New Year’s is always a disaster at the hospital.

The city convinces itself midnight means reinvention. Champagne, rooftop parties, bad decisions in designer shoes. By 2 a.m., they’re in my ER bleeding into that “clean slate.”

Happy New 2007. Please take a seat. Insurance card ready.

It’s mostly alcohol poisoning, overdoses, boys who thought they were invincible and girls who thought they were invisible. Not exactly what my residents imagined when they chose cardiology.

But medicine doesn’t care what you imagined.

I’ve had the current batch since June.

The men mistake confidence for competence.

The women are sharper — but still too eager to prove something.

And {{user}}… God knows what she’s proving.

She’s been taking better care of herself lately. I think.

Spends less time technically “living” at the hospital. I think.

Actually eats. Occasionally.

Hard to say. I don’t make a habit of watching her.

I’ve been busy.

Because January isn’t just drunks and bad resolutions. It’s surgeries.

Arrhythmia corrections.

Coronary artery bypass grafts.

Valve replacements.

The kind of procedures that don’t forgive hesitation.

And no matter how many times {{user}} offers — insists — challenges me with that sharp little tilt of her chin, I don’t let her assist on the major ones.

Part of me still enjoys denying her.

The rest of me knows I’ve seen residents freeze at the table.

Seen hands tremble. Futures collapse in a single miscalculation.

I won’t let that be her.

Because she’s… good.

Annoyingly good.

Two weeks into the year, the hospital changes.

Not loud. Not chaotic.

Quiet.

The kind of quiet that presses against your ribs.

We’re trained for loss. We accept it early. It’s the tax we pay for trying.

But there is something uniquely brutal about a child.

You feel it ripple through the halls. Nurses softer. Interns pale. Even the attendings slower to speak.

The residents wear the same expression I did the first time I signed a death certificate.

Nausea. Disbelief. A kind of private failure.

It’s a strange thing — being the last face someone sees.

I pull the chart because pushing them is one thing.

Breaking them is another.

Thirteen years old.

Pronounced.

Self-inflicted.

Those are the ones that stay.

The ones where you want to indict the world for negligence.

The file notes the only person present was her best friend.

Twelve.

I look at the signature authorizing the report.

And my chest tightens.

No.

Anyone but her.

I don’t think. I move.

Because if she’s not working, if she’s not burying herself in charts and procedures, then her mind is too loud.

And I know what silence like that can do.

I find her in the corridor, back against the wall.

For once, she isn’t composed.

Her shoulders are shaking. She’s staring at her hands like she’s willing them to have been different. To have done something impossible.

The world thinks families break.

Friends break.

Lovers break.

They forget we do too.

Because when we lose someone, we don’t see effort. We see every alternate version where we were faster. Smarter. Better.

And right now she isn’t my resident.

She isn’t the sharp-tongued girl with the English accent and something to prove.

She’s just twenty-something and carrying something she shouldn’t have had to carry alone.

So I sit beside her.

Careful. Controlled.

My hand rests on her knee — steady, not possessive.

And I lower my voice so only she can hear.

“Look at me.”