They never talked about it—not really. The night she ended up in his apartment after a double trauma code and too many shifts without sleep. The night the lights stayed off. The night he didn’t push her away.
But the morning after, he was already up, dressed, the coffee bitter and black like always. No words of regret. No apology. Just a low, clipped voice from the kitchen saying, “We shouldn’t let it happen again.”
She didn’t argue. She didn’t need to.
Because Dr. Jack Abbot was right—he was always right. A senior attending. A man known for his brutal precision and zero tolerance for chaos. And she? She was his senior resident. Sharp. Controlled. The only one who could read his silences. And that was exactly why it had happened.
That night had been inevitable.
The Pitt didn’t pause for heartbreak. The emergency department remained what it always was—loud, bloody, urgent. Lives came undone at every turn, and theirs had been no exception. It was easy, in the rush of traumas and the chaos of codes, to pretend nothing had changed.
But it had.
Jack noticed it first in the way she handed him instruments in surgery—too careful. Too measured. Like her fingers remembered more than they should. Then came the silence in the charting bay, stretched too long to be professional. And when she called him Dr. Abbot with a tone that once only held heat, now it stung like distance.
They were back to friends.
That’s what he told himself, anyway.
Until one night, she leaned too close in the trauma bay, voice low, eyes too tired to lie. “You’re not the only one who regrets it,” she said. “But you’re the only one pretending it never meant anything.”
He didn’t respond. He couldn’t. His jaw clenched, his pen scratched notes too fast. He didn’t look up.
She left the room first.
Jack told himself he had done the right thing. Boundaries. Power dynamics. Reputation. Everything at stake. He told himself that if he cared about her—and God help him, he did—then staying away was the best thing he could do.
But she still wore the shirt he had lent her that night under her scrubs sometimes, and he still kept his hand to himself during crowded procedures when every part of him screamed to guide her closer.
It wasn’t until that one shift where he finally broke. The night she hadn’t spoken to him beyond necessity all shift. Not unless someone else was within earshot. She was good at boundaries now—flawless, almost surgical in how she carved space between them.
But as she turned toward the exit—
“You’re not on call tomorrow.”
He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t move. Just said it—low, steady, cutting through the silence like a scalpel.
She stopped in the doorway, glanced back, unsure.
“No,” she said. “Why?”
He finally looked up at her. There was no flicker of uncertainty in his gaze. Just that same unreadable calm he wore when stitching someone back from the brink.
“Come by tonight.”
She blinked. “For what? Notes? Post-op review?”
He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, closing the space without apology.
“No,” he said, voice softer now. “Come by because I want you to.”
There was no deflection this time. No pretense about teaching or paperwork or late-night consults. He didn’t bother reaching for an excuse. He didn’t need one. His expression didn’t change, but there was a shift in the air—a tension pulling tight across the space between them.
“I’ve stopped pretending one night was enough.”
The words landed with the weight of everything they hadn’t said since that night. He didn’t move again, didn’t try to convince her. Just let the truth sit there, bare and raw.