The emergency department at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center breathes even after midnight, a living organism of fluorescent light and restless motion. Monitors chirp like distant alarms, gurneys rattle over tile, voices rise and fall in practiced urgency. You move through it on instinct, years of muscle memory stitched into your bones. Blood, noise, chaos—it used to feel like something you chose. Lately, it feels like something that chose you.

And then there’s him.

Dr. Jack Abbot stands across the trauma bay, sleeves rolled, voice steady as he calls orders with the kind of calm that doesn’t come naturally—it’s carved, earned, survived. War did that to him. You see it in the way he carries himself, in the subtle shift of weight over his prosthetic when he thinks no one’s paying attention, in the way nothing ever seems to rattle him—not really. Not on the surface.

His ring is still on, too. It always is. A quiet, stubborn circle of metal that refuses to acknowledge it no longer has meaning.

It’s been three months.

Three months since everything fractured, since ten years of marriage collapsed under the weight of exhaustion and silence and things neither of you knew how to fix. You were young when you married him—young enough to believe love could outpace distance, that opposite schedules wouldn’t hollow something out from the inside. But nights stretched longer, conversations grew thinner, and somewhere between saving strangers and losing sleep, you started losing each other.

You told yourself it wasn’t one moment. Not really. It was everything.

Still, the image lingers—walking into that room, the wrong place at the wrong time, finding him too close to someone else—Samira Mohan. Her hands looked clinical enough. Careful. Innocent, maybe.

“It’s not what you think,” he’d said.

Maybe he was right. But you were too tired to keep guessing. So you left.

Now you exist in this strange, sterile in-between—working side by side like nothing ever happened. Professional. Precise. Strangers who know exactly how the other takes their coffee, how they handle pressure, how they break.

You don’t look at him longer than necessary. He doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t want answered. It works. It has to.

Until it doesn’t.

That night—weeks ago now—was supposed to be nothing. Just another brutal shift, another string of cases that left your hands shaking long after the last patient stabilized. Someone suggested drinks across the street, the city soft and distant in the dark. You don’t remember agreeing. You don’t remember when everyone else left. And you definitely don’t remember how you ended up back in his sheets.

It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t discussed. It just… happened. A collision of history and loneliness and something neither of you had fully let go of.

And then morning came. And with it, distance again. You went back to being careful. Controlled. Separate.

Except now—

Now something isn’t right.

It starts small. Subtle. A wave of nausea that hits at the wrong time, the wrong place. You brush it off at first—bad coffee, lack of sleep, stress. It wouldn’t be the first time your body protested the pace you keep.

But it keeps happening. More frequent. Less ignorable. And tonight’s shift is relentless—back-to-back cases, barely a moment to breathe.

You disappear between patients, slipping into the nearest bathroom with a hand pressed tight against your mouth, the world tilting just enough to make your stomach churn. You barely hear the door open behind you.

“Hey—”

You close your eyes, hand gripping the edge of the sink as another wave passes. Your throat tightens, not just from the nausea.

Jack doesn’t ask if you’re okay—he already knows you’re not. You share two kids, two pregnancies behind you, a whole history of reading your body before you ever said a word.

He’d known something was off, but he wouldn’t even let the thought settle—pregnancy wasn’t supposed to be on the table anymore. Not when, on paper at least, they were already done.

“You should’ve told me sooner,” he begins, “could’ve covered for you.”