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There’s a new betting pool at the PTMC, but this one isn’t plastered across the walls for everyone to see. It involves too many of their coworkers for that. It’s the kind of debate that slides directly from lips to ears, hushed and sneaky. Whispers pass through the over-crowded corridors between doctors and nurses. Sometimes even patients chime in. Did you see…? Do you think they’re…? Everyone seems to have their own thoughts and feelings on the matter, each equally as certain as the last. It’s the kind of situation that they’ve never found themselves in until the day that Trinity Santos started working in the Pitt.
01.
Eileen Shamsi is sure that her daughter is dating someone. Specifically, that new intern in the emergency department. The one who dropped the scalpel into her prize surgeon’s foot during a chest tube procedure. Dr. Santos. She’s not sure that she approves.
Of course, it’s not like Victoria has said anything about it in as many words. And it’s not like Eileen is particularly well versed in seeing her daughter in a relationship—aside from, perhaps, the decade-long relationship with medicine that Victoria entered the day she decided to follow in her parents’ footsteps—but she’s mostly certain, and not often wrong.
For one thing, there’s the nickname. Ever since Victoria’s first shift at PTMC, Dr. Santos has been calling her Crash. Eileen remembers the way that Victoria had panicked when her mother overheard and tried to press her on it. She had fumbled for some kind of cover-up the way that she did as a child, when Eileen used to catch her up hours past her bedtime, reading a book under the covers with a flashlight clutched in her pudgy, pre-pubescent fingers, insisting that she hadn’t been up this whole time, that she’d only just woke up a few minutes ago and was only trying to read herself back to sleep, really.
At first, Eileen is concerned that the nickname is coming from a place of malcontent, her treasured daughter the victim of unwarranted hazing in her place of work. She tells herself that’s why she keeps taking unannounced trips down to the emergency department, why she lingers to catch the tail ends of conversations she’s not a part of. Over time, the look on Victoria’s face when met with the silly moniker goes from being pinched and tight to relaxed and quite nearly fond. Dr. Santos is the only one who ever utters it. Eileen notices that she smiles every time she does.
Then, Victoria starts spending less and less time at home. It’s not something that Eileen’s prepared for. Victoria has always been a homebody. There was really no other option. She was barely a teenager when she went to college; meanwhile, her peers were embarking on the journey to junior high. She had very little in common with either of the circles that she occupied, which naturally led to some isolation. She hadn’t worried about it much, then. Victoria was an only child and she had always been independent, self-sufficient. She kept to herself. She focused on her studies. If she didn’t make an appearance at the dinner table, it was because she was hunched over a book in her bedroom, a plate balancing on the corner of a crowded desk, not because she wasn’t present in the house at all.
At first, Victoria doesn’t say much about where she’s going, and Eileen doesn’t press. After all, Victoria is an adult. She’s entitled to her own freedom, she isn’t a caged bird. It’s often just once a week, maybe twice, for a few hours at most. She’s back before Eileen retires to bed for the night. There’s nothing to worry about.
Then it’s three nights a week. Then four. Then entire weekends. It’s when she catches Victoria descending the stairs with a duffle bag that she finally is bent so far that she snaps. The crack is deafening to Eileen’s ears. She thinks Victoria feels its reverberations, too. She nearly misses a step when she catches her mother’s gaze, her hand clutching at the railing to steady herself.
“Where are you going, Victoria?” she asks, taking great care to not sound shrill. She is a rational woman, a logical one. She does not lose her temper with her daughter.
“Out,” Victoria says, stubborn as ever. She was like this as a child, too. Once Victoria made up her mind, there was very little one could do to change it. She had always been proud to know that her daughter was formidable and unyielding. It had never been directed at her before.
“Victoria, please,” she hears herself say, bordering on exasperated. “I just want to be sure that you’re safe.”
“Oh my god, mom!” Victoria throws her hands up in the air. “I’m going to Trinity’s, alright?”
Eileen just stares blankly. This isn’t a name that she knows. Trinity. She turns it over in her mind and comes up empty handed. Victoria seems to recognize this, because she elaborates. “Trinity Santos, from PTMC.”
Dr. Santos.
“Oh.” It sounds a little unrecognizable, even to her own ears. She tries again. “Oh. Dr. Santos. Just the two of you?”
Victoria’s expression twists. There’s something that she isn’t saying, something she’s trying desperately to conceal. It’s working. “I mean, Whitaker lives there, too.”
Eileen reaches for something to say and falls short. The silence stretches out between them, unbearably long, before Victoria shakes her head and finishes descending the last few steps. She hesitates in front of her mother for a moment before pressing a rushed kiss to her cheek. “I’ll see you later, mom.” Then she’s gone.
“Perhaps she wants space,” her husband suggests when she recounts the day's events before bed, hardly looking up from the book in his hand.
The thought leaves a sour taste in Eileen’s mouth, but one that fades when her phone lights up in her lap with Victoria’s name flashing across the screen, accompanied with a photo of her from her college graduation. She was sixteen. “No, look. She’s already calling. Ready to apologize.”
She doesn’t answer until she’s slipped out of the bedroom, but when she lifts the phone to her cheek and says “Hello?” there’s no response. The line isn’t quiet, though. There’s muffled background noise, like she’s hearing through something. A pocket, maybe. Still, she says again, and a little louder, “Victoria?”
There’s the scratchy sound of fabric against a microphone, then the sound becomes a little clearer but even more distant.
“I’m just saying…” That’s the voice of Dr. Santos. The second half of her sentence is lost in the static of the call, Eileen presses her phone closer to her ear like it will help. It doesn’t, of course.
“...bet you always…” This time it’s Victoria’s voice, but the sound of Dr. Santos saying something overlaps and the phone seems to be too far away from them to pick any of it up reliably.
For a few long moments, she can’t manage to pick up any of what they’re saying, and she realizes abruptly that she should definitely hang up. Just as she’s about to pull the phone away from her ear, there’s a startling sound of a thud, the distinct sound of Victoria’s giggling, and Dr. Santos saying “so fucking beautiful” and Eileen is frantically ending the call.
She lasts about four days without seeing or hearing from Victoria—aside from the fateful pocket call—before she caves and goes down to the emergency department when she knows that Victoria has a shift. She might have all but moved out, but she’s still on their shared family google calendar.
Immediately, she’s faced with the sight of Victoria and Dr. Santos leaving a patient’s room together. Their heads are ducked close in conversation. Victoria wears the kind of smile that Eileen hasn’t seen on her face in a long time, the brightness of which is only rivaled by the mirrored expression on Dr. Santos’s face. Something in her that she cannot name settles a little at the sight of it.
It’s on her way out that she notices a pair of figures watching Victoria and Dr. Santos nearly as closely as she, herself, had been. It’s Dr. McKay and one of the nurses—the boy with the head full of lovely curls. She starts charting a slow but intentional path past them, hoping to catch something of value from their conversation, but it’s fruitless. All she catches is the nurse saying “What do you think? Twenty on them?” and Dr. McKay replying “That’s lowballing. I say at least forty.”
It means absolutely nothing to her.
02.
Occasionally, Dr. Santos works the night shift.
It started not long after her first shift at PTMC, the mass casualty event. Dr. Santos had found herself knee-deep in a methemoglobinemia case that turned out to have an attempted suicide lurking beneath the surface—something that only she had managed to pick up on. She’s had John Shen’s respect since that moment, despite the less than savory way he’d heard many of the day shift-ers talking about her. Poor bedside manner, overeager, less than humble, picking fights with established residents, turning the dynamic of the emergency room on its head unapologetically. He could see exactly why she stuck out like a sore thumb in the daylight hours at PTMC, but that didn’t mean that he necessarily agreed with their thoughts and opinions. These were the same people who dubbed someone as talented as Samira Mohan, Slow Mo, after all.
For all the talk about their reputation as “ ER cowboys,” there were certain norms that straying from became hard to swallow for old timers like Dr. Robby. Even Shen, who has now taken up the mantle as a night shift attending, is still offered a sour look every now and then when he strolls into PTMC with his sunglasses on and a large Dunkalatte in hand at seven at night, ready to engage in some witty repartee.
It kind of made him sad that she’d been pigeonholed into the day shift from day one, a place where he doesn’t necessarily think she has the greatest capacity to shine. He’s thought from that very first day, from that mass casualty event, that she would take better to the night shift. He heard the way that Abbot talked about her impromptu (and unsupervised) REBOA that saved a life. And he knows for a fact that Ellis took an immediate liking to her. At least, he can assume that much given the frequency with which Ellis manages to bring her up in conversation. So he pushes, and he pushes, until eventually something breaks and Dr. Santos is on the night shift twice a week.
“I’m going to have Dr. Santos shadow you,” he says to Ellis as they’re walking in on the day of Santos’s first night. He’d brought her an iced coffee specifically to butter her up and the way that she clenches her fist around the plastic cup shows that she’s caught on.
“You dick,” she grits out as her eyes narrow and Shen flashes a grin at her on instinct. “Why are you doing this to me? Do you hate me? Be honest.”
“I’m doing this for your own good, actually,” he retorts, bumping their shoulders together good naturedly. “And hers. You’re a kickass senior resident, she deserves to be learning from people like you. Everyone does.”
Ellis gives him an unimpressed eyebrow raise. “Resorting to flattery?”
Shen feigns innocence. “Is it working?”
For all her bitching and moaning, Ellis and Santos work together exactly as well as Shen thought that they would. He’s had this skill his whole life. He was single handedly responsible for the long-term relationships of two out of three of his sisters. He would have absolutely crushed it in regency England.
“What’s she like?” Shen asks during their usual Saturday breakfast. It’s the way they end all of their weeks—at a greasy, hole in the wall diner called O’Leary’s at six in the morning. “Dr. Santos?”
He doesn’t miss the way that Ellis has to force her mouth into a straight line to stifle a smile that threatens to betray her. “She’s a firecracker.”
The answer startles a laugh out of Shen. “Explosive?”
“Hard to look away from.” Ellis tilts her head, considering. “She’s wicked smart. Fast on her feet. Down for anything.”
He gives his eyebrows a little wiggle and she shoves at his shoulder hard enough that he nearly topples off his barstool, but they both know what he really means is that Santos reminds Shen of Ellis. This reminds him of the versions of themselves that exist only in the past tense—when Shen was the experienced resident and Ellis was the bright-eyed newbie ready to dive in headfirst.
He’s dying to know more, but he knows from experience that these things do best when they’re left to develop on their own, so he doesn’t. He steps back and allows things to run their course.
His patience is rewarded when, a few weeks later, Santos comes around the corner to interrupt their conversation with a cheerful “Parker, can I get your opinion on something?”
She slides into the space between them, encroaching on Ellis’s personal space like it’s nothing and Shen can’t tell if she’s just bold or familiar. Over her shoulder, he mouths ‘Parker?!’ at her. Even he isn’t on a first name basis with her—though, to be fair, that’s mostly because Ellis hates to call him John.
A smile begins to tug at the corner of her mouth and betrays her attempt at remaining unaffected in the face of Dr. Trinity Santos. “Absolutely.” She makes sure to flip Shen off behind her back as Santos drags her off.
Then, early one Saturday morning, in the very last moments of their shift, Ellis cancels on Saturday breakfast. It’s absolutely unprecedented. Shen’s jaw literally drops. Ellis gets about as close to pouting as she can without losing her dignity. “Come on, man, don’t look at me like that.”
“And does this happen to have anything to do with…” His sentence trails off, his gaze traveling to Santos, who lingers on the other side of the room doing an admirable job of looking like she isn’t waiting for someone.
Ellis waggles a finger at him admonishingly. “A gentleman never kisses and tells, you should know this.”
Shen points a finger at himself in a show of exaggerated disbelief. “Whoever told you I was a gentleman was sorely mistaken.”
He does, however, have some basic decency so he makes sure to wait until it’s very nearly dinner time to swing by Ellis’s place and get the scoop. He’s even generous enough to pick up some takeout and a six-pack on his way there. His heart is so big. He’s sure that it’s absolutely late enough that Ellis will certainly be alone again but he’s immediately proven wrong when her front door opens and it’s Santos on the other side, wearing a shirt that he definitely saw Ellis wearing last week.
He grabs Paolo on his way out of his next shift and slides a crisply folded bill into the palm of his hand. “I heard about the new pool. I want in. Fifty on Ellis.”
03.
It’s been ten months since Frank Langdon worked a shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center emergency department.
It’s been ten months since his life completely imploded on itself. Ten months since he started rebuilding it all, brick by brick. The twelve step program felt a lot more like a twelve hundred step program a lot of days. He admitted his powerlessness, he attempted to reconcile with a God that he’d lost touch with a long time ago, he made fearless moral inventories and lists of the people that he’d hurt. Abby. His parents. Louie, and all the rest of his patients. Robby. Dana. Dr. Trinity Santos.
The last one is the hardest to admit to himself, especially once he steps back into PTMC and realizes just how much everything has changed. He knew that ten months was a long time, but he didn’t realize that it was quite that long until he starts to look around and realizes there are new people that he doesn’t recognize at all walking the familiar halls, that people he had once seen every day were now nowhere to be found. And then, at the center of it all, are Mel and Santos, now connected at the hip. Ten months of imagining the way that he and Mel would snap back together like two puzzle pieces goes up in smoke.
“Yeah, looks like you got replaced,” Princess says from his side and he scowls and drops his gaze before anyone else can call him out on staring.
Life has gone on without him. It’s a tough blow.
Mel is still as kind as Frank remembers her being. She offers him a wide, friendly smile when she sees him for the first time that day and comes to chat with him amicably about the cases that she’s juggling, but he’s no longer the first person that she looks for when something exciting happens. Instead, he’s forced to endure hearing her say “Has anyone seen Dr. Santos?” with an expression of giddy glee that she once pointed at him.
The thing is, the almost year that she’s spent within the walls of the PTMC emergency department has seen Mel grow and flourish. She was never quite fragile, but now she moves with a kind of sturdy certainty that Frank hadn’t witnessed on her before. People look to her, look up to her, look for her. Mel is only ever looking at one person.
He realizes that much right away, but he doesn’t quite grasp the true scope of it, the enormity of the thing, until he sees the two of them in action together.
The case doesn’t seem like an extreme one at first—an asthmatic twelve year old brought in by his mother with a low grade fever, potential stomach bug. In the eyes of Robby, who has been trying hard to foist him off onto low-stakes cases that he can manage in a supervisory capacity, it’s perfect for Dr. Langdon. Mel and Santos are the doctors who actually get to be hands-on with the patient. Frank watches.
“Tachy at 135,” Santos announces as they wheel the boy into one of their free rooms. “BP 64 over 32, breathing at 28.”
“He looks tachypneic. And dehydrated. Dr. Santos, can you get an IV running before you start any preliminary labs?” Their gazes meet only for a moment and something passes between them that Frank isn’t privy to. Mel turns her focused gaze to the boy’s mother without sparing a glance at Frank at all. “I’m Dr. King. Dr. Santos and myself will be taking care of your son today. Can you walk me through the last twelve hours?”
The mother nods. “He’s been tired for the last day or so, a lot of abdominal pain. We’ve been treating with alternating ibuprofen and tylenol but it’s not helping. He woke up with a bit of a fever this morning and we figured he could just rest it off, but then at lunch time we couldn’t get him to wake up.”
“Any vomiting?” Mel asks.
The mother’s gaze doesn’t leave her son as she answers. “A couple of times today.”
Trinity reaches to examine the boy’s abdomen with gloved fingers. Despite appearing half-unconscious, the touch causes him to groan and writhe painfully on the bed. “Responds to pain. Temp up to 101, though.”
“What about the days leading up to the illness?” Mel presses. “Any signs or symptoms, anything out of the ordinary?”
“What about this?” Santos asks as Jesse cuts away the boy’s shirt, revealing a mangled, yellowing bruise seeping across the skin that Santos had just pressed her fingers into. “What caused this bruising?”
“He was in an ATV accident last week,” the mother says, her voice shaking. Mel touches a reassuring hand to her shoulder. “Crashed right into a tree out on his grandparents’ property. But he always wears a helmet and protective gear, so he wasn’t hurt. Just the bruises.”
“Did you take him to the doctor or anything after the accident?” Mel asks.
The mother shakes her head. “No, he was perfectly fine otherwise. I didn’t think it was necessary. Is he going to be okay?”
“He’s going to be fine,” Mel assures her. “Dr. Santos-”
“Put him in line for a CT,” Santos says before Mel can even finish the sentence. “Dr. Langdon, can you go check on those labs we sent out? I want to see his WBC, creatinine, hemoglobin, AST, ALT…”
“On it,” Frank says, swallowing back the bitter taste that rises on his tongue when he has to take orders from Dr. Santos.
“Looking for?” Mel prompts.
“Signs of an acute kidney injury,” Santos responds without hesitation. Frank catches only a glimpse of Mel’s responding smile as he turns away. “Could indicate sepsis.”
“Very nice, Dr. Santos,” she says, and Frank is once again reorienting himself in a world where Mel is the one doling out praise instead of seeking it. He’s distinctly aware of the fact that he’s looking at a version of Mel who isn’t his. Who never has been. Who never will be. There’s a split second where he thinks that maybe he could change that (he’s already blown his life up once, what’s one more time, for her?) but then promptly thinks better of it. Major life decisions aren’t recommended within the first year of sobriety, and getting a divorce only to insert himself in whatever tenuous thing is blossoming between Mel and Dr. Santos definitely falls under the umbrella of major life decisions. Also, probably, the umbrella of incredibly stupid life decisions.
Instead, he comes back to the room with the lab work that they requested and keeps his distance. The numbers are all elevated, in line with the AKI that Dr. Santos had been hypothesizing on. A few minutes later, the CT comes back, too, indicating a bowel perforation and an abscess that has them immediately taking blood cultures.
“Call surgery,” Mel says, the first words she’s uttered to Frank since the patient arrived. He should feel happy that she’s remembered he’s in the room, but instead it kind of feels like a slap. He knows it isn’t fair to hold onto, so he doesn’t. “Let them know that we’re sending him up right away and starting him on IV empiric antibiotic therapy.”
When the boy and his mother are out of the room, he isn’t the one that Mel turns to to celebrate. That’s Santos. They take two steps closer to each other on instinct, like they’re being pulled by magnets, reaching out for each other for a celebratory high five. Their hands touch, grasp, drop, but never separate. Frank is the one that looks away first.
Later, he’s caught staring again by Larry, who holds out an empty hand for him. “Yo, want to get in on this?”
Paolo elbows Larry in the side hard enough that he makes a small ‘ oof’ noise. “Come on man, you can’t ask the guy who just got out of rehab if he wants to gamble.” He says it in a hushed whisper, but not hushed enough that Langdon doesn’t hear.
“No thanks,” Langdon replies, turning his gaze down toward the desk space in front of him. It’s the only safe place to look.
“Well, he might not, but I sure do,” Antoine says, sliding a crumpled handful of bills from his pocket and searching for what he can add up in multiples of five. “Can I get thirty on Mel?”
When Frank stands and walks out the front door of the emergency department for some air, it feels like nobody even notices him go.
Life goes on, alright.
04.
Heather Collins has had a real tough go of it the last few months. Dana Evans has been doing her best to help take care of her—she has her over for dinner at least once a week, takes her out for drinks when they both have the next day off, checks in on her as often as the frantic rush of their day-to-day lives allows—but there are some things that she just can’t help with. Not unless Benji gets cool with a lot of stuff really quickly.
The concern comes to light one of those aforementioned nights that they’re both, miraculously, off the next day. Heather has dragged her to a new cocktail lounge that she’s been wanting to try forever, despite Dana’s protests that she’s too old for hard liquor, so she really can’t even be blamed for saying “Honey, is anyone taking care of you?”
An amused smile threatens to tug at the corners of Heather’s mouth. “Taking care of me?”
Dana knows that she knows exactly what she means, but she elaborates anyway. “You know, sexually.”
Heather bursts out laughing. “Oh, you are drunk!”
“No! Well, yes, but no,” Dana shakes her head, reaching across the table to lay her hands on Heather’s forearms. “I’m saying it because it’s true. It’s important. You know how much serotonin the body produces post-orgasm?”
Heather’s eyes go wide as she casts a quick glance around to see if anyone overheard her. “Shh. Not so loud about the orgasms here, this is a classy establishment.”
“And? Orgasms are classy as shit,” Dana protests, and Heather dissolves into giggles all over again.
“If it’s the orgasms you’re worried about, I can promise you that I have that handled,” Heather says once she’s composed herself. “The wonders of modern technology.”
Dana clicks her tongue. “It’s not the same! You know it’s not the same.”
Heather’s eyebrows shoot up on her forehead. “Yeah. When it comes to men, it’s often better.”
Now Dana is the one laughing—and very undignified, too. It’s a loud cackle that does make a few of their fellow patrons shoot a look in their direction. “There are plenty of fish in the sea, you know.”
Heather’s smile morphs on her face, taking on a tense edge. “I’m thinking about taking a dip in different waters.”
Dana squeezes her arms reassuringly and watches as the tension melts from Heather’s features. “Been there, babe.”
Heather’s jaw drops. “You have not.”
“I had a girlfriend in college!” Dana nods, lifting her hand like she’s being sworn in on the witness stand. “Ask Benji, he’ll tell you.”
Heather stares at her in quiet wonder, stars dancing in her brown eyes. “You’re so fucking cool, Dana.”
“Alright, alright.” Dana rolls her eyes and shoves herself off of Heather gently. “What are you looking for? I can be on the prowl. Your wingwoman.”
Heather ponders the question. Dana can practically see the way the gears turn inside her mind, the same way that she does when she’s assessing a patient. There are a lot of people who sleep on Heather’s quiet genius, but Dana certainly isn’t one of them. “I think… someone bold but not… dominant.” Dana’s eyebrows arch and the corner of Heather’s mouth twitches. Good to know . “Someone strong enough to lean on without worrying that they’ll break. Someone who can make me laugh. Someone who isn’t afraid to stand up for themselves, who can stand up for me.”
“Well, I’ll let you know if I find Wonder Girl anywhere.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s Wonder Woman.”
“But until then, all you need to do is find some pretty little young thing and-”
“Alright! That’s enough from you!”
She doesn’t remember a whole lot else from the night—just being buckled into the passenger seat by Benij, trying to kiss Heather goodbye, and then falling asleep fully clothed and in all her makeup from the night before. Thank god she has the next day off.
The next time that she does head into work, it’s with two iced coffees—one to present to Heather as her “I’m sorry for overstepping regarding your sexual escapades and also for trying to plant one on you right after you came out to me” gesture. Heather takes it with a look that tells Dana it’s appreciated but highly unnecessary.
“You’re allowed to overstep,” Heather reminds her when she attempts to put words to her apology, just to make sure none of the meaning is lost. “You’re my friend. It’s what we do.”
“I just know that when you…” She trails off, reaches for one of Heather’s hands. They don’t talk about her miscarriage, but she knows that Heather was making a go at it alone then. She doesn’t know when the last time Heather had a partner in her life was. She hopes to god it wasn’t Robby. “I just know you’ve been on your own a while, and I want to make sure you know you’re still worthy of love and romance and all that.”
Heather smiles and gives her hand a squeeze. “If it doesn’t work out with Benji…”
Dana laughs. “You’ll be the first person I call.”
For a while, nothing comes of their discussion, and Dana doesn’t push it because she knows it’s not her place to, but then… then Heather comes in one day and she’s absolutely glowing. Like literally radiating, despite the fluorescents—which is really saying something because the fluorescent lighting in the emergency department is genuinely an atrocity—and she walks with a certain spring in her step and her smile is just loose and easygoing enough…
“You little minx,” Dana practically squeals as she seizes Heather by her hands and tugs her aside. She always feels a little like a girl again when she and Heather get going like this. The friendship keeps her young. “You slept with someone! Who was it?! How was it!? I need to know everything.”
And Dana really thinks for a minute there that Heather isn’t going to tell her. Her straight-faced stoic act is very convincing at first. She’s really got Dana going until… until her mouth unfurls in a little smile, and her gaze dips away from Dana’s to look somewhere over her shoulder, and when Dana turns around to follow her line of sight it lands right on a blushing but awfully satisfied Dr. Trinity Santos.
As soon as she realizes that she’s caught, Heather grabs Dana by the sleeve of her scrubs and pulls her back around the corner where they won’t be interrupted. “Do not.”
“Dr. Santos?!” Dana whisper-shouts, loud enough that Heather shushes her for it.
She gives Dana a glare that contains very little heat. “I seem to recall you were the one who told me I just needed to find a pretty little young thing.”
Dana scrubs her hands over her face with a groan. “Got me there. Shit. How was it?”
Heather takes a cursory glance around, like she’s afraid Trinity will pop out of the nearest room. “So good.”
“Really.”
“Like… so good, Dana.”
The next time that she sees Donnie, she slips him a twenty. “Put it on Dr. Collins for me, would you? And at least try to keep it discreet.”
05.
It’s late when Joyce St. Clair arrives at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. She’s also in extreme amounts of pain, which immediately captures the attention of Dr. Jack Abbot. Well, that, and the fact that as soon as she opens her mouth, the first words out of it are, between screams, “Is Dr. Mohan here? I want Dr. Mohan.”
As a fellow member of the Samira Mohan fanclub, he gets her. He also recognizes Joyce and her wife, Ondine, immediately. Only recently, Samira had sought his opinion regarding Joyce and her increasingly frequent sickle cell crises. Their conversation is still fresh in his mind.
“As much as I wish I could have Dr. Mohan on my shift, she prefers the daylight,” Abbot laments, taking over to guide the women toward one of their open rooms. “I’m guessing you’re the Mrs. St. Clairs? I’m Dr. Abbot. Dr. Mohan is a friend of mine. I’m going to get you started with ten milligrams of IV morphine and a Dilaudid drip. Once we’ve got your sickle cell pain under control we can discuss who will take over your case tonight.”
When he comes back a little bit later, Joyce is looking considerably better. Enough so that before he can even get both feet inside her room, she’s asking “Is Dr. Santos working tonight?”
He raises an eyebrow. He hadn’t seen her name pop up on any of Joyce’s charts. “You’ve been treated by Dr. Santos?”
Joyce and Ondine exchange a look. “Not exactly,” Ondine replies. “But we’ve met. And we’ve heard a lot about her, from Dr. Mohan.”
This catches Abbot’s interest. He’s been hearing whispers of a new betting pool starting up again, and though he’s never been the type to pay any mind to whispers as far as passing judgement goes, he has a hard time saying no to a little recreational gambling. He never puts anything more than the bare minimum of five dollars in. He mostly just likes to be involved.
This is his first real lead at having anything to contribute. Not that Samira mentioning Dr. Santos is much of a lead at all, but when he looks down at where Joyce and Ondine’s hands are clasped on the edge of her bed, he thinks that maybe they are qualified to weigh in on the topic. “I’m sure Dr. Mohan speaks highly of Dr. Santos. She’s an excellent doctor.”
Another look travels between the wives; Abbot can see traces of it in the corners of their mouths, in the crinkle of their eyes. Joyce is the one that speaks, but the words don’t come as easily to her as they do to Ondine. He can tell she’s still in pain. He pushes another ten of morphine. “She does speak
very
highly of Dr. Santos.”
Abbot so desperately wishes that he wasn’t the attending physician so he could continue this conversation. Instead, he says “Dr. Santos is working tonight. Let me go get her for you.”
Santos’s eyes widen when he tells her that Joyce St. Clair is here and requesting her by name. “Oh, no, really? I just saw her a couple weeks ago at-” As though she realizes she’s about to show too much of her hand, she closes her mouth around the rest of the sentence. “I’ll be right with them. Thanks, boss.”
When Abbot passes by Joyce’s room later, he can’t help but notice that the wives call them Samira and Trinity, not Dr. Mohan and Dr. Santos. He makes a mental note about it and carries on with his night, keeping his potential bet in the back of his mind.
He tries to pay a little bit closer attention during their shift trade-off in the morning. If Santos worked the night shift, there are a few people she won’t leave without seeing first. Samira is one of them, but so is Heather, and Mel, and Dr. Javadi. If Santos works the morning shift, she comes in with someone different every day, usually from the aforementioned list, but sometimes Whitaker. And he definitely doesn’t think that she’s dating Whitaker.
At some point, he becomes cognizant of the fact that he’s spending far too much time dwelling and conspiring on the personal life of his much younger subordinate employees and decides he has to cut it off right then and there.
On his way out, he catches Larry and slides him a crisp five dollar bill. “On Samira, please.”
Larry leans in with a smile. “Between me and you, boss, that’s where I put my money, too.”
+ 01.
It’s not easy being the guy in charge. Nobody knows this better than Dr. Robby.
One would think that after years of running an emergency department, he would be better equipped for all of the responsibilities that come along with it. And he likes to think that he is… when it comes to the patients. He can keep his composure during an emergency, most of the time. He’s a damn good doctor.
It’s the managing the other doctors part that he struggles with. Everything that happened with Frank very nearly did him in. He’s only kind of recovered some sense of normalcy with him back when talk about Santos starts to spread.
He knows about his staff’s love for a bit of light gambling. They’ll take any excuse to start running a betting pool. He just didn’t think it would come at the expense of each other’s personal lives. It’s an HR nightmare. It’s the kind of thing that will have Gloria on his case in 2.8 seconds if it breaches containment, and the absolute last thing he desires in this life is more of a reason to have Gloria on his case.
He can’t very well bring it up with Dr. Santos. What if she doesn’t know? She doesn’t seem like the type to take it lying down, which makes him think that she hasn’t… unless she knows and just doesn’t care. Should he wait to see if she brings it up with him first? Should he try to talk to everyone involved? But how could he possibly know who all was? It’s a headache.
He decides to wade in through the shallow end rather than cannonball into it. He talks to Whitaker. It feels like a safe bet; he’s definitely uninvolved while also being close enough to Santos to help him confirm some of the facts.
He catches Whitaker outside of a patient’s room and claps a hand on his shoulder, steering him off in the opposite direction that they were headed. “Can I talk to you for a second about something?”
Whitaker’s eyes widen. “Sure, Dr. Robby.”
“You’re not in trouble.” Whitaker visibly relaxes. Robby wishes he could do the same. “It’s about Dr. Santos, actually. I know the two of you are… close.” Whitaker’s expression shifts to one of confusion, like he’s not sure where Robby is going with this. To be fair, Robby doesn’t really know either. “I’m, erm… I’m assuming that you’ve heard about…”
He trails off. He has half a mind to jump ship and come up with something unimportant and meaningless to say and pretend like he never even heard about any of this, but Whitaker beats him to the punch and says “The betting pool? Yeah, I have.”
“Yes.” The three letter word feels like it takes a full five seconds to leave his mouth. “And do you know if… Dr. Santos knows?”
Whitaker barks out a laugh that takes Robby by surprise. “Honestly, captain, I think that she’s the one who started it, but I can’t prove that.”
Now Robby is just even more confused. “So is she… actually…”
“Dating all of them?” Whitaker asks, which is absolutely not what Robby was going to say. He can feel the moment his brain shuts down, the moment that Robby.exe stops working. “I mean, I haven’t checked in on the wagers recently but I can tell you with certainty she’s dating at least five of them.”
All Robby can say is “Five?”
“Have you ever heard of polyamory, boss?” Whitaker asks, eyes infuriatingly earnest.
Robby is very suddenly struck with the encumbering knowledge that everyone should know less about each other. He releases his hand from Whitaker’s shoulder. “You know what. That’s okay. Forget I asked.”
A familiar look crosses Whitaker’s face. They’re both aware that they’ve been in this exact position before. “Consider it forgotten.”
Robby turns the other direction as quickly as he possibly can without it considered running. On the way toward the center vestibule of the Pitt, he passes by Princess and Perlah, their heads ducked together. He catches a few words that he recognizes—namely Dr. Robby and Whitaker.
He scrubs a hand over his face. If he’s not careful, he’s going to be the next topic of conversation in this place.