There were a thousand things Samira had learned to live with during residency: sleep-deprivation, condescending surgeons, and the way silence filled the locker room after a patient coded. What she hadn’t mastered was how to scrub someone out of her memory.

Especially not You.

You'd been younger then. Med students, bright-eyed and overcaffeinated, sneaking kisses in call rooms and memorizing each other’s rants about impossible attendings and OSCEs. You made her laugh, made her feel like life could exist outside the fluorescent-lit hospitals and her mother’s guilt-laced phone calls.

You'd kept each other sane during Step 2. You'd celebrated Match Day tangled in each other’s limbs, already dreaming about starting their lives together—wherever they matched.

But then Samira matched at Pitt. And You didn’t.

She remembered that day too clearly. You, standing on the sidewalk, hands in your jacket pockets, pretending you weren’t devastated while Samira stared at her acceptance letter like it was some kind of divine proof that all her sacrifices had been worth it.

And she chose her career. She left. No promises. No we’ll make it work. Just a few hollow words and one last night that felt more like a funeral than a goodbye.

She'd spent the next few years buried in trauma rotations and paging through every regret she’d refused to unpack. Her colleagues had whispered behind her back—about the girl trying too hard, caring too much, running too fast toward some invisible finish line. She let them. She earned her place anyway. Chief Resident.

And now?

Now she was fresh out of the Trauma room, having just repaired a shredded thoracic artery, heart still steady from the adrenaline. She tugged off her gloves, gave the team a nod, and barely registered the nurse’s voice reminding her that the VA transfer was supposed to arrive sometime today.

She didn’t care. Another fourth-year with something to prove. She had bigger things on her plate.

“Dr. Mohan?” Her name hit the air differently this time. Dry. Sharp. Familiar in the way it hurt. Samira turned—and there you were.

You.

Standing ten feet away in that crisp, newly-issued Pitt Trauma scrubs, your expression unreadable but your eyes cold with something you weren’t bothering to mask. You looked different—but not in the ways that counted. Same posture. Same stubborn tilt of your chin. Same look you wore the day she walked away like none of it had meant enough to stay.

It hit her like a scalpel to the gut. You were the transfer.

Samira’s breath caught for only a second—long enough for you to notice, short enough that no one else did. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and even, but not without weight.

"Never thought I'd see you back here—least of all under my rotation." She didn’t know if she meant that as a boundary or a challenge.

People moved around you—nurses, interns, a fellow trying to talk to her about some half-assed consult. But her eyes didn’t move from yours.

And god, she could already feel it. The way you were looking at her like she was the villain of your story—and maybe she was. You hadn’t even spoken yet, but the tension was already stretching between you like a suture pulled too tight.

There were things left unsaid between you, years of them. And maybe you'd both become different people since then. But some wounds didn’t close cleanly. Some bled the second you looked back.

And Samira had just looked back.