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Cassie McKay is totally fucked.
Which sounds hyperbolic given the night that she has had. In the grand scheme of things, isn't totally fucked being pulseless without hope of reversal? Isn't it an IO and a chest tube and three rounds of epi and still no ROSC? Isn't it a black slap band and move on to the next patient – red bands, yellow bands, green bands, don't stop for the black, keep moving, keep moving, keep moving – until finally it's over and even then is it ever really over?
Totally fucked is not sitting in a jail cell at midnight because she was trying to do her job. That's more like royally screwed. From here, though, it's the same difference.
"Fuuuuuck!" Cassie shouts and lets the word reverberate off the cement block walls.
"Hey, deep breaths," the even-keeled voice next to her says. "You're spinning out."
Cassie McKay does not spin out. Could a second-year resident in her forties be able to survive past intern year if she didn't know how to compartmentalize, if she couldn't keep calm and carry on?
She should say that, but what she says – shrieks, really – is, "I'm so incredibly screwed!"
Her words come out in short desperate gasps. It's so embarrassing that she staved off having a nervous breakdown during a mass casualty incident only to forget how to get air into her lungs and push carbon dioxide out of them now that it's over. She keeps trying – she's always trying – but God, it never goes the way she wants it to, does it?
"Nothing's going to happen to your residency. You're going to be fine."
Except she still can't breathe and that seems like an important pre-requisite to being fine. Except she loves being a doctor, but that's not what she's thinking about right now.
"I am going to lose my son."
It is jarring to say out loud, but even more jarring when a kneecap brushes against hers. Cassie's head snaps up instinctively, her fist curling around an imaginary set of keys to jam into said kneecap before her brain can tell her body to chill out because this is not a fight or flight situation. And thank God for that because McKay is still wheezing like a dying animal.
Apparently, her cell mate's new strategy is intimidation because he barks, "Goddammit, Dr. McKay, give me a three count!" before counting to three while she sucks air in through her teeth and then counting to three again while she lets it out. She keeps doing this until her hands stop shaking and her vision isn't swimming anymore. Only then does he believe her claims that she won't pass out. He returns her nod with one of his own before declaring, "Everything is going to be fine, McKay."
He doesn't know that, of course. He has no possible way of knowing that. And honestly, Cassie is so tired at this point that she couldn't care less about professionalism when she finally snaps, "With all due respect, Dr. Abbot, that's pretty hard to believe coming from the guy sitting in jail next to me."
*
Here's what happens: life is a zero-sum game so the price of saving dozens of lives is that she'll never again be allowed to see the one person that she'd sacrifice them all for.
"Dramatic!" the voice in her head says. Weirdly, it still sounds like Mrs. Ashcroft at the custody hearing and takes on a sing-song quality as McKay remembers her laughing, "Cassie always was prone to exaggeration."
Her mind flashes to Chad's mother taking the stand in that impeccable Hermès cape, her face half turned towards the judge so she can roll her eyes like they're in on the same joke. The joke being that Cassie is the better parent, that taking away primary custody from her wouldn't be akin to giving custody to the nanny the Ashcrofts keep on retainer, that Chadwick Harrison Ashcroft III isn't the same man child now who couldn't keep her Ficus alive for one weekend then while she went to San Diego for an MCAT review course.
*
Abbot advises her to tell Ortiz that she's "still ruminating" when the officer comes back to offer Cassie her one phone call. It sounds like terrible advice that she'd be an idiot to listen to, especially when they're in similar boats, but she's only got two numbers memorized and the alternative to playing dumb is to wake up her dad and ask him to call the lawyer and, oh yeah, tell him that he might as well say goodbye to his grandson forever now that they'll never let her within a hundred feet of him again.
"That seems counterproductive," she tells Abbot noncommittally instead of thinking about tomorrow and the day after and the day after that if she loses Harrison to Chad.
"Keep it in your back pocket," Abbot says with a shrug. When she still looks skeptical, he adds, "Don't worry so much, McKay. I used my one phone call very wisely."
She has no idea what that means and Abbot's chuckle doesn't exactly clarify matters either. She's about to ask how his phone call helps her – she saved more than two dozen lives today so she's allowed to be a little selfish! – when Ortiz's boots click-clack on the cement floor as she gets closer before finally rapping her knuckle against the bar of their holding cell and saying, "You're up, McKay. Time for that phone call."
Cassie looks at Abbot – who is nodding sagely like it is intern year and he's about to walk McKay through her first spinal tap again – and then looks at Ortiz – who looks bored despite having just ruined Cassie's life tonight. McKay takes a fortifying breath because she is going to regret this in about four seconds and then says, "I'm still considering all my options."
Ortiz looks at Cassie like she's insane whereas Abbot looks at her like he's about to hand her a twelve-dollar bottle of Incanto Prosecco from Trader Joe's to celebrate her first champagne tap.
*
Here's what really happens: Cassie takes an IO gun to her ankle monitor so she can save five more lives in the next thirty minutes. She intubates, applies pressure dressings, and triages, triages, triages – yellow, ICU; red, up to the OR; this one gets a chest tube, this one goes down to the morgue; they got the shooter and it's that kid; no, it's not; yes, it is; no, it's not, but it could have been and maybe that's reason enough to keep David in that room and maybe she has saved so many more girls who won't need name tags and treatment plans scribbled in Sharpie across their foreheads.
McKay moves patients like chess pieces and then moves through them like a prodigy playing a speed round. Checkmate, checkmate, checkmate until she's done and her trophy is Officer Alberich ordering her to put her hands above her head like a criminal while half of the ER gapes at them. She feels the cool metal of the handcuffs on the side of her wrist and hears "You've got to be fucking kidding me, Luke!" before her hands are briefly let go so Officer Alberich can threaten to arrest Jack Abbot too if he tries to interfere again.
Cassie risks getting shot to turn around just in time to hear Abbot say, "Fuck off, man," before rolling his eyes and asking Dana to get Gloria. He's muttering something about bullies with badges when Alberich makes the mistake of putting his hand on Abbot's shoulder. All at once, the attending who is always so chill under pressure rears back his fist and slams it into Alberich's nose with a deafening crunch and all Cassie can think is green band, snap it into place and put some ice on it.
The end result is still the same though. McKay gets arrested but now she has company on the way to the police station. Company that immediately asks the cops, "How about playing some N.W.A. for the drive?" as soon as they're locked into the back seat.
*
"Maybe I should ask for that phone call now."
"Give it a minute." Abbot goes back to what he was blathering on about before: "So the baby is hypotensive, turning blue with oxygen, single S2—"
"Do you know how much worse you've made this for me?" Cassie sighs in the middle of a case presentation she didn't sign up to hear in jail. "I probably would've gotten a slap on the wrist about the ankle monitor thing, but who is going to overlook a cop getting decked because of me?"
Abbot laughs. "Relax, McKay. Can't chase a rainbow without some rain first."
Has Jack Abbot always spoken in Fortune Cookie?
*
Cassie is about to give up hope of anyone coming to bail them out when she hears, "For fuck's sake, I don't need a police escort to walk a straight line to the only occupied holding cell in the room!"
"And there she is," Abbot hums at McKay, looking entirely too pleased with himself for someone who has been presenting cases that Cassie has barely paid attention to for two hours. She wouldn't have listened at all if he didn't pimp her on the differentials, workup, and treatment plans afterwards. It turns out that, despite all this, Cassie still wants to make a good impression on someone whose clinical acumen she respects.
"Ma'am, it's policy," Ortiz says as she runs after the woman.
"Fuck policy."
Abbot's get out of jail card sounds an awful lot like Emery Walsh, but that's a certifiable thought. If anything, he'd be in jail for killing her, right? How tired is Cassie for even thinking that?
McKay is about to ask Ortiz to take pity and get her a cup of coffee when Dr. Walsh storms down the hall and stops in front of them to scoff, "So I can't step away from the ER for twenty minutes without you getting arrested, Jack?"
"Holy shit," Cassie mumbles under her breath. Her head moves so rapidly between Walsh and Abbot that she gives herself whiplash. She expects him to be as shocked as she is, but the shit-eating grin does not fade from Abbot's face. Did he know that Walsh was coming? Of course, he knew because he's the one who called her, right? Unless he called Robby and Robby turfed it to Walsh, but even someone as out of it right now as Robby would see that for the bad idea that it is. No one asks oil to help out water in a jam.
And since when does Walsh call Abbot "Jack" instead of "unrepentant menace to standard of care" like she did repeatedly when McKay was on nights? Every time Walsh came down to precept a surgery consult only to find that Abbot was in the middle of doing yet another unnecessary procedure on the patient, the rest of the ER braced themselves for impact like sailors powering through a tropical storm. Once when Abbot was going to debride an extensive crush injury in the ER with nothing but topical lidocaine, Walsh looked like she was legitimately going to drill into his chest cavity with an IO gun to stop him.
But right now Abbot is smiling at Emery Walsh with what can only be considered fondness in his eyes and it's freaking Cassie out! In fact, it's so fucking weird that Cassie's wondering if she's hallucinating. She's been up for twenty hours and all she has had to eat in that time is half a granola bar and three sips of Harrison's fluorescent yellow Gatorade. As she questions her mental status, Abbot gets to his feet and walks to stand opposite Walsh from inside the jail cell. He rests his elbows on the horizontal bars running perpendicular to the vertical ones of their cage and leans forward to stick his face between the metal.
"What took you so long, Em?" he asks cheekily.
Em? Cassie looks down to see if there's a shiv in Abbot's hand. She can't have "accomplice to murder" on her rap sheet too.
"I thought you were on the roof, asshole! Ran into Robby and then had to wait for him to work through his feelings without—"
"You remember McKay, don't you?" Abbot quickly interrupts before jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Cassie. "Second year resident whose advisor is Robby?"
Cassie's not stupid. She knows there's a pointed warning in there somewhere, but she's not interested in uncovering all that. Whatever feelings Robby is working through are of no concern to her. Truthfully, she's waiting for Ellis to graduate in nine months and join The Pitt ER attending pool so she can ask to switch advisors.
For her part, Walsh apparently also does not care about talking shit in front of McKay because she groans, "I'm already bailing you out of jail. Now you want me to call out earmuffs too?"
Cassie isn't sure what's going on, but she's offended. She's not a little kid! Hell, she's probably older than Walsh! They can talk about whatever they want if it ends with McKay getting out of here.
"Oh, I want you to call out lots of things," Abbot drawls, his voice so low that Cassie pitches forward to hear him and then isn't sure she heard right. Surely, Jack Abbot is not hitting on Emery Walsh when they both seem like they'd be happier hitting each other with their cars. Is this what it feels like to be an eyewitness to one of those shift-destroying four car pile ups they get every other week?
Cassie must have heard wrong because Walsh just rolls her eyes and asks, "Why am I bailing you out of jail again?"
By now, Cassie has decided that he must have left Walsh the voicemail, who would purposefully drive below the speed limit on her way here to teach him a lesson. But what kind of person asks someone to bail them out of jail without telling them why they are there in the first place? McKay is about to explain the whole thing with her ankle monitor and him defending her when the corner of his lip curves up and Abbot says, "As a residency program director, I thought you'd appreciate my solidarity with the trainees."
"You thought I'd swoon over a felony?" Walsh deadpans. She looks like she's about to commit several of her own right now.
Abbot leans in even closer like if he wants it bad enough, he'll be able to squeeze through the narrow space to reach Walsh on the other side. Is he trying to goad her into an assault charge so they can all spend the night in here like The Three Musketeers?
"I thought women liked bad boys."
Is he flirting with her? From jail? Cassie would be impressed with his commitment if she wasn't half convinced that her mind was playing tricks on her.
"Only in novels with cowboys on the covers," Walsh replies incredulously. As an afterthought, she adds viciously, "Also bad boy, Jack? Being a little generous with the description there, don't you think, old man?"
"We both know I've got the stamina of—"
Cassie needs her own cell. She needs her own cell and two pillows to put over her head to stop from hearing any of these words. She needs a lobotomy more than that one phone call and that Hail Mary and—
A filter between her brain and her mouth, apparently, because the first words out of Cassie McKay's mouth are: "Oh my God, are you two dating each other?"
Is this a booty call? Has McKay not suffered enough tonight without becoming privy to the knowledge that the venom Abbot and Walsh routinely spit at each other across the ER might just be foreplay?
"Worse," Walsh groans, the first thing she has said to McKay since she arrived.
What's worse? Before she can ask, Abbot holds up his hand and Cassie's brain explodes.
*
There are certain types of knowledge that are so deeply ingrained into the foundation of a place that they become the truth. In The Pitt, these are the things that are common knowledge:
Shen sneaks expired bags of TPN home to mix with Biogold organic fertilizer so he can keep the bonsai tree his mother gave him at the start of residency alive. It's the proxy marker she uses to make sure he can keep himself alive during their monthly FaceTime session, the threat of a surprise visit from San Francisco always looming even now that he is an attending. Shen practically gets the shakes if they go more than two weeks without getting a nursing home patient with urosepsis on nights so he can swap out their potassium-containing TPN for two liters of D5NS.
If Dana takes a second smoke break during her shift, the shit is about to hit the fan. If she's on her third, everyone knows to stay away unless they want to get eviscerated.
Jack Abbot lost his leg, then lost his wife, and then lost his patience for playing by the rules when he realized that the universe didn't hold itself to the same standards. Instead of accepting that sometimes things suck, he decided that practicing jungle medicine in a first world country was a lot more fun.
*
"But you're a widower."
The moment she says it, Cassie realizes how stupid it is to tell him that. If anyone would know, it would be him, right? Is she trying to gaslight him into having a dead wife?
"Am I?"
"Aren't you? Everyone knows that you're…" She's about to say the way you are, but that feels insensitive even for this situation. When he laughs like he knows how that sentence would have ended, Cassie has to sit back down because what the fuck is even going on anymore?
"Everyone thinks they know, but I have never confirmed or denied what they assumed to be true."
"Huh?"
Abbot sighs like he's disappointed in her inability to follow his twisted logic. "It's a faulty presupposition leading to the wrong diagnosis."
"Except who the hell pretends to have a dead wife?"
He laughs and raises his hands in surrender before jerking his head towards Walsh.
"She'd rather pretend to be dead than admit that she married me."
The crazy thing is that Abbot doesn't even sound mad about it. On the contrary, he sounds amused – like this is an anecdote they've told at countless dinner parties since trading promises and sealing their vows with a kiss. For her part, Walsh doesn't even blush. Cassie is starting to think that nothing fazes this woman when Walsh says matter-of-factly, "Just because you're my favorite mistake doesn't mean you're not still a mistake."
Walsh must spot Cassie craning her neck in search of a ring on her finger because she rolls her eyes, pulls the necklace out from under her shirt, and allows the band to catch in the fluorescent lights.
Already anticipating her next question, Abbot says, "She saves the real one for when we're having dinner with the parentals so they don't think that I'm a deadbeat."
"Speaking of whom…"
For the first time all night, Abbot's mouth turns down into a frown.
"What?"
"Hey, I had to call Dad in the middle of the night for this favor! You know how cranky he gets when he doesn't get a full eight hours of sleep before he flies to DC for a vote!"
Cassie's eyebrows furrow. There are so many Walshes out there. Surely, PTMC's meanest trauma surgery attending is not related to that Walsh.
Abbot squeezes his eyes shut. "Okay, just pull off the band-aid, Em."
"Brunch next weekend."
Abbot immediately groans like he's been punched in the gut before whining that brunch is always preceded by golf and "it's inhumane how early Dan's tee times are when he owns the damn course, Em!"
"He's trying to be considerate!"
"Of whom? Certainly not me!"
"He doesn't need to be considerate of you. He's getting your arrest expunged at two in the morning!"
"Hold on!" Cassie interrupts louder than she intended because they both turn to stare at her. "Your father is Congressman Daniel Walsh?"
After a beat, Walsh shrugs and says, "If you voted for the other guy, I really don't want to know."
*
Everyone knows that every November, Jack Abbot takes a week off to mourn his dead wife. It's the only time they can be sure that he won't come in even if Pittsburgh implodes and their entire hospital becomes a mass casualty unit.
Cassie realizes now that he's probably celebrating his wedding anniversary at a B&B out of town at that time and the reason his phone goes straight to voicemail is because he's too busy railing Emery Walsh.
It's such a good grift that McKay is surprised no one else has ever thought of it before.
*
It turns out that Walsh is not full of shit because when Ortiz shuffles back to the holding area and opens the cell door, her entire body slumps into itself like she's a dog who got whacked in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper for pissing on the rug. She grumbles that in light of recent events, they're free to go. Ortiz is about to head back when Walsh gestures at the dead monitor still strapped to McKay's ankle and asks snidely, "Aren't you going to take that off?"
"She disabled the mechanism!" Ortiz sputters.
"Bolt cutters should do the trick," Abbot offers helpfully.
Ortiz does not look like she appreciates the tip as she glares at him. Walsh taps her foot on the floor and impatiently exhales a long breath. When she speaks again, her voice is practically dripping with condescension as she says, "Officer Ortiz, we don't have all night. Some of us have lives to save in the morning." The chop, chop is heavily implied.
"I'll see what I can do," Ortiz says through gritted teeth before leaving them.
"I love it when you get debutante-at-cotillion bitchy!" Abbot says with a grin as he pulls Walsh in for a kiss.
It's like watching all of Zeus and Roxanne play out in three-times its normal speed over twenty minutes, but McKay can't look away. It doesn't make sense and it shouldn't work and she's still not totally convinced that their marriage won't end in a double homicide one day, but they look…happy? Or at least, she's never seen either of them look happier unless they're elbow deep in some guy's abdomen and tamponading a retroperitoneal bleed with lap pads while arguing about which one of them is doing it better.
Before McKay has to clear her throat loudly or yodel, Walsh pushes the heel of her hand against Abbot's chest and orders him to go and apologize to Alberich.
"I thought Dan took care of it?"
"Took care of her thing because she was right," Walsh says as she nods at Cassie. "That restraining order was bullshit. I'd do more than break an arm if my kid was spending Mother's Day with a twenty-three-year-old influencer who had questionable taste in crop tops simply because my ex was being a dick about whose weekend it was in the custody arrangement."
And that's…exactly what happened. Cassie tries not to gape at Walsh or, God, do something truly mortifying like hug her for convincing a sitting congressman to vouch for Cassie to a judge at two in the morning. She thinks she's being pretty cool given the circumstances, but her brain decides that she's being too cool and pivots to having her sound like an idiot when McKay stammers, "So you…you have a kid too? Like together or…?"
It sounds like McKay is asking if Walsh has personally discovered water on Mars. Why can't she stop whatever is happening with her voice right now? Why can't she just be normal about this?
To her credit, Walsh has already lost interest in McKay by then because she has turned back to Abbot, her husband, to scoff, "I was not about to tell my father that you punched a cop like an attention-seeking jackass."
"That's not…Luke was the one being an asshole!"
Walsh shrugs.
"If I can forgive him for spilling red wine all over my white couch during your stupid Pittsburgh's Finest Poker Night—"
"We didn't invite him back precisely because you didn't forgive him!"
She conveniently ignores him to continue, "Go kiss and make up so he doesn't press charges because you broke his nose."
"Allegedly," Abbot grumbles.
"It looks bruised more than anything else," Cassie adds supportively.
*
It turns out that Robby already pleaded Jack's case to Officer Harrelson as soon as the cops carted them away so Abbot didn't have to grovel or promise Officer Alberich an invite to the next poker night after all. Naturally, Walsh already knew this before she headed to the police station, much like she apparently knew that Abbot would rather cancel poker night altogether than invite that douchebag into his house again.
"And that," Walsh confesses to Cassie smugly, "is how I get my living room back on Tuesday nights."
Cassie wants to be her.
*
"So…that diner on Fifth?" Abbot asks Walsh knowingly after Ortiz shoos them out of the precinct and warns them never to grace her halls again.
"It's either getting waffles or getting divorced," Walsh replies with a grin.
While Abbot rolls his eyes and reminds her that she makes the same threat every week, Cassie awkwardly waits for her phone to turn on again. She has to be back at work in twenty-eight hours and plans to spend at least twelve of those hours sleeping, but she has to get home for any of that to happen. Her car is obviously back at the hospital so her options are either to call her father for a pick up – and then he'd know that she spent at least part of the night in the slammer so maybe that's not an option at all – or take an Uber back to the hospital and then pray that she doesn't wrap her car around a pole on the drive home.
Once she sees the prices though, McKay considers opening Google Maps and seeing how long it would take to hoof it to PTMC when she hears the long beep of a car horn. When she looks up, Emery Walsh is poking her head out of the driver's side window to snap, "What the hell are you doing, McKay?"
Cassie jumps out of the way of Walsh's Beamer and then, mortifyingly, starts to wave them through like she's a school crossing guard. For fuck's sake, what is wrong with her? When the car doesn't move, McKay holds up her phone and calls out, "It's just taking a minute to search for an available Uber—"
"Get in the damn car, McKay," Walsh orders exasperatedly.
A second later, she hears the click of the doors opening. Cassie jogs over to tell them that she doesn't want to impose and that she's got money left over from moonlighting last month to pay for this highway robbery, but Walsh is irritably drumming her fingers on the wheel by the time she reaches the car.
McKay looks to Abbot to confirm that tagging along as a third wheel to extend this night even further would be a nightmare, but he just grins and explains, "Don't mind her. Her hanger manifests itself as impatience when you can't read her mind." He reaches behind him to get the handle of the back door. "Robby would kill me if you got murdered out here after all this."
Since McKay can't lie about trusting Pittsburgh PD to solve her murder case, she climbs into the car and barely gets the door closed before Walsh peels out of the parking lot so fast that her screeching tires leave tracks behind.
"The true crime is surge pricing," Walsh grumbles just as the speakers start playing George Michael's "Freedom!" from Abbot's phone.