It had been four days since the wedding. Four days since I woke up in Audrey Callahan's apartment at six in the morning with her side of the bed already cold, watching her come out of the bathroom in a robe with her hair tied back and with her face already set into the version of herself who was going to tell me it wasn't a thing.
I hadn't stopped thinking about her.
That was the part I couldn't make fit. I'd done this before. Tuesday nights, weekends, the easy goodbyes that felt like goodbyes because they were. I was good at casual. I'd been good at it for a decade, and it had never once followed me into the firehouse on a Monday morning. A woman left my place, or I left hers, and we both went back to our lives, and the only thing that lingered was the goodwill.
This wasn’t goodwill. This was the smell of her on the pillow next to mine, the sound she made when I found the place at the side of her neck, the look on her face in the morning when she told me it couldn't be a thing—meant it, wanted me to argue, never would have admitted that she wanted me to argue.
I knew she wanted me to argue because I'd read that room, and I'd chosen not to push because she asked me not to, and choosing not to push was costing me something I'd not budgeted for.
Four days. Four days of the pact sitting in my chest like a rock I'd swallowed on purpose.
I set it down. Same as I always did. I put it on the shelf where I kept things I wasn't going to look at during a twenty-four, and I went back to the eggs.
The tones dropped at nine fourteen.
My coffee was still on the island. Lou had the clipboard down. Halsey was already moving toward the rig. Micah grabbed the med bag off the wall mount and nearly tripped over his own stool, which was Micah's version of ready.
Captain Hank came through the office door, radio in hand, the mustache and the decades of calm already in position.
Dispatch had it as chest pain, sixty-two-year-old male, restaurant on Main. Sitting up, conscious, pain radiating left. Wife on scene.
We rolled.
The siren opened up as Halsey took us out of the bay, and the sound wiped the morning clean. Everything before the tones was gone. The eggs, the coffee, the thing I wasn't thinking about. The call was the only thing. My body knew this. Twelve years of my body knowing this.
The restaurant was a three-minute run. The man was sitting in a booth with his wife across from him. He was pale and sweating, his left hand flat on the table like he was holding something down. His wife's face was the face I'd seen a hundred times—the focused terror of a person who needed someone to arrive and take over.
I took over.
Vitals first. His pulse was elevated, rhythm regular. Blood pressure high but not critical. I talked to him while I worked—name, what he ate this morning, when the pain started, and if he took anything for it. He talked back. He was a talker. His wife was the quiet one, watching me with both hands on the table like she was bracing for something.
"You're going to be fine," I told him. "We're going to take you in, get the docs to run some tests, and your wife's going to follow us in the car. All right?"
He nodded. His wife nodded. She didn't look fine. I caught her eye over his shoulder and gave her the nod—the one that said I had him, and she could breathe.
We loaded him. Hank rode in the back with him. Halsey drove. I did the call sheet on the bench seat with the vibration of the rig in my handwriting, and the run to Hartsdale General took four minutes.
The ambulance bay at Hartsdale General smelled like exhaust and disinfectant. I had the patient off the rig and through the ER doors before the engine had finished cooling.
The handoff was clean. I gave the ER nurse the sheet—sixty-two, chest pain onset forty minutes ago, vitals stable, no cardiac history per patient, aspirin administered on scene. She took it without looking at me, which meant she was good at her job. The man went through the double doors on the stretcher. His wife came in two minutes later with her car keys still in her hand, and a triage nurse walked her through.
I stood in the hallway with the clipboard.
The ER at Hartsdale General was a building I'd walked through a hundred times. I knew the smell, the light, the particular quality of the linoleum under my boots. I knew the path from the ambulance bay to the intake desk. I knew the path from intake to the elevators, and I knew that if I turned left at the end of this hallway, I would be looking at the corridor that led to Labor and Delivery.
I turned left.
She was there.
Halfway down the corridor, moving between rooms with a chart in her hand. Scrubs, ponytail pulled through the back of a navy cap, the half-smile she offered when she wasn't going to let herself give a full one. She was talking to someone—another nurse or patient, I couldn't tell—and her hands were moving while she talked, making a point, explaining something, being competent, fast, and completely in her own world.
She didn't see me.
I stood at the end of the hallway with the call sheet in my hand and watched her for a count I didn't track. Long enough to register what I was doing and not long enough to stop doing it.
I wanted to walk down that hall.
The thought arrived complete, without strategy or calculation. I wanted to walk down the corridor, catch her between rooms, say something easy—Callahan, nice scrubs—and watch her face do the thing it did when I showed up unannounced, the quick flash of surprise before the wall came back up. I wanted to be in the room she was in. I could have done it. I was a Hartsdale firefighter who had just dropped off a patient, and she was an L&D nurse I knew from my best friend's wedding, and walking down a hospital hallway to say hello was the smallest, most unremarkable thing two people in a small town could do.
