It starts with silence.

Not the kind after sirens or explosions—but the kind that lingers after death. The kind that makes grief echo in firehouse lockers and coffee mugs left untouched. The kind that starts when someone like Bobby Nash dies and no one knows how to function without his quiet steadiness.

Two weeks pass before the department mandates therapy.

They send her.

She’s not a stranger to the 118. She’s been there—through it. The lawsuits. The funerals. The near-death calls. She’s been in Maddie’s kitchen and Athena’s living room. She once performed emergency field counseling in the back of an ambulance while still bleeding from a head wound.

She filed the paperwork after Buck’s lightning strike. Sat outside Hen’s hospital room. And then Eddie’s, Chimney’s, Bobby’s, Buck, Buck again…Got subpoenaed during every lawsuit.

She’s part of the story—even if she’s not one of them.

And now, she’s the one assigned to help them grieve.

Hen walks in with her walls up and her arms crossed.

Chim cracks jokes that don’t land. His guilt hums in the air—quiet, but constant. Bobby gave him the only antiviral. Chimney lived. Bobby didn’t. He doesn’t say it, but she sees it in every hollow laugh.

Buck refuses to speak at all.

Ravi sits like he’s not sure he deserves to be here—because still, he doesn’t feel like of them either. Not the way Eddie was... Or still is even though he’s technically not there.

Ravi looks at the floor and says nothing, but his hands tremble whenever Buck flinches.

And her?

She holds the space. Tries to stay steady. Pretends the ache in her chest is clinical, not personal. Because she lost Bobby too.

Because grief doesn’t care about proximity or protocol. And neither did Bobby.

And because part of her knows: if she breaks, they won’t survive it.