You know the rules.

After school, you wait for the bus. You always wait for the bus.

Your backpack is heavier than it needs to be, stuffed with worksheets and a library book you don’t really understand, and you sit on the cracked bench with your legs swinging because you’re too young to reach the pavement. The bus comes. It always comes.

But today, it’s raining in that thin, gray Pittsburgh way—more mist than storm. The clouds press low over the bridges and the rivers, and everything feels smaller somehow.

You miss him.

Your dad—Dr. Frank Langdon—is somewhere across the city inside Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. The Pitt. The place people whisper about when ambulances scream past on Forbes. The place that swallows him for twelve hours at a time and spits him back out smelling like antiseptic and exhaustion.

He promised he’d try to make your school presentation next week. He looked so tired when he said it.

So instead of getting on the bus, you decide to surprise him.

You know where the hospital is. You’ve been there before—on weekends when he brought you to ‘volunteer’, when the nurses smiled and told you how handsome and brilliant your dad was, when Dr. Robby himself crouched to your height and called you “Frank’s shadow.”

It can’t be that far.

You start walking.

The city is louder without an adult beside you. Cars rush too close. Strangers don’t look like strangers in cartoons; they look tired, busy, unknowable. You cross streets when the little white walking figure appears, heart pounding like you’re getting away with something monumental.

By the time the hospital rises into view—glass and steel and red-lettered Emergency Room glowing against the dim sky—your socks are damp and your hands are cold.

Inside, the ER is chaos incarnate.

Monitors beep in overlapping rhythms. A stretcher bursts through the automatic doors. Someone is crying. Someone is swearing. Someone is calling for blood.

You slip past the front desk because no one expects a kid to walk in alone.

You know where he works. You’ve memorized the path.

You turn the corner into the emergency department just as your father pulls off a pair of bloody gloves.

He doesn’t see you at first.

He’s in motion—efficient, commanding in a way he isn’t at home. Nurses orbit him. A med student hovers, trying to keep up. He’s younger than the photos in the house suggest, earlier in his career, sharper around the edges. Dr. Robby’s golden resident. The heir apparent.

Then he looks up.

And everything stops.

You’ve never seen fear move across someone’s face that fast.

It’s there for half a second—raw and blinding—before it hardens into something else.

“What are you doing here?”

His voice cracks through the department louder than he means it to. Heads turn. The med student freezes.

You flinch.

He’s across the room in three strides, crouching in front of you, hands gripping your shoulders—not rough, but firm enough that you feel how hard they’re shaking.

“You walked here?” he demands. “By yourself? From school?”

You nod.

The anger is still there in his voice, sharp and terrifying—but his eyes are glassy, scanning you like you’re a trauma patient. Checking for injuries. Bruises. Threats that aren’t visible.

“Do you have any idea—” He stops. Swallows. Lowers his voice. “Do you have any idea what could’ve happened to you?”

You don’t. Not really.

To you, it was just a long walk.

To him, it’s every worst-case scenario he’s ever treated rolling through his mind at once. Every kid hit by a car. Every missing child. Every parent screaming in the waiting room.

You’re staring at him, wide-eyed. Rain still clinging to your sleeves. Backpack slipping off one shoulder.

He exhales. Long. Shaky.

His hands loosen.

“Okay,” he mutters, dragging a palm down his face. “Okay. Not how we’re handling this.”

He glances around at the staff who are very much pretending not to watch.

“You don’t ever walk across the city alone again. If you miss me that much—” he pauses, one eyebrow lifting “—they invented this wild new concept called a phone call.”