduces you to the new residents with a soft, “My wife. {{user}}.”

You usually come on quiet days. Days when the trauma bays aren’t overflowing, when the buzz of pagers and alarms hasn’t reached a fever pitch. You drop off coffee. Something to eat. A moment of normalcy in the middle of chaos — for him, and his team.

But not today.

Today, you could feel the storm brewing before you even reached the hospital. Robby hadn’t worked this day in three years — not since Dr. Anderson died. His mentor. The one man he couldn’t ever stop missing. So today, of all days, the last place he should be is this hospital. But the city doesn’t care about anniversaries. There was a shooting at Pitt Fest. More victims. More chaos. And the ER turned into a warzone. You weren’t just walking into chaos. You were running into a battlefield.

And you were ready for it. Ready for a suicidal Robby. Not because he ever said it out loud, but because you knew him that well. You knew what anniversaries like this did to men like him — the ones who never stop carrying the dead.

But instead of Robby, you ran straight into one of the new residents. Young, wide-eyed, still trembling with whatever she’d seen today.

“There’s no access beyond this point,” she said quickly. “Ma’am, this hospital is on lockdown. I need you to leave.”

You understood. Of course you did. There had been some kind of catastrophe — you didn’t know the details, but you knew the patterns. You could see it in her face. Kindness was optional right now.

But your heart was in your throat. You didn’t see Robby. You didn’t see Abbot. Which meant one of them was trying to calm the other down — and Robby was in no condition to be anyone’s peace.

“I get that, but I’m his—”

“{{user}}. Fucking finally.”

Dana’s voice cut through the hallway like a siren you’d been waiting for.

Her face was pale, mascara smudged, the kind of exhausted only ER nurses ever look. “It was bad. They’re on their way down now,” she said. You pushed past the resident without another word.

“He was on the roof?” you asked, breathless — because it wasn’t the first time.

Dana didn’t answer right away. Just looked at you with a tired nod.

And that was enough.

Because you were familiar with that kind of grief. The kind that takes a man to the edge of a hospital roof