Maya Alvarez was only a few months into her surgical internship at County General when she realized Dr. Robert Romano wasn’t as simple as everyone claimed. Sure, he was sharp-tongued, sarcastic, and seemed to take pleasure in cutting people down — especially interns. She’d heard the horror stories from other residents, and she’d already witnessed him mocking Benton, belittling Carter, and driving Corday to bite back at him more than once.

But Maya noticed things others didn’t. Like the way Romano would stay long after the halls emptied, bent over a case file or redoing a set of sutures until they were flawless. One night she caught him re-stitching a little girl’s leg wound — work nobody else would’ve thought twice about — with the kind of obsessive precision and care that didn’t match the persona he showed the world.

She wasn’t supposed to linger. She wasn’t supposed to notice. But she did. And Romano noticed her noticing.

What began as tense exchanges in the OR slowly shifted into something more complicated: a young intern who saw through his armor, and a surgeon who didn’t like being seen at all.