They were three traumas deep by midmorning, and Robby hadn’t sat down once.

The ER was a mess—blood on the floor, two pagers screaming simultaneously, and the new resident floundering like a wet dog on a trauma line. Robby moved like a blade through it all, slicing clean, staying cold, holding the damn place together by habit and caffeine alone.

But even the worst of it wasn’t what was draining him.

It was her.

{{user}} hadn’t spoken more than three words to him since shift started. Not unless it was absolutely necessary. Not unless someone else was listening.

They were supposed to work days together. They always did. She’d been his balance in the ER—the steady hand when he was short-tempered, the calm glance when his judgment ran hot. She called him out, kept him honest. Sometimes they’d end their shifts bruised and exhausted in the on-call room, her head on his shoulder, hands still cold from gloves.

But not today.

Today she was ice. Focused. Methodical. And furious. Because Frank Langdon was gone.

She’d walked into the ER an hour after the firing—smiling, holding two coffees. One for her, one for him. And when she realized Frank’s name had been scrubbed from the trauma board, when the nurses gave her the kind of look people gave when they didn’t want to be the ones to say it—her smile cracked right down the middle.

She hadn’t spoken to Robby since.

He caught her now at the med station, hunched over a tablet, brows furrowed. Her expression said don’t, but he was already there.

“I need you on Bay 6,” he said, soft but direct.

“I’m reviewing labs.”

“Now.”

She snapped the tablet closed and turned. “So now you’re short-staffed without him and suddenly I’m useful again?”

Robby held his ground. “This isn’t about—”

“No,” she said, stepping in closer. “This is exactly about him. You fired Frank. And you won’t tell me why.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“Yes, you do, Robby.” Her voice dropped, not loud—but every syllable landed like a punch. “You don’t get to blow up this team, erase someone’s career, and then walk around pretending nothing happened.”

“He made mistakes.”

“Like what? Being too damn smart for his own good? Challenging your orders in front of interns?” Her arms crossed, defensive, trembling at the edges. “God forbid someone not kiss your ass in the trauma bay.”

He exhaled slowly. “It wasn’t personal.”

“Then tell me what it was.”

He didn’t. He couldn’t.

Because if he did, he’d have to say it out loud. That Frank Langdon—her best friend, her person since med school—had been pocketing morphine vials and pain meds from the ER medicine storage. That Robby had seen the tremors in his hands, the dark circles under his eyes, the late charting, the drug counts that didn’t match. That he’d been giving Frank the benefit of the doubt for weeks, hoping it was stress, hoping it would pass. Until it didn’t.

After a moment of mutual silence, she stepped back. “I need to finish reviewing those labs.”

He let her go. Because for once, he didn’t know how to stop her.