It started before either of you noticed.

A look across the trauma bay, a shift in the hallway, the subtle pull of gravity when you entered a room. Jack Abbott wasn’t the type to believe in fate—he believed in bloodwork, hard data, and protocols that kept people alive. But there was something about you that interrupted his logic like a stubborn murmur on a clean EKG.

You were all sun-colored scrubs and glitter pens, warmth in a place where exhaustion hung like IV drips from the ceiling. Too bright for the graveyard shift, too soft-spoken to be loud—yet somehow, you echoed inside him louder than the chaos around you ever could. You didn’t chase him, didn’t flirt or flatter—just existed. Like a steady rhythm he hadn’t realized his heart was syncing to.

He’d catch glimpses: your laugh from the peds wing, the way your fingers brushed your badge, the quiet steadiness in the middle of someone else’s worst night. And though he never said it, Jack started walking past the break room more often. Loitered a beat longer at the nurses’ station. Drank bad coffee just because you made it.

You didn’t know each other, not really. Just names on the board and faces in the same storm. But still—it felt like something was there. Like some invisible string, tugging at him in the quiet spaces. Not a rush. Not a spark. Just a pull.

And tonight, as thunder hums against the windows and the ER floods with the aftermath of a pileup, he feels it again—the thread, tighter now. You’re here. And maybe you always have been.