Bird-like, the cursor blinked in the corner, waiting for her next move.
*
At eleven-thirty in the morning, Boston Children’s Hospital was a living organism— fast, loud, and relentlessly purposeful.Even in the staff-only corridors, the air thrummed with urgency: the rolling hum of gurneys, the clipped voices of nurses handing off charts, the soft beeping of monitors leaking through half-open doors.Somewhere down the hall, a baby was crying — the sharp, heart-piercing kind of cry that made adults straighten involuntarily.
Marcus stepped out of the elevator into Paediatrics, badge clipped to his jacket pocket out of courtesy rather than necessity.He hated coming to hospitals in an official capacity.People here lived by the rule that pain was to be treated, eased, soothed — not interrogated.
He found Dr.Maya Brennan in a tiny break room that overlooked a courtyard scattered with toy tricycles and plastic ride-on cars.She wasn’t sitting; she was moving.Fast.Her white coat hung open as she rifled through a stack of files, her dark hair pulled back in a strained, too-tight knot.
She didn’t seem to register him until he spoke her name.
“Dr.Brennan?”
She jolted slightly, then turned.Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, the kind of dryness that came from hours of refusing tears.She blinked at his badge, then at his face, as if translating both through several layers of fog.
“You’re the FBI,” she said mechanically.“I was told someone would come.”
“Yes,” Marcus said gently.“I’m Marcus Reid.I’m very sorry about your sister.”
She gave a sharp nod — not in acknowledgement, but in dismissal, as if she couldn’t afford to let the words land.
“I can give you ten minutes.Maybe fifteen.”She gestured vaguely toward the stack of folders.“I have five consults backed up, and two of my kids are pre-op.This is not—” Her voice cracked, a tiny fissure quickly sealed.“This is not a good day to fall apart.”
“I understand,” Marcus said.And he did.The whole floor smelled like sterility and heartbreak, and Maya looked like she had been holding up the ceiling by sheer will.“I’ll be quick.”
She nodded again, sharper this time, like she was bracing herself.She motioned toward a small table with two chairs.They sat.
She folded her hands tightly, knuckles whitening.“You need to ask about Sarah’s work?Or— God, I don’t know— her enemies?”She laughed once, a brittle sound.“She didn’t have enemies.She annoyed people sometimes, sure, but—”
“It’s about your parents,” Marcus said softly.“And the Brennan Foundation.”
Everything in her froze.
For a moment her expression went blank — not evasive, not resistant, simply blank, as if all her internal systems had shut down under overload.He watched her swallow, a faint tremor shivering along her jaw.
“No,” she whispered.“No, I can’t— not now.I have too much to do.I have patients who— who need—”
But the sentence didn’t finish.Her face twisted suddenly, painfully, and she pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eyes, as if trying to push back an incoming tide.
“Dr.Brennan,” Marcus said quietly, “it’s okay.”
She shook her head violently.“I can’t fall apart right now.I won’t.These kids— some of them don’t get parents who show up.Or they do and the parents are— are terrified.I have to be steady for them.I can’t lose it.”
But she was already losing it.Not loudly, not dramatically — but in the small, unstoppable ways grief seeped through armor: her shoulders shaking, breath hitching, a faint, keening sound escaping before she could choke it down.
Marcus didn’t speak.He simply shifted his chair closer, grounding his voice to a near-whisper.“You’ve been holding yourself together since you got the call.You’re allowed to… stop.Just for a minute.”
At that, something in her gave way.
The tears came fast — a sudden, flooding collapse, as if a dam had cracked and everything behind it surged forward.She pressed her hands over her mouth to muffle the sobs, but they broke through anyway.For a long time she couldn’t speak.Marcus didn’t rush her.He just stayed where he was, letting her grief unfold in its own time.
Eventually, she sagged back in her chair, exhausted, wiping her cheeks with the cuff of her sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.“I don’t have time to cry.”
“You have time,” Marcus said.“We can wait.”
A shaky breath.Then another.
