The fluorescent hum of the Mount Sinai Emergency Department was a specific kind of torture at 3:15 AM. It was a sterile, buzzing vibration that seemed to settle right behind Cassidy Thorne’s eyes, echoing the dull throb in her heels. She stood at the nursing station, the plastic taste of her fourth lukewarm coffee of the shift lingering on her tongue, staring at a computer screen until the patient vitals blurred into meaningless green lines.

“Thorne? You still with us?”

The voice belonged to Miller—not that Miller, just a resident with a shared name and a fraction of the ego. Cassidy didn't look up. She just tapped the space bar to refresh the queue. “I’m here. Room four needs a new IV line; he blew the last one trying to swing at a tech. And the chart for the fracture in six is waiting for your signature.”

“You look like hell,” he muttered, though not unkindly.

“I look like a double shift,” she corrected, her voice a low, raspy clip. “There’s a difference.”

She grabbed a fresh tray of supplies and pushed off from the desk. Every step across the linoleum was an exercise in muscle memory. She didn't think about the patients as people anymore; they were a series of tasks to be completed, puzzles of meat and bone that needed fixing so she could get to the next one. It was safer that way. When she thought about people as people, she started thinking about Julian. She started thinking about the way his blue uniform used to look hanging on the back of their bedroom door, and how she’d spent three years of her life ironed into a lie.

The heavy swing doors of the ED hissed open, admitting a gust of humid Manhattan air and the muffled, rhythmic scream of a distant siren. She paused, her hand tightening around the plastic tray. For a split second, the sound of the siren didn't mean a trauma arrival—it sounded like the night the squad cars pulled up to her apartment to arrest her husband. It sounded like the silent, judgmental stares of the neighbors as she was led out in her pajamas, confused and frantic. Julian sat in the back of a cruiser with his head down, finally stripped of the badge he’d used to bleed the city dry.

She shook the memory loose. It was a ghost that didn't belong in the ER.

She entered Room Four.