Chapter Text
September 2025
It starts like this:
Frank gets caught. He does not voluntarily give up information about the stolen drugs – he gets caught.
Big difference.
And there’s much to say about him, unwilling to give up that kind of information because he simply did not believe he ever would – get caught, that is. He figured out a way to fly under the radar and still be great at what he does. If anything, he was better. More attentive, quicker, sharper reflexes – it was like Noah’s fucking ark of pros.
But he gets caught, and Robby kicks him out. Then he comes back, and Robby looks at him like he is personally responsible for his downfall, like Frank himself is the reason he had a fucking panic attack in the peds room - as if the benzos themselves caused the mass casualty incident.
They didn’t – Frank wants to make that very clear. Yes, he got caught doing a shitty thing, but the scale of the issue probably wouldn’t have been that bad if it were any other day in the Pitt. Frank likes to tell himself that.
In the time between getting caught and coming back to the hospital, he sits in his car just a few streets from the hospital garage. He contemplates going home, but what is he supposed to say to Abby? He calls Robby again and again because what has he got to lose, and just when the feeling of panic is rising in his throat like bile, he gets an alert about PittFest and swerves back into his original parking space.
No one stops him when he walks into the ER, thankfully, and he gets stuck in immediately. He takes a few seconds to gauge the others’ reactions to see if Robby has told them anything, but everyone seems too busy trying to keep the 100 or so people alive, so he slips in seamlessly.
But then Robby and him have it out again in the ambulance bay, and he says some shit he’ll probably regret at some point in his life – not right now, that’s for sure – and then goes home because at least this time he’ll have a reason not to divulge about his day to Abby.
The kids are asleep when he gets home, but he checks on them anyway after showering. That feeling of panic rising in his throat gets to him again, but he closes the door of Sadie’s room with an uncomfortable breath before he does something stupid like talk to the animals on her wall. He regrets thinking that.
Abby wakes up when he slips into bed and asks him if he’s okay. He tells her that he’s fine and that she should go back to sleep. She knows not to pester him after a day like this.
The next morning, he tells Abby that his days off got pushed forward because of the MCI and does his due diligence by dropping Tanner off at preschool and taking Sadie to the park for a stroll, all before 10am. He calls Abby at work and tries to convince her to take some days off so they can head into the country – he just needs to get out of this place, get out of his skin, his own brain. She tells him she can’t at such short notice and that he should sort the garage out if he’s getting antsy.
On the fourth day, he ends up at Robby’s door because he knows it’s his day off. Robby tells him to go home, and when he doesn’t, he tells Frank that he physically cannot come back to work unless he fixes up, that he will not allow him into the doors of the ER until there’s physical proof of his sobriety. When Frank tries to tell him that he’s got it under control, that he’s weaning himself off, Robby slams the door in his face.
He tries to hide the fact that he’s not going to work by getting up early and spending his day at the park like the homeless and elderly. He lasts two and a half days before realising he can’t maintain this, so he goes cold turkey. How hard could it be? It was only a few benzos, and there’s no reason to get rehab involved – it’s not even that serious a problem.
He lasts 27 hours before dipping into his emergency supply. Which, by the way, dwindles by the hour now that he doesn’t have access to the hospital stash anymore.
He runs out of his own supply in four days. This is when he starts to get really pissy. He argues with Abby over every little thing, even raises his voice at Tanner, who only wanted another round of couch cannonball. Abby tells him to piss off until he’s calmed down, and he leaves the house with the intention of suppressing the itch with alcohol. When that doesn’t work, he stumbles into the alley and asks a sketchy-looking man if he’s selling. He then offers Frank fentanyl.
Frank Langdon might be an idiot, but he’s not stupid.
So he goes home and downs some of Abby’s Xanax that she got after giving birth to Sadie. He knows they’re out of date, but he doesn’t care – desperate measures and all. He feels euphoric for around seven minutes before he doubles over and throws up in the foyer and passes out in his own vomit.
It’s only when he feels someone shaking him that he wakes up and realises that Tanner is standing above him with a banana, pushing it towards his face so that he can open it. Frank does as much, and Tanner makes a quick remark about how he smells stinky before slipping away into the den.
He can’t seem to get Tanner’s face out of his head, and the way he scowled in a way only a three-year-old can – so innocent and honest. Later that evening, he tells Abby that he hasn’t been to work for nearly two weeks. She doesn’t seem that surprised by this.
He tells her that he got into trouble for stealing. “Stealing what?” she asks.
So he tells her, “Stealing benzodiazepines.”
“Why did you steal them, Frankie?” She continues, but he’s sure she knows the answer.
“Because, because I think I have a problem,” He says, and it’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud.
She then starts suggesting rehab – just like Robby did – and it scares the shit out of him. So he calms her down, tells her the issue isn’t that bad, that Robby is helping him out, and how much of an asset he is to the hospital, so they're only putting him on a sabbatical.
He then claims that since he’s a medical professional, he can become sober from home, especially now that he doesn’t have access to medication from work. He doesn’t tell her about the first attempt – if he can even call it an attempt. She doesn’t like the idea one bit, but Frank’s always been very good at convincing people when he needs to. That’s at least what he believes.
It takes him two weeks to realise he can’t do this. He lasts longer than he thought, but that’s mainly because every time he sees Abby’s face crumble when he gets too agitated, he dies a little inside. Every time he hears Abby telling the kids something along the line of it’s okay, guys, leave daddy alone, he’s just a bit upset, he realises how much of a colossal idiot he’s being.
Abby floats around the idea of rehab again, but because he’s an asshole, he puts his foot down. That’s when she gets Marie involved. Seeing his older sister’s expression over FaceTime when words like stolen drugs, rehab and addict get thrown around is enough to make him sick.
“You wanna end up like Uncle Jimmy?” She throws at him, and he avoids her eyes the rest of the duration of the call, feeling all too much like his six-year-old self when he got caught eating handfuls of sugar out of the pantry. Uncle Jimmy was dead – a fentanyl overdose. His own kids didn’t even attend his funeral. It’s the most harrowing Frank has probably ever felt, and yet he still argued with her because it’s not fentanyl, it’s just a few muscle relaxants, and he was weaning himself off.
After the phone call with his sister, Abby tries to book him into a facility up north somewhere – one that looked like it was hacked up by some rich New York socialite who wanted an excuse for a two-month break. There’s some shit on the website like aura painting and equine therapy, and she tells him it’ll be nice – a break for your brain.
Frank hates rehab, but he sticks with it. He does the 30 days unwillingly. He doesn’t participate, he doesn’t think he deserves this – he was weaning himself off, for god’s sake. He doesn’t go to rehab because he wants to or because he thinks he should get better – he goes because Abby told him to, but Abby doesn’t even visit him, nor does she bring the kids. It’s not so much her fault - he doesn’t let anyone visit, not even Marie. No part of him is in it, which is his first mistake.
Still, he comes out after 30 days and thinks he’s done it – the worst is over. That is, until he has a panic attack when he opens up the cabinet above the sink and sees a new prescription of Xanax labelled Abigail J Langdon. He pops two tablets and then immediately shoves his fingers down his throat whilst bent over the toilet.
He then locks himself in the bathroom and calls Robby in a panic. The voice on the other side tells him to stay where he is – not to move, and Frank does exactly that. His entire body shakes against the tiled floor, and it’s only when he hears the muffled sounds of Robby talking to his wife that he sits up and wipes the bile away from his mouth.
He reluctantly opens the door and lets Robby in. He sees a blur of red hair behind him, sobbing quietly, but he doesn’t dare look up at her.
“I fucked up, Robby. I really fucked up.” He says, eyes filling with tears.
“Okay. Okay, let’s go.” Robby sighs and picks him up off the floor. He sits down in the passenger seat of Robby’s car and tries to catch his breath. Robby comes back out from his house with a weekend bag. The same one he took to rehab. He didn’t even last three whole days.
Frank cries himself to sleep on Robby’s couch, and the two of them go to a rehabilitation centre about an hour away the next morning. It’s a dark and dim building – no bells and whistles, and everyone down to the receptionist seems a bit cutthroat. Frank feels better suited here.
Robby watches him sign his name and then tells him, “This is it, Frank. This is your last chance. I can’t, I can’t in good faith let you do this again. You’ve scared the shit out of Abby. You’re scaring the shit out of me. If you can’t make this one work, then you’re on your own. I mean it, Frank, this is it.”
“Robby, I’m really sorry.” He says, clawing at his own chest.
“Tell me again in a year and I’ll know you mean it.”
He lets Abby visit this time. It takes her a week to make the trip, but he knows she put it off because of the whole bathroom incident. He tells her about the first Xanax mishap, and she nods along like she’s scared of doing anything else.
“I should’ve hidden it, I didn’t know, I didn’t…” She stutters, and he takes her hands, shaking his head.
“This isn’t on you, Abs. I’m really sorry.” He tells her, and it’s not a lot, but it’s a start.
Abby visits when she can, which is normally a couple of times a week, but even then, the twelve inches of space between them might as well be a glass wall like they show in prison movies. She’s pulling back, and Frank can’t blame her – why would she want to stick with a drowning man? His kids hand him drawings, and Tanner asks if Daddy is sleeping in a new bed because his back hurts. Frank clutches a drawing that Sadie made and cries himself to sleep.
He’s adamant about not letting anyone from work visit, no matter how many times Cassie or Yo message him. Collins emails him because, of course, she would contact him through email, but he doesn’t reply. Seeing their pitying faces might break him. Hearing about work would definitely.
That doesn’t stop Yo from turning up. He rejects the invite twice, but then she shows up and waits in the waiting room for an hour before he cracks. He should’ve known – they went to med school together and she’s as, if not more, stubborn than she was back then.
“Santos came up to me that day. Said something about you and the benzos, but I didn’t want to believe her. I shut her down and I…I was going to find you afterwards. I was going to, but then PittFest and you disappeared after that.” She tells him in the rehab rec room. The sofa they’re sitting on is lime green, and it makes him slightly nauseous when he looks down at his hands, clammy against the sweats he’s wearing.
“Yeah.” He says, his voice tense.
“Frank.” She says poignantly.
He looks her in the eyes for the first time in four months. “I didn’t know she told you. Who else did she tell?” He asks because he needs to be prepared. Unfortunately, the urgency isn’t translated into his tone. He’s exhausted.
“Just me. I cornered her later after I found out what was going on. You know, I had to ask Abby? Robby’s such a dick; he wouldn’t tell me anything. I have your dog by the way.”
Frank looks at her, horrified. “You have my dog?”
“Listen, when I went over - this was like the day after you went in the first time – Abby was freaking out because the dog people had delivered the little thing, and I felt bad, so I took him off her. Gave him to my parents. I let your kids name him. They decided on Lunchbox.” She tells him as if it’s not the most insane thing he’s ever heard.
“Lunchbox.” He repeats, grimacing. It’s in this moment that he realises how far this one fuck up has led him. Fine, multiple fuck ups.
“It’s okay. They love him, like an obscene amount. My sister is in a shit mood because she’s now been demoted to third favourite. I’m kind of in love with the little fucker. My mom’s been making him personalised collars. He has a whole Instagram page.” She shrugs, angling her body towards him.
Frank nods because he’s not sure there’s anything else he can do.
“You could have told me.” She says, quietly.
Great, back to the crushing reality that he is, in fact, in rehab. He almost, almost forgot.
He doesn’t tell her what he’s been telling everyone else, which is that I thought I had it under control because he’s not sure he believes that anymore. He’s a doctor, was a doctor? He’s not sure anymore. But he knows he wasn’t coping well. He knows that – he’s not an idiot.
And the thing is, he could’ve told Yo. She wouldn’t have had a go at him like Robby did - judged him like everyone else did. She would’ve been firm with him, unlike Abby. Frank knows she would’ve been the one to get through to him, which is exactly why he didn’t tell her.
“I know.”
“I hate that Santos told me. I haven’t as far as looked at her in the last three months. You should be proud of me. I was planning on sleeping with her, you know.”
“Thank you for your sacrifice.” He deadpans.
“You’re welcome. I’ve been sleeping with my ex-girlfriend, so you should know I’m suffering just as much as you are.”
“Maria or Vickie?”
Yo looks away, avoiding his gaze. “Angel.”
“Ah.” Frank clicks his teeth and smirks. He doesn’t remember much about Angel despite the fact that she was Filipina, like Santos. He looks at her, frowning with disapproval. “Slut.”
“How’s the asylum?” She asks, pushing his head away.
“Worse this time around, so it must be working. I’ve only thought about killing myself twice so far.”
“Frank.”
“I won’t actually.” He tells her pointedly.
She sucks on her teeth and sighs. Sometimes he hates how much she knows about him. Not right now, though.
“Thank god for Catholicism.” She hums.
Marie visits - his eldest sister. They’ve never been overly compassionate siblings, but she clutches onto his hand anyway when he tells her the whole story. Out of his entire family, he only really trusts her with it.
She slaps the side of his head and calls him an idiot. Then she pauses because she’s crying too much. Frank has to face the other way so he’s not looking at her. She doesn’t like crying in front of people – never has. Frank wonders if he inherited that from her.
After she’s calmed down, she asks about Abby and the kids. He knows Abby has been keeping her updated – Marie is the only one that Abby can tolerate. Frank used to get annoyed about it, but it’s the case for him most of the time.
He tells her the truth, which is that he fucked up and she’s been great about it and that the kids are too young to know what is really going on, and selfishly, Frank is thankful for it. But then she looks at him with a wince, and he knows what that look means. Suddenly, the visitors’ room feels too small.
“Will you stop? I haven’t dragged them here with me. I told them you didn’t want them visiting.” She scolds him whilst he tries to pull out of her grip. She’s always been stronger than him.
“Why would you say that to them! Oh my god, they’re going to turn up here. Fuck!” Frank panics, pressing his fingers into his eyes.
“Calm down, Jesus.” She rolls her eyes and pulls his hands away from his face. “You didn’t even have to deal with them on your first go. They’ve gotten worse this time, but I’ve been mediating. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Oh god, Mom’s going to try and have me baptised again. I can’t do it, Marie, I won’t do it!”
“Will you just pick up their fucking phone?”
“What am I supposed to say? Hey Mom and Dad, sorry your baby’s a drug addict.” He snaps back at her.
“You’re such a dick.” She sighs. “They just want to know how you’re doing. And also, it wouldn’t kill you if they visited. You’re a drug addict and you’re still the favourite.”
“Brian’s the favourite.” He reminds her.
“Well, you’re still not the least favourite.” She throws back, sourly.
“You’re an unmarried ex-catholic lesbian with no children,” Frank tells her. “You’ve got no chance.”
He spends Thanksgiving, his birthday, Christmas, Sadie’s third birthday and New Year's all in rehab. That’s the worst of it. He’s about five weeks into the second stint, pushing a dry slab of turkey around on his plate when he sees his reflection in the window. He barely recognises himself. Wham drones on from a radio behind him, and he feels as hollow as he looks. He knows Abby’s visiting later, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. This has to be it, he tells himself. It’s never going to get worse than this – it can’t.
This is a bit of a turning point for Frank - if he can even call it that. His therapist at rehab insists he should. This therapist – a stubborn Pakistani woman called Mona – is a lot more direct with him than the one he had his first time round. She doesn’t shy away from telling him how it is, and Frank thinks that this time around it’s going to stick. She scares him shitless, but it’s what he needs.
After another 60 days, Frank feels better. Not good per se – just better.
When he’s home, he knows the little orange bottle is hidden somewhere in the house, but he doesn’t make any effort to look for it. It feels like progress, and he smiles to himself and then immediately thinks about ten other ways in which he could screw up his own sobriety. He goes out for a smoke and tries not to collapse from sheer exhaustion.
He’s sober for about three months when he realises this might be worse than working during Covid. He doesn’t think too hard about that because he’s blocked that period of time out for the time being. He does the same thing with rehab, and his new therapist struggles to get him to open up about either of them.
It’s not like he’s particularly proud of the fact that he ended up in rehab. Twice. It’s not information he likes divulging, not even to Bobby, his new 54-year-old bald therapist who knows the exact reason why he’s attending the sessions. When he thinks about rehab, he gets flashes of tremors, panic attacks, vomiting and slight suicidal ideation. Which is why he doesn’t allow Abby to say the word around him. “When you were at the…centre,” she says, resisting the urge to roll her eyes.
Being at home is more difficult than he realised. He’s constantly on edge, constantly shaking, and constantly wondering if this is all worth it. He knows it has to be – somewhere, somehow, for some reason unbeknownst to him, he was given a second chance. He was given about eighteen second chances, really, and he’d be a fool not to take the universe up on its signs. Maybe it’s God – Frank’s not sure he wants to get into all of that right now, though. Baby steps.
He goes to NA meetings every day, sometimes twice a day, and they suck the life out of him with all the Jesus-y undertones, but listening to the 60-year-old man named Mike harp on about how his kids don’t talk to him freaks him out just enough to make it through the night. He falls asleep in Tanner’s bed next to him sometimes, now that they’ve upgraded him to a twin.
Abby’s great about the whole thing. He can tell she’s entirely upset and overwhelmed, but she tries to hide it from him. It makes him feel like shit. He does the kids' nighttime routine and drops them off at school and daycare in the morning. He ignores Robby’s phone calls, but it’s fine - he knows Abby is updating him.
He texts Cassie and asks her how the fuck she does this. They get coffee, and she tells him she just does because seeing Harrison fast asleep in his room, knowing that he has a bed at her place, knowing that he smiles when she picks him up, feels better than any drug. Frank hopes he finds it in him to believe that.
He goes stir crazy at home, and he declutters everything, which is terribly inconvenient for Abby, but she bites her tongue. She’s not very happy these days, and he knows it’s his fault, but he just can’t bring himself to ask her about it because what could he change?
He listens to medical podcasts whilst going on long walks, just close enough to the hospital to see the ambulances turning in, but never close enough to see any of his colleagues.
He cooks, cleans, learns to garden and hates everything about it, but his kids giggle when they play dinosaurs before bed, and Frank slowly starts to understand what Cassie meant when he’s got both kids tucked in on either side of him whilst he reads the same Bluey book for the eighth night in a row.
They get more coffee, and she, unprompted, tells him about life at the Pitt. He smiles when he learns that Mel is doing well, that Whitaker is keen on doing his intern year at PTMC. She tells him how everyone is a bit subdued, how they’re all a bit kinder to the addicts that walk through the door. Langdon’s not sure what to make of that, considering the fact that Cassie’s been sober for nearly ten years and they should’ve been kind anyway. There are a few meetings about his return to work, and he’ll have to redo part of his residency, which is expected. Still, a part of him dies inside.
His therapy reduces from twice a week to once a week. He tells Bobby that he’s sure Abby is staying with him because she feels like she has to and that he’s pretty sure she’s having an affair with someone from work – he’s just too chickenshit to ask. He tells Bobby that he’s scared he’s only sober for his kids and that when they get older, he won’t be able to control himself anymore. He tells him that he’s absolutely shitting himself thinking about going back to work, for more than one reason.
He schedules time to meet Santos because he has to apologise to her – part of the twelve-step programme that he knows is necessary but still complains about to whoever will listen. He walks into the coffee shop with no intention to do so. Santos quickly throws him off his high horse.
“Jesus, Langdon, not everything is about you!” She tells him with a screwed up face as if she just smelled something sour. “You were high at work. You stole drugs from work. That’s it. That’s all it was ever about. I would’ve done exactly the same if it were Collins or McKay, fuck, even if it was Mel.”
Langdon recoils like he’s just been slapped. A bitter taste develops in his mouth, like acid rising in his throat. He takes a purposeful breath in from his nose and glances up at Santos.
“It was not some personal vendetta I had against you. I knew you for all of eight hours. I just saw the signs and put two and two together.” She rolls her eyes like she’s exasperated. “And you’re angry at me, not because you got caught but because you’re annoyed at the fact that it was me. That I figured your shit out, someone who knew nothing about you. Someone you had just met.” She flashes him a blank expression.
And, well, that checks out. Bobby said a similar thing to him when he started therapy. He knew his anger was misplaced, first at Robby and then at Santos and then at fucking Doctor Hagan and, naturally, Abby, all before he even took a swing at himself. But now, with Santos sitting in front of him, telling him that he wasn’t as slick as he thought he was - it feels as uncomfortable as when he had to open his locker for Robby all those months ago.
Maybe that’s what hurts the most. He knows Santos did the right thing, that he’s incredibly lucky she didn’t go to HR or someone worse with that kind of information. He was stealing drugs for fucks sake. He’s even luckier that Robby gave him all those second chances. But the truth of the matter is that no one picked up on it - people that he saw for upwards of sixty hours a week, friends and colleagues, none of them noticed something was off.
Back in September, he thought that was a good thing, that he had managed to slip under everyone’s radar. I’m so smart, he used to think, I’m a fucking genius, he would say in the mirror after refilling the vials with saline.
Now, he realises how lonely and pathetic it was. His own wife didn’t pick up on it. Robby didn’t either, and it makes him feel smaller than he’s probably ever felt.
“No one intends on becoming a drug addict, Langdon. No one, no matter the situation. There were some whispers about you being overprescribed, and we know better than anyone how it can spiral out of control.” Santos sighs and scratches the space between her eyebrows before slumping her shoulders and inching closer. “You’ve got a family – kids, a wife, probably a mortgage. And I know what drug abuse looks like, Langdon. I’ve seen it get so bad that even doctors stop helping. And I don’t think anyone deserves that – not even you.”
Frank nods, blinking quickly. Once he had told himself he had the problem under control, thoughts of what would happen if it all slipped out of his grasp never occurred to him. He never thought about what would happen if the benzos stopped working, if he needed to take something stronger. His mind never went to a place where everything could’ve been pulled up from under him. It’s only in rehab when the therapists there made him write down the worst possible scenarios that could’ve occurred if he continued, where his kids kept popping into his head, and he had to excuse himself and go throw up in the shared toilets.
“I hope you know how lucky you are. Your wife is still with you - she hasn’t taken your kids, which is well within her rights. Robby has given you a second chance. Do you know how rare that is?”
Langdon’s throat feels tight. She doesn’t even know about the second rehab visit. He thinks he’s going to be sick. “Yeah, I do.” He says, the words punching out of him uncomfortably.
Santos tilts her head – her iced latte in her palms long forgotten. “You’re a good doctor. From what I’ve heard. From what I saw on my first day, too, but your pleasantries were reserved for only Mel, it seems. Maybe Whitaker, too, I don’t know, I only remember him being pissed on.”
He should probably laugh or even smile, but they get stuck somewhere deep in his stomach. He doesn’t laugh much now, not unless he’s with the kids, but it’s not the same. Abby doesn’t try to make him laugh anymore, which he now realises is a pitiful thing. Abby’s one of the funniest people he knows – it’s what attracted him to her in the first place.
“I don’t regret it, if that’s why you’ve called me. I’m not going to say sorry or try and convince you that what I did was for the better. We both know it was. You were high on the job. You stole drugs. That’s it. You being a prick was low down on the list of problems I had with you.” Santos finishes, lifting her cup up and taking a long sip from the green straw. She smacks her lips when she’s done and frowns as she stares at Frank’s face.
Frank opens and closes his mouth a couple of times before some semblance of a thought appears in his mind. His lips feel dry, and his back hurts from being hunched over on this fucking artisanal coffee shop stool. What happened to chairs with backrests, Jesus? And Bobby’s voice suddenly chimes in his head because he’s deflecting again. He’s distracting himself and deflecting so he doesn’t have to face reality. He swallows harshly and looks up at her.
“Santos, I’m, er, I’m sorry.” He says quietly, nodding his head gently afterwards, like he’s satisfied with himself. “You were right, I was an asshole to you, and you didn’t deserve it. You were onto me, and I got defensive.” He pauses, pressing the pad of his thumb against the beaded bracelet on his left hand. “You did have an issue with following orders, but I shouldn’t have screamed at you like that. I was your teacher - I should’ve been better.”
Santos smirks wickedly. “You know, Robby says we’re a lot alike, actually. In the few times he’s brought you up. It’s weird – only he’s allowed to say your name, and when he does, he speaks about you like you’re some ex that broke his heart and abandoned him.”
Langdon’s not sure what to make of that, so he doesn’t reply.
“Anyway. I’ve got to go. Good chat. Good luck with your sobriety. I hope you were a good doctor when you were sober - if not, you’ve got much bigger issues to deal with.” She says languidly as she hops off the stool, swiping her cup as she pulls the strap of her bag onto her shoulder.
“Santos?” Frank looks up at her as he straightens his back. He tries not to wince at the strain. Fuck, he needs to start yoga or something. “Listen, I’ll, er, I’ll tell Garcia to cool it. I know she’s been giving you a hard time.”
“Thanks.” She replies, frowning a little like she doesn’t entirely believe him. He waits thirty seconds before bolting out of the coffee shop himself – he’s positive the blue-haired barista heard their entire conversation.
July feels a long way away, but it creeps up on him. He starts sleeping in the guest room. Abby doesn’t touch him much anymore, and even if she does, she does it like she’s scared he’ll crack under her fingertips. Frank hates it. He’s nearly seven months sober now.
A few weeks before he’s due back to work, he has dreams that he walks into the ER and finds his body limp against their pharmacy supply. He doesn’t tell anyone about that. Robby keeps messaging him, and he reads them without replying unless absolutely necessary. He sees him at the disciplinary meetings in June. Frank avoids his gaze whilst agreeing to the random drug tests and locker searches. It’s humiliating, but he still has a medical license. He’s going to have to thank Robby one day. Maybe once he can look him in the eye, he'll figure out a way.
He keeps reminding himself it could’ve been so much worse. He could’ve ended up on the street or in prison, or even dead. He barely lets himself think about what would’ve happened if his kids found his supply. He tries not to think about all the patients’ lives he endangered by being high. It could’ve been so much worse.
July 2026
On July 4th, 6:50am, Langdon stares at the no parking sign in the ambulance bay whilst smoking a cigarette. His chest hurts, and he’s not entirely convinced he won’t collapse and die here. But then he hears the voice of someone cheerful.
“You’re back!”
Mel’s grinning up at him, cheeks pressed against the bottom of her glasses.
Frank startles, the cigarette slipping from his fingers and dropping onto the floor. He watches it burn out before looking up at Mel. Her expression drops, and she slowly brings her hand up, pointing to her chest. “Mel.” She says, introducing herself, unsurely.
He snorts, shaking his head. “I remember who you are, Mel,” He replies. She’s got her hair in two braids today, and she’s smiling. Still smiling. Ten months at this place, and it hasn’t broken her. God help her.
“Dr Robby said you were starting this week, but I didn’t know which day.” She bounces up on the balls of her feet, grinning like she’s about to burst at the seams.
Langdon exhales and has a fleeting thought that he doesn’t deserve any of this. He doesn’t deserve a second chance at work, or his wife supporting him, or Mel looking up at him like he’s still worthy of her time when they both know he’s not – not by a long shot.
And yet, she’s standing here, waiting for him to say something as if she’s actually interested in what he has to offer. It’s a crushing feeling, especially when Frank knows how much he’s probably let her down. Still, he isn't sure if anyone besides Cassie is going to speak to him today, so he takes the win, selfishly.
“I was supposed to start tomorrow, but HR called me and told me I could start today if I wanted.” He flashes her a tight-lipped smile. She nods, understandably and crosses her arms over each other before interlocking her fingers.
“I’m really glad you’re back, Dr Langdon.” She says, relaxing her arms.
Frank stares at her in pure disbelief. “Why?” He’s such an idiot.
“Because not a lot of people make it out the other side. Trust me, I know.” She says, and Frank has no other option than to believe her. She glances to the automatic doors and tilts her body so they can walk in together. She puts one foot forward, so Frank does the same. She then starts rattling on about how she was very proud of herself after figuring out the diagnosis for a patient that had everyone stumped yesterday.
“Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.” She says with an air of haughtiness. Well, her attempt at it.
“Broken heart syndrome?” He says, following her to the lockers. She’s got such an intense grasp on his attention that he doesn’t notice the several pairs of eyes hooked onto his every movement.
“It’s a real thing! I diagnosed it a few times whilst I was at the VA.”
“No, no, I believe you. I had a case like that in my intern year. Took me forever to actually accept it, though, it just seems so…unmedical.” He tells her before she pulls open her locker. It’s only then that he realises how far he’s actually got into the ER.
His old locker stares back at him as if it’s taunting him. He chokes on his own breath and punches in the code – Tanner’s birthday – before stuffing his things inside. He does it quickly because Mel’s already done, and somewhere along the line between the ambulance bay and now, he decides he’s going to stick with her.
Dana grabs him as soon as he’s finished with his rounds and tells him to stand there whilst she gets a good look at him. It makes him feel like he’s five and starting preschool. She holds his face, plants a kiss on his cheek and tells him that he’s gone all scrawny. He knows she had a hand in getting him back to work, and one day he’ll thank her for it. How, he’s not quite sure yet. But he’s trying not to be as annoying.
Through all the teeth-grating and uncomfortable welcome-backs he gets, seeing Javadi hiding behind a tablet when he pulls up to the nurse’s station is still his favourite. After letting her stare at him for a few seconds – he can tell from the corner of his eye – he finally says, “Glad to see you again, Dr Javadi.”
She twitches slightly and slaps on an agreeable smile. “Oh! Lang- I mean, Doctor Langdon, you’re back! I mean, oh god, not that you’re back, but just I wasn’t expecting to see you. Uh, no, that’s not - erm, how was your vacation? Oh, er, well, it wasn’t a vacation, I mean! It must have been nice to relax, oh god-“
Frank’s sort of bewildered, but also he’s got a good sense of humour, so he lets her talk for a minute before he puts her out of her misery with a tight-lipped smile. “It’s okay, we both know I was at rehab. Nice to see you taking the ER for another spin.”
“Uh, yeah. It’s weird, but I really enjoyed it last time. Not that PittFest was enjoyable or anything – God, it was awful, but also kinda rewarding? Anyway, my mom hates that I’m considering emergency medicine, but it’s been my favourite rotation and- okay, I’ll stop now.” She nods, shaking slightly.
“I heard some great things about your first time round. I hope you stick with us.”
“Really? That’s,” She sucks in a sharp breath, “Thank you, Dr Langdon.” She blinks and then offers him a weak smile before turning around and walking away with a straight back. Langdon watches with a little laugh and then takes a breath before heading back to chairs.
Work beats his ass, figuratively and literally. Because Robby – well, he can only assume it’s Robby since the man hasn’t actually made direct eye contact with Frank since he’s started again – has put him on chairs. That means a lot of stomach bugs, chesty coughs, and vomit galore. The drunks are disorderly, leaving Frank with bruises over his body that make him wonder how the fuck he did this ten months ago. Was it the fact that he’s in his 30s or that sobriety makes him feel like he’s going to be under the weather for the rest of his life? He’s lucky if he gets to do a suture nowadays.
The people at work are fine enough. No one says anything to his face, but there are a few who stumble around him as if he’s going to pressure one of them into stealing drugs if they’re left in a room alone with him too long. He sometimes sees the whole thing pan out like one of the physician associates will walk in and Frank will grab him by the collar, begging, “You gotta help me out, man, I’m dying here, please, we don’t have to tell anyone!” And then the vision gets a bit out of control because a SWAT team shows up and holds Frank down by the neck, which seems unlikely.
There’s also the small issue of him being unable to administer any medication. It’s not a major issue, and it was one of the requirements given in order for him to be able to return to work, but it’s one of those pain in the ass things that is a constant reminder of his fuckup. Fuckups. It consists of him completing all his charting and then having it checked by another doctor. He’s so far only gone to Collins, Cassie and Mel for this. He knows Robby checks his charts anyway, but he hasn’t mentioned it to Frank, so that’s another thing they’re avoiding.
Cassie’s great in a kind of motherly way, in that she stands next to him during morning briefings and scowls at anyone who looks at him for a second too long. He kind of wants someone to say something just to see how she’d react. He wouldn’t put money on her reverting to her old ways, though, now that the ankle brace is off.
Collins finds him alone in the staff lounge a couple of days in, and sort of just looks at him with an exhausted look on her face. “Frank.” She breathes out, shaking her head. It’s all she has to say.
He crumples under her gaze. “I know.” He exhales, fingers twitching against the open bag of pretzels.
She sits down opposite him and gives him a look – similar to the one Marie gives him when he’s pissed her off slightly, but she’s too forgiving to actually do anything about it. “Are you okay?”
And Frank doesn’t expect that. He does a double-take because no one really asks him that anymore. They tell him things like You could’ve come to me or How did this happen and he’s never sure what to say. But Collins doesn’t ask him stupid and obscene questions, and that’s why he doesn’t mind telling her the truth.
“I think so.” He replies. It could’ve been way worse, so right now, being back at work, knowing his kids are waiting for him at home, knowing that he has managed to get his foot back on the line – he’s okay.
“Good. I know things are tense with you and Robby,” She says, and Frank is struck by her bluntness. Their relationship was always this looming presence overshadowing them whenever they spoke about their personal lives, especially as Frank lived with Robby over the first part of Covid, when everything went wrong for the two of them. “But for what it’s worth, I think he was wrong. He shouldn’t have blown up on you like that, especially in the hospital. The ER is a breeding ground for gossip.”
He cringes, thinking about that afternoon when Robby pushed his things into his hands and sent him away. How that was less than a year ago baffles him completely. “He had his reasons.”
Collins shrugs. “Maybe, but still, he’s your attending - he’s your friend. He should’ve known better.”
Not anymore, he thinks. Frank’s not quite sure what to say to her, and because Collins is Collins, she reads him straight away. She pushes her chair back and nods at him. “There’s a broken hip in trauma two. Come on.”
And Frank doesn’t have to be told twice.
Mel’s great. Of course she is. He never really had any doubts, but if he’s completely honest, he didn’t think of her much during his multiple stints in rehab. Jesus, he sounds like a washed-up boyband star. He remembers her as being one of the only good things to happen that day, but with the way he replays it in his mind, he struggles to piece the day together as it is.
She’s just always there. During the first few weeks, he could turn his head, and his eyes would just find her, like she was waiting for him to grab her for something. Not that she’s not busy – he’s quickly realised that she’s become a pillar of strength in the Pitt. Her and Mohan have struck up a kind of tightknit friendship which allows them to communicate through eye movements and giggles. Cassie’s always flashing a smile at her or punching her shoulder in a way that she’s not completely used to yet – Frank can tell. Even Robby’s got a bit of a soft spot for her.
She’s also surprised him completely in the way she treats him. He was sort of expecting her to walk on eggshells around him, like some of the other staff members do – especially the ones that aren’t too familiar with him, like Whitaker. Even Santos has kept a respectful distance, which he’s not really used to yet. But not Mel – she’s figured out a way to speak to him that doesn’t make him want to curl up on himself, and Frank deeply appreciates it. It’s the way she looks up at him – both physically and figuratively that makes him feel the most normal he has felt in nearly a year.
She’s not condescending, but she also doesn’t act as if the last ten months haven’t happened. She’s somehow found a middle ground where she’s eager to get his advice because she knows he’s a seasoned doctor, whilst also being acutely aware of when he needs a second opinion on something because he’s doubting himself. Again.
The first time it happens, they’re checking over a 6-year-old boy with a broken arm. It’s funny how something that felt so easy, so rote, now takes him a moment. He finds himself having to familiarise himself with tests and diagnoses he knows he wouldn’t have spent two seconds thinking about before. And that feeling is terrifying – almost more than sobriety or the idea of Robby flipping out on him – it’s the fact that this, his job, isn’t coming as easily to him as it did before.
The thing is, if this had happened in front of anyone else, Frank probably would’ve taken extreme measures and done something incredibly stupid. He probably would’ve quit his job and moved out to Iowa to become a hermit. But it didn’t. It happened in front of Mel. And she was so nice about it, for fuck’s sake.
It wasn’t anything major, but he knows first-hand how a minor mistake can lead to someone’s worst nightmare. He’s rattling off the same batch of tests, glancing up at Jesse as he does so. CT, chem labs, X-ray – the basics. But the boy seems like he’s in a lot of pain, so he throws a 2mg of Morphine before grabbing the stethoscope around his neck.
He knows something is wrong just in the way everyone slows down around him. And then, Mel clears her throat. If the room hadn’t already quietened down, he probably would’ve missed it. But she clears her throat, so he glances up at her and watches her shake her head ever so slightly. Genuinely, anyone else would’ve missed it.
And he’s suddenly confronted with the fact that he gave the wrong order. He blinks quickly, opening his mouth as his eyes dart between Mel and Jesse before correcting himself. “Wait, I mean point one of morphine. Sorry.” He murmurs, swallowing back a bit of bile.
When he looks back up at Mel, she’s faffing around with the splint the EMTs had messily placed. Frank’s not sure he’s ever felt so humiliated in his entire life. Well, rehab wasn’t great, but this is up there with it.
The boy gets passed to ortho, and Frank avoids Mel as she tries to clear chairs. They naturally pass each other in the longue or in the few traumas they have to deal but she doesn’t bring it up. She even goes a step further and asks him whether he could take her through the steps of placing a transvenous pacemaker, since it had been a while since she had seen one being done. As if Frank isn’t doing this for the first time in a year.
Their shift comes to an end, and Frank, naturally, feels like jumping out of his skin. He’s stubbing out a cigarette when she walks out of the ER, and he shouts her name, brashly. She stops, startled and then attempts to flash a smile when she realises it was him.
“Dr Langdon! Is everything alright?” She asks, clutching the strap of her messenger bag. Her hair’s in a single braid today, but the shorter pieces at the front have fallen out unceremoniously throughout their shift.
“Yeah, I, er, wanted to thank you. You know, for earlier.” He finds himself gently scratching the skin around his elbow.
“Oh, it’s no problem, really.” She replies with a bright smile
“But it is. You know it is.” He confesses quietly, grimacing.
Mel sighs with a contemplative look. “Dr Langdon, we’re only humans. We’re bound to make mistakes. For some reason, neither we nor the patients we treat seem to want to believe that. You were out for 10 months, and that too, recovering. It has a massive toll on your mind and body. You slipped up with this one thing, but now you’ll never forget the correct dosage of morphine for a child.” She says, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. “You should cut yourself more slack. You’ve only been back a few weeks.”
Frank feels like he’s just been slapped in the face, but in a good way. He wants to flee, he wants to shake his head like a petulant child and say nuh-uh! He doesn’t do either; instead, he stares at Mel like she’s just said the most egregious thing. When he was planning on thanking her, he was sure she would just reply, You’re welcome and he’d be on his not-so-merry way.
Mel’s constant reassurance is almost suffocating. Her acceptance, along with the majority of the staff’s feels too much to handle. And part of this drowning feeling is because he knows he doesn’t entirely deserve it. They don’t know about the first two attempts to get clean at home or the fact that it took two stints in rehab to make the whole sobriety thing stick.
They don’t know how badly he scared Abby, how he left her alone with their two young children whilst he was off at rehab, refusing to actively take part because he didn’t think he had a problem. They don’t know how selfish he is.
And that hasn’t gone away; otherwise, he would’ve told them about all the horrible things he’s done instead of accepting their pity. Frank never claimed to be a good man, but he’s working on it. Slowly. Very slowly.
“Mel.” He says, strangled in both his voice and expression. “You…You need to stop being so nice to me. Really. It’s making it very hard for me to torment myself.”
“Why are you tormenting yourself?”
“Because I’m a bad person who does bad things.”
Mel’s expression sours. “Do you really believe that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Mel grasps the strap of her bag and winces as if she’s trying to figure out how to approach this. Frank can understand he’s not making it any easier for her, but she seems so adamant about changing his mind.
“I’ve been around addicts, Dr Langdon, not just at my time at the VA - I’ve known them personally, and I would really appreciate it if you wouldn’t say things like that. I know your experience is specific to you, but I don’t think they are bad people. No one chooses to be an addict. Did you?”
Frank stares at her, speechless. He then averts his eyes, cautiously gulping because he’s not entirely sure. He’s discussed with numerous amounts of time with all his different therapists, and he can’t shake the feeling that he absolutely had a hand in his addiction – he swallowed the pills, he injected himself – it was all him. But from a medical standpoint, he understands how addiction affects a person neurologically. And when he thinks about that, he manages to give himself some slack.
He’s also terrified, to put it lightly. He’s not sure he’s ever been on Mel’s bad side – didn’t think she had one, but witnessing this, the stiffness in her tone when she speaks, it’s scared him enough into never wanting to know what she’s like when she’s actually angry.
“If anything, I find what you did really admirable. We both know the success rates for rehab – it’s not very high, but you’re putting the work in. We can see it, I,” She pauses as if she’s trying to gauge his reaction, “I can see it.”
Frank stares at her, incredulously. And then, because he’s a masochist, he opens his mouth again. “Mel, what do you know about my absence?”
“I know you had a back injury and were overprescribed benzodiazepines. And that you went to rehab.” She replies.
“I got caught stealing from the ER. I stole medication from patients, and I put a number of them at risk. I convinced myself that I had it under control, but Santos realised. Her first day. She told Robby, and he kicked me out before the MCI – I didn’t leave early. Then I had to go to rehab twice, because the first time didn’t stick. So, as much as I appreciate you being kind to me, I’m trying to tell you that it’s not really warranted. I don’t deserve it.”
He's self-sabotaging and he’s actively trying to ruin one of the only good relationships he has at work because he’s an asshole. And for some reason, Mel’s not playing into it. She hasn’t slapped him across the face or turned the other way to run for the hills. Instead, she frowns and puffs out her chest a little, like she’s trying to stand taller, as if she’s saying is that all you got?
“Can I ask how long you’ve been sober for?”
Frank shrinks slightly. “Nearly eight months.”
Mel looks at him in surprise. She smiles, and Frank wants to cower at the sight of it. “That’s very impressive.” She exhales through her nose and tilts her head. “I’ve seen this before. I know what you’re doing, and it’s not going to work with me, unfortunately. You can’t convince me that you’re a bad person just because you tried to manage an illness yourself – you’re a doctor, it makes sense. You work insane hours on top of having responsibilities like your wife and kids, and I know how isolating it can be to try and fix everything by yourself. It may have been an uneasy road to get here, but you’re here and that’s what’s important, right?”
Frank’s going to throw up. He presses his shoulder against the brick wall and takes a few deep breaths, all whilst trying to avoid Mel’s gaze. “I, er, don’t know what to say.”
“Has no one told you that? I’d hate to be the first person to tell you that. We know, first hand, how badly things can spiral out of control.” She says quietly, clasping her hands together.
“My therapist has tried to drill it into my head but…”
She nods. “I understand it’s hard work, but you’re doing really well. It’s paying off. You have no idea how pleased I am to see you back here. You’re a success story, Dr Langdon.”
Frank makes a pained noise before burying his face in his hands. He swipes his palms down his face and then blinks quickly before shaking his head. “Okay. Alright. I get it. You should stop, though.”
“Sorry.” She says, laughing pitifully.
“No, no, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put all of my own shit onto you. I’m still working through some things, apparently.”
“You know, I have a bit of experience working with people with addiction issues. I’m not qualified to be a sponsor or anything, but if you ever want to talk, I’d be more than happy to listen. I haven’t gone through what you have, but I know a lot of people who have, so I want to believe I have something of use to offer.”
Frank nods stiffly. “Thanks, Mel.”
“You’re doing fine, Dr Langdon. I have full faith in you.” She says, smiling, before turning to walk away. Frank watches her go, trying to understand how this one person that he’s known for maybe two weeks has managed to get through to him, unlike every other person in his life. Maybe it’s the glasses that make her seem trustworthy.
She doesn’t gain anything from telling him all of this – he’s not really her superior anymore, it’s not like he can help her get her foot in the door. If anything, associating with him is probably making it harder for her. Frank feels as if he’s just been doused with cold water. He suddenly regains feeling in his body and calls out her name before jogging up next to her. He’s also supposed to be going home, he just realised.
“You should drop the honorary. It would make me feel a lot better if you just called me Langdon. Or Frank, even.” He says.
“Oh!” Mel drops her shoulders and blinks quickly. “That’s very kind, but I’m not sure…”
“How about Francis?” He says, thankful for her inquisitive expression. She frowns slightly as if she doesn’t believe him, and so he pulls his wallet out and angles his driver's license towards her.
“Your real name is Francis?” She asks, smiling in disbelief as she leans forward to inspect the card.
“Yeah.” He cringes before tucking it back into his pocket. “Only my parents call me that, though – normally when they’re angry at me.”
“Sorry, I’m still…Francis, really? I don’t want this to sound offensive, but you don’t look like a Francis.” She laughs a little, and he wants to pump his fist in triumph.
“My parents are catholic. I’m from New Jersey.” He explains, and she nods as if it all makes sense.
“Oh, I had no idea.” They quickly move out of the way of a car, and she starts walking towards the exit. Frank follows her. “I’m surprised at the New Jersey bit. I thought people from there have quite strong accents.”
“I did, but I’ve trained myself to speak properly. Okay, not properly – God, if my mom heard me, she’d skin me alive. I just mean, I’ve managed to tone it down a bit. It’s not always…the most professional dialect.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I think it’s fun.”
Frank glances at her from the side and then contemplates it. Maybe she’s right. “It always creeps back out when I talk to my family. We’re not always the most civilised.”
“I hope you know that I’m going to pay extra attention whenever you speak. With an accent like that, I’m sure you’re bound to slip up.”
Frank drops his head and laughs. “It’s worse when I swear.”
The first few months after Frank’s not-so-glorious return aren’t as smooth sailing as he hoped. Robby doesn’t even let him in on any proper traumas until August, and even when he is, he’s told to stand back and watch as if he were a low-life intern. But he’s working hard, and Mel says it’s paying off, and he has no reason not to believe her.
Robby’s still distant with him – he won’t stay in a room with Frank any longer than he absolutely has to, and even though they’re supposed to do some mandatory HR meeting every other week, they both just stare at the HR representative as if she’ll be able to diffuse the tension between them.
The random locker checks and urine tests are fun - especially when they both land on the same day the new med students are starting. That’s a fun little anecdote to explain to the sweaty kid from Missouri. That’s one thing he didn’t anticipate – having to explain that he’s a recovering drug addict. When he returned to work, everyone knew. But now there are new people and they’re all looking at him strangely as Robby flicks through his crossword book before rifling through his spare clothes.
He doesn’t use the term recovering drug addict when he explains, because it seems a little harsh, but saying I’m nine months sober doesn’t make him feel much better. Well, it does a bit when Mel buys him a pomegranate RedBull to celebrate the day.
After his conversation with her, he desperately tries not to put himself down in her presence. It doesn’t stop the constant reel of thoughts going through his head, telling him that he’s a disgusting person who deserves to be in jail, but at least he’s not voicing those thoughts as often as he once was. Those are reserved just for Dr Bobby on Tuesday at 10am.
It’s a few weeks in when he wonders if Robby’s lined up his and Mel’s shifts since they’ve ended up working on the same days for a while now. It is probably just a coincidence, but he knows he works well with Mel, and he knows Robby knows it too. He quite obviously doesn’t mention it to him, even though he knows on some level that he should thank him, except they’re not exactly on friendly terms. He definitely does not mention it to Mel.
He wonders, when they’re walking to grab lunch from the cafeteria – another one of Frank’s adventures in following Mel wherever she goes as if she’s pulling him on a leash – if she’s aware of the fact that she’s one of the few people at work technically keeping him afloat. He doesn’t want to bring it up, scared that she’ll try and tell him that he’s a competent and well-established doctor – he’s not sure he could handle that again - but it isn’t lost on Frank how unstable he’d be without her.
That’s not to say that the others aren’t helping, because they are – they’re all very mindful of him, careful to pull any addiction case away from him and reminding him to take a five-minute break whenever he gets short with them. But maybe that’s why it feels different with Mel. There’s not this wall between them - it’s not the competent doctors on one side and Frank the drug addict on the other. It’s just Mel and Langdon going to the ambulance bay for a five-minute breathing break, or Mel and Langdon sitting in the lounge to share a protein bar.
He knows that his dependence on her is wrong – Bobby’s told him multiple times, but it’s getting him through work, and right now, that’s all he can ask for. He knows, well, hopes that in a few months he’ll find his footing, but for now, he’ll stick with her. He mentions to Bobby that he’s now slowly realising that he’s had an issue with dependence his entire life, maybe. Bobby doesn’t contradict him.
Mel is probably well aware of this, Frank’s sure of it. But she doesn’t call him out on it, doesn’t grimace when he glances up at her to ensure he’s given the correct medical advice, she doesn’t even mind when he steals another intubation off her because he just wants the practice. She encourages him.
At the end of the day, he’s still technically a year ahead of her in terms of their residencies, and he’s had more experience, so it doesn’t feel pitiful when she asks him for advice. It’s just nice because it doesn’t feel forced from her side. It’s as if she wants to stick with him just because it’s him.
She’s also relaxed around him since that first day. It’s taken her a while to call him just Langdon, even if she struggles with it. But it always makes him smile when he can see her saying doctor in her head before calling out his name. She’s getting better at treating him like another colleague. It’s nice.
Collins and McKay are older than him, and just on that basis, he’s always felt like a bit of a child in front of them, despite being at the same level or even ahead in terms of his education – the perils of being the youngest child. And there was always an underlying current of competition between him and Mohan as they bargained for Robby’s praise. But it’s not like that with Mel.
When he thinks about it, really thinks about it, and he doesn’t let himself do that often, he looks back to that first day. It’s labelled one of the worst days in his life for a reason, but it’s not the worst, and he thinks it’s because of Mel that it’s not. He didn’t think he had the patience to drag someone along all day and teach them, especially with the small issue of substance abuse, but Mel proved him wrong. She’s been proving him wrong since his first day back, too. Which is exactly why he doesn’t let himself think about it too much.
They’re not technically friends, not the way him and Cassie are, but then again, she’s his sponsor, so that friendship is loaded anyway. But, him and Mel, they’re friendly. Inside the hospital, he sticks by her like glue, but they don’t spend time outside of work. Frank’s on a mission to be the best husband and father, so spending time with a female colleague outside of the 70 hours they already spend together doesn’t feel like a good idea.
That is, until Abby meets Mel.
They’re out at the park because, like a dog, if Frank doesn’t leave the house at least once a day, he goes stir crazy. He made breakfast with the kids in the morning, which allowed Abby to get in an extra hour of sleep, so she’s extra agreeable and doesn’t moan when Frank chooses the bigger park with the lake and ducks.
And naturally, because Sadie is now two, she’s no longer tied to the stroller, which means the moment she sees the ducks, she’s pulling out of Frank’s grip and heading straight towards them. Abby’s a few meters behind with Tanner, but Sadie is fast – Abby blames Frank for that – and they all break into a sprint to try and catch her.
Frank distantly hears Abby shouting to someone near the lake to stop her, and he’s barrelling towards the lake when he sees a runner swooping Sadie up off her feet just before she can jump into the lake. It’s not deep, thankfully, but they didn’t bring extra clothes for her.
“Oh my god, thank you!” Abby says breathlessly, pulling Sadie from the stranger’s grip. Frank slows to a jog and presses his palms to Sadie’s head.
“No problem. I always thought it was strange to put a playground so close to the lake, but I- Dr Langdon?”
Frank does a double-take as he looks up and realises it’s Mel standing in front of them. It was Mel who saved Sadie.
“Mel?” He says, furrowing his brows slightly. He relaxes somewhat at the sight of her and releases a deep breath.
“I almost didn’t recognise you with your clothes on!” She says, sort of breathless with a smile. It takes both of them less than two seconds to realise what she’s said, and he’s lucky she opens her mouth before he does because he’s not sure he’d be able to explain to Abby what she means. “I just mean, I’ve never seen you without your scrubs on!” She continues, and Frank nearly chokes. “Oh my god. This is going awfully. I’m trying to say that I’ve only ever seen you in your scrubs.”
“She’s funny,” Abby says gently, cradling Sadie whilst looking between the two of them. Frank presses his hand against Tanner’s head to ground himself.
“You have no idea.” He mumbles, blinking quickly before realising that he should probably say something to diffuse the tension. “Sorry, Mel, this is my wife, Abby. Abby, this is Mel, from work.”
“Nice to finally meet you.” Mel holds her hand out, grimacing slightly, and Abby shakes it with a little smirk.
“Oh, Mel. Frankie’s told me a lot about you. He says you’re a big reason why he’s doing so well, so thank you.” Abby says, and there’s no mirth in her voice – it feels genuine. Frank wants the ground to swallow him up. This has to be some cosmic karma from the universe because Cassie called Mel his work wife two days ago. He’s being punished.
“Oh, no, that’s completely him. He’s an amazing doctor. He deserves all the credit.” Mel says, shaking her head in the humble way she does whenever she talks about him. She glances at him and smiles, and Frank flashes her a tense, tight-lipped one in reply.
“Well, I can at least thank you for saving our daughter,” Abby adds. Mel smiles and ducks her head forward, whispering a quick hi, Sadie. She waves back before burrowing into Abby’s neck, and Mel’s face softens. She then looks down at Tanner who’s wrapped around Frank’s leg.
“And you must be Tanner.” She says, smiling brightly. It doesn’t waver, not even when Tanner refuses to answer. “Your dad told me you like dinosaurs. Do you have a favourite?”
Frank goes still as Tanner contemplates replying to her. He’s not the most outgoing kid, especially in front of strangers, but it’s not anything to worry about. Saying that, there is something violent in Frank that needs Tanner to reply to Mel. He desperately wants Mel to know that he’s a good dad.
He’s about to repeat the question to Tanner to urge him to answer, but Tanner looks up and smiles at Mel. He looks like Frank when he does.
“Diplodocus.” He says. Frank lets out a breath and ruffles Tanner’s hair.
“That’s a good one. I like Triceratops.” She replies.
“Did you know Triceratops have three horns?” Tanner mirrors her smile, and Mel laughs, looking up at Frank.
Mel places her hands on her hips, impressed. “I did not! Are you some kind of dinosaur genius?”
Tanner beams and then shoves his head through Frank’s legs from embarrassment.
“What are you doing here?” Frank asks dumbly. She’s in running shorts. Idiot.
“This is our local park. I’m here with Becca. She’s sitting in the middle, reading.” Mel says, pointing behind them at the girl sitting cross-legged in the middle of the large green space. “I prefer running outside, and the park is great because I can see her from wherever I am.” She continues.
He used to run here, he remembers bittersweetly, before rehab, when the medication numbed the pain in his back. Nowadays, he can’t do more than 10 minutes before feeling like he’s going to snap in two.
He nods slowly and takes a second – no longer because he knows it’s incredibly creepy – to look her up and down. The black shorts she’s wearing are short. Idiot. She’s wearing a matching jacket, similar to the one she wears in the hospital. And her hair is up in a messy ponytail that seems to be slipping out from the side of her glasses. She looks different. Frank suddenly realises his wife is standing next to him, and like an oaf, he stumbles. “I didn’t know you ran.”
“Oh, I don’t really. It’s just something I’ve taken up. I’ve always wanted to, and the park is only five minutes from our place. But I’m not as consistent as I should be. Becca has to drag me out most days.” Mel finishes with a smile and looks over his shoulder at her.
“Becca is Mel’s sister.” Frank quickly tells Abby. She nods, like she’s slowly piecing everything together.
“You know, Frankie runs. He used to run marathons before-“ Abby stops herself suddenly and turns to look at him cautiously. Maybe there’s a bit of fear in her expression, but he places his hand between her shoulders so she can exhale.
“Before rehab. I think those marathon days are over for me now, though.” He says with a casual smile. “Turns out taking up smoking and a lingering chronic back problem isn’t the best recipe for long-distance running.”
“You know, when I was researching before I started running, a lot of people said yoga helps. I understand it’s probably not that simple in your case, but there are loads of health benefits to it.” Mel smiles gently, shrugging her shoulders with careful intention. “Becca and I frequent a beginner’s class on Sunday morning at the rec centre sometimes. You’re more than welcome to join us.”
“That’s not a bad idea, actually,” Frank says and shares a look with Abby. She looks back at him with an odd expression, and he doesn’t have the time to figure out what it means.
“Something to think about. Anyway, I should get going, I’ve still got half the park to cover yet. Nice to meet you, Abby. See you at work, Doctor- I mean, Langdon.” Mel says with a smile as if she’s glad to have caught herself. She glances back at him, and he chuckles before nodding his head with approval.
“You’re doing better.” He tells her.
“I’m trying, but I still find it a bit weird.” She confesses with a gentle grimace.
“Keep practising.” He says, and she waves at them before turning around and running off.
They’re both watching her go, but Frank suddenly feels caught. It’s not a feeling he’d like to explore any further.
“She’s cute,” Abby says from beside him.
He’s not sure how the hell he’s supposed to reply to Abby, but he knows if he doesn’t, it’ll seem sort of suspicious.
“Er, sure.” He says, frowning as he glances at the side of her head. Abby tilts her head and watches Mel for a couple of seconds before turning back to look at her husband. She doesn’t look out of sorts, doesn’t pick up on any weird vibe – not that there is one between him and Mel. But it’s still mildly unsettling. Abby’s never been a jealous person - he’s never really given her a reason to be, but he’s not sure he would’ve liked them to meet. Keep work and personal life separate – Robby told him that early on, when he first started. But again, Robby has never been the best example of healthy relationships.
Frank turns his attention to Tanner once he realises Abby isn’t going to say anything else. “Come on, buddy, I promised you the monkey bars, didn’t I?”
They walk towards the playground, and Frank makes a conscious effort not to look at the asphalt running around the edge of the park in the hopes of seeing a blonde runner.
He’s washing up dinner plates when he feels the vibration in his back pocket. He has a feeling that Mel was going to message him, and when he opens his phone, he sees her name right there, hovering under a picture of his kids.
They’ve texted each other now and then, but it’s nothing past:
Cafeteria doesn’t have Redbull. Will a monster work?
No it’s alright thanks
Or
Abbot’s asking for you. Specifically asked for ‘glasses’. Is that offensive?
Lol no
Just in the elevator
For some reason, he keeps the water running. He distantly thinks that if he turns it off, Abby will realise something is wrong. It’s thoughts like these that remind him why he’s still in therapy. He’s not even doing anything wrong! He swipes open his chat with Mel and thinks of ways to torture Cassie when he sees her next.
Hey, nice seeing you in the park! Just wanted to apologise if I made things weird with Abby. I wasn’t expecting to see you and the words just got a bit jumbled in my head hahaha
Frank turns the tap off and rests his hip against the counter.
Lol it’s okay she found it funny. I guess it is true about the scrubs thing. I remember when I saw Robby in jeans for the first time, it was so weird
Harmless enough, right? He entertains the idea of deleting the messages, but Abby’s never asked to go through his phone, not even after rehab, so it feels unnecessary. He’s not even doing anything wrong! He knows this is ridiculous. He’s about to turn his phone off when it buzzes again. He’s clicking on the message before it even drops down completely.
Honestly I feel like Robby materialises outside the hospital before his shift.
Can’t imagine him with an actual life outside the ER
Anyway, glad she found it funny! I know I can get caught with my foot in my mouth sometimes :/
I would feel the same about Robby except I lived with him for a few months during covid. It was bone-chilling. Like sleeping on your principal’s couch
You’re fine Mel, don’t even worry about it. Abby knows we’re friends
He bites at the hangnail on his thumb and anxiously waits for a reply. They are friends. The relationship they have is friendly. They’re friends. He tells himself it’s fine until she replies. She likes the second message, and he watches the three dots on her side of the screen. He really shouldn’t be so worked up over this. This is actually slightly concerning. He knows he should probably speak to Bobby about this, but then that would mean admitting that the relationship he has with Mel is out of the ordinary, which it certainly is not.
Oh wow
What was that like?
I’d tell you about it except I’ve pretty much blocked out those years in my head. Wasn’t the best time in my life. Gives the last year a run for its money lol
How was your run?
It takes her a moment to reply. Frank breaks out into a sweat.
:(
It was good! I always forget how much better I feel after exercising. Becca reminds me all the time, but work makes it harder to get out sometimes
I’m completely jealous. Running was probably one of my only healthy vices
You should get back on the horse!
Obviously don’t exert yourself
Can’t do more than about a mile and my pacing has gone to shit over the last year. Doesn’t help that I’ve taken up smoking
Ah well, my grandma smoked from age 13 and she lived to 89 so it can’t be all that bad
Frank guffaws. Like, actually out loud. It surprises him. He hopes to God that Abby didn’t hear him.
You’re still better than me
When I started running I couldn’t do more than 2 minutes without keeling over
I guarantee you that you could probably lap me if we ran together
You’re just out of practice
Then again, I wouldn’t want your ego bruised
Ouch
You’re right though
If you ever wanted to start it back up again, you’re more than happy to join me
It’ll probably make me feel a lot better about myself
Okay I get it you’re basically Usain Bolt
He’s known for sprinting
But I appreciate the compliment
I should go, I’ve got frozen lasagna in the oven and it’s probably the most gourmet thing I’m going to eat all week
Mel between this and your protein bars I’m scared you might actually develop scurvy
I ate two oranges today! My vit C levels are fine thank you
Some greens would be good too
You’re being a real dad right now
But okay I’ll eat some spinach or something
lol good
see you at work
👍
Frank clicks his phone off and presses his temple against the kitchen cupboard. He inhales and exhales like they taught him in rehab and then flicks the tap back on before he does something stupid like reread the messages.
Like he suspected, his shifts stop coinciding with Mel’s. It seems obvious enough that he feels like he was right, but he still doesn’t mention anything to Robby. Maybe he was just obsessing over it. Maybe he’s going crazy. Either way, he knows it’s the right thing. He could feel himself using Mel as a safety blanket whenever they worked on a trauma together. On the odd day that he wasn’t working with Mel, he’d stay on chairs or hang back unless he was positive he could do it.
But he slowly weans himself off her and attempts to slip back into his old, confident self. It doesn’t work – not even close, but Bobby constantly reminds him how he has to teach himself everything again now that he’s sober. He has to relearn how to do everything without depending on drugs. And now it feels like, without depending on Mel.
And the thing is – he’s fine. He works a week of day shifts and a week of night shifts, and on both, he figures out to be good again. Because that’s the thing – he was good. It’s just taking him a bit longer to find it again.
Sticking with Mel was great, and he’s definitely not going to give that up – she’s an amazing doctor – but he feels more confident about his decisions. And honestly, that’s what he missed. He hesitates less now and finds himself smiling more. He’s handling traumas by himself, and it’s the closest he’s felt to being himself from a year ago.
Which is exactly why he’s not surprised when his final night shift goes absolutely haywire. There’s some kind of system reboot that’s making handovers harder, and they’re already a doctor short since the flu is going around.
He’s eight hours into the shift, already ready to collapse from sheer exhaustion, when shit hits the fan. Within one hour, he handles five traumas. First, it’s an 8-year-old hit by a car. They just about stabilise him before he’s sent up for an ex-lap. And then there’s a 37-year-old man with an MI, a 31-year-old burn victim, a motorcyclist hit by a semi and a 27-year-old woman with a brainstem infarction. Three of those five die on the table under Frank’s hands.
He goes up to the roof and smokes a cigarette afterwards. He stays up on that roof and looks down at the world beneath him. He calls Cassie, hands shaking, because for the first time in a long time, he doesn’t trust himself.
“I told you to stop saying sorry whenever you call me. I want you to call me, Frank. That’s the whole point of this.” She says to him, voice crackling from the speaker.
“Okay.”
She waits a moment, and he can hear her exhaling. “Is everything okay?”
He doesn’t have an answer to that, and that’s a terrifying realisation, so instead of replying, he lights up another cigarette, just so he has something to do with his hands.
“Frank, where are you? Aren’t you at the hospital?” She asks.
That seems simple enough. “I’m on the roof.” He tells her.
And then immediately regrets it when he hears shuffling on the other side. He can imagine her sitting up in bed, panicking slightly.
“Oh my god, Cassie, no – I didn’t…I didn’t mean it like that. I just, I’m up here smoking, that’s all.” He winces, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead.
Cassie takes a moment to reply, and even when she does, he knows she’s not entirely convinced. “Okay. You’re up on the roof smoking. Do me a favour and stand in the middle of the roof so I don’t do something stupid like call Abbot to come and get you.”
Frank does what he’s told and leans against one of the massive air vents. He takes another drag and winces at the burn. The loose gravel crunches under his feet whenever he moves them, and he realises just how restless he is. “Okay.”
“What happened?”
He sighs. “It just got a lot, really quickly.”
“Bad shift?”
“Yeah.” He says, bitterly. “It’s fucking predictable too, because I’ve been having a good few weeks. You know, a few days ago, it was a year since…” He pauses, sucking on his teeth before reminding him that the whole point of calling Cassie is that she won’t judge him. “Since Robby caught me. And the thing is, I had a really good day. I was great and I didn’t let the small things bother me, you know, I felt normal.”
“How do you know you’re feeling normal?” She asks, and he can hear the uncertainty in her voice.
He opens his mouth to reply, but comes up short. Because the thing is, normal for a long time meant feeling so numb that even the most gut-wrenching, painful cases wouldn’t affect him. There were a lot of ways Frank wanted to be similar to Robby, but he didn’t have time to shed a few tears after every patient that died. If he did, he’d still be crying over the patients he lost to covid.
So feeling normal meant feeling nothing. And the thought makes Frank want to choke.
“I just hate feeling everything. I’m so fucking emotional about everything.” He says instead.
“Okay, well, that’s understandable. Your body is going through a massive change; of course, your emotions are going to be heightened.”
“I’ve been sober for ten months, Cass.”
“Which is amazing, but it can take a long time for everything to settle.” She says quickly, “Listen, Frank, when you’re intoxicated like that, it’s really easy to feel nothing, and after a while, it feels good, so you don’t see a problem with it. But I’m telling you, there’s nothing wrong with feeling everything, especially in a job like ours. If anything, it’s good to get it all out.”
“I thought I was doing better. I feel like I’m going backwards in terms of recovery.”
“You’re not. I mean, fuck, you’re doing so much better than I ever was. Took me years to get where you are.” She laughs softly, but Frank doesn’t have it in him to believe her entirely. “Getting sober is hard enough, doing it whilst being in the ER – Frank, that feels damn near impossible. You’re constantly surrounded by the one thing that nearly ruined your entire life. But you’re doing it. Every day, I look at you and you’re doing it.”
“Yeah, maybe, I don’t know.” He replies, voice strangled.
He hears her sigh. “This used to happen to me a lot, where I’d have a few good days or weeks or even months and then suddenly I’d think, okay, the other shoe has to drop, right? That, something bad has to happen because that’s just what happens to people like me, like us.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I have to…I have to remind myself to breathe sometimes. And it’s so fucking exhausting, Cass.” He admits quietly.
“It does get easier, I promise. One day you’ll wake up and go through an entire day without thinking about any of it.”
“Have you got a specific date in mind?” He asks, throwing the end of his cigarette on the floor before pressing it out with his foot.
Cassie laughs. “Unfortunately, I’m not that good of a sponsor.”
“You are. You’re…” He pauses, “I couldn’t do this without you.”
“You could, but I’m glad to be around.” He can practically see the smile on her face. “I know so much of your life is defined by this one bad thing, but it’s not going to be like this forever. I think we’re so used to being fuck ups that we think it just comes naturally to us. But we have control over that, you know. We have control over whether we want to fuck up or not. And it’s just one of those things we have to choose every day. Like, every morning just say to yourself that I’m not going to fuck up today, as long as I can help it.”
Frank smiles and feels his shoulders loosen up slightly. “Cass, I’ve had five patients die on me in the last eight hours alone.”
“Okay. Could you have done anything differently to prevent them from dying?”
“No.” He says quietly.
“Exactly. That’s where the whole as long as I can help it part comes in. Sometimes you’ll fuck up, and it won’t be your fault. That just comes with our beautiful and absolutely fulfilling job.”
“Noted.” He laughs softly, pushing off the wall and making his way back to the door.
“You’re 10 months in, Frank. Just keep going.” She says, and Frank decides he’ll believe her today.
It takes a couple of weeks for their schedules to line up, but Frank eventually takes up Mel on her offer to go to the yoga class.
He meets Becca for the first time, and she spends the duration of the class coming up with different ways of calling him inflexible. Mel tries to stop her the first few times, but after Becca sits up after downward dog and asks him if he’s ever been able to touch his toes, he barks out a laugh, and she stops trying after that. It’s honestly the highlight of his week.
He tells Abby four days before he goes, just in case she has a problem with it. Not that she should have - he’s going with a friend from work and her sister, it’s not like he can get up to anything else. Not that he would, with Mel – he’s not a creep.
But he sends Abby the link to the website just for his own sanity. She doesn’t seem too fussed about the whole thing, which stings a little. It shouldn’t, but it does.
Abby’s been distant, but Bobby tells him it’s expected, and Frank’s not surprised by it. He did leave his wife alone to deal with two kids under four, whilst he puked his brains out nearly every day for 90 days. Still, he would much prefer a screaming argument over the silence. It’s not like she’s giving him the cold shoulder, but she’s just become complacent about him. He knows he’s probably not trying hard enough either, but ever since rehab, he’s terrified. He's so scared that if he has to live like this, walking on eggshells around his own wife just so he can see his kids, he’ll do it.
The class is made up mainly of 60-year-old women, most of whom like to flirt with Frank once Becca lets it slip that he’s a doctor. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t like it just a bit. However, he doesn’t love the 64-year-old woman called Marjorie, who keeps trying to show him the lump on her breast. Mel breaks up that little consultation before Frank knows what’s hit him.
Becca’s the best, though. He knew on some level she would be – she shares 99% of the same DNA with Mel, and he really values Mel, so them clicking was sort of instantaneous. Although she doesn’t say anything, Frank knows Mel appreciates him putting in the effort. He can sometimes see, in his peripheral vision, Mel smiling at him whilst he listens to Becca talk about the drama at her facility – most recently, the hot goss is the love triangle between her friends in art club.
After a couple of sessions, Frank’s not entirely sure that yoga is making a difference. But Mel and Becca like to get a treat from some swanky juice bar around the block from the rec centre afterwards, and Frank’s not saying that that is the only reason he goes, but the mint, apple and ginger juice that Mel recommends is kind of life changing.
Because of their complicated schedules, they can’t attend every session, and Frank’s also a wimp and refuses to go in on the one Sunday when Mel’s working. He takes the kids out to breakfast that morning, whilst Abby meets up with a friend from work.
The week after, their schedules line up, which might be because Frank worked a double on Friday so that his Sunday morning would be free, but that’s neither here nor there.
They’ve grabbed their juice – Mel and Frank with their concoction and Becca with her Strawberry and Banana smoothie – and he finds himself, like so often, following Mel as she goes on about some report she read in some journal. Becca’s in front, wearing her headphones and skipping slightly as she hums some song that Frank can’t place, and around five minutes into the walk, he realises that they’re on route back to her house.
Now, Frank has only ever seen the outside of Mel’s house one time, when they had both finished at 2am and he insisted that he’d drop her off. She actually lives pretty close to him – around a 5-minute drive, so it wasn’t as if it was out of his way or anything. Abby was asleep when he got home anyway, and it didn’t seem like pertinent information when he saw her after work the next day.
He doesn’t say anything to Mel when he realises that they’re getting closer and closer to her house. She’s rambling on about an updated review on managing pheochromocytomas when they turn onto her street.
“Recent clinical trials have shown promise for medications such as sunitinib and cabozantinib, and I know they only offer short-term disease control, but it was really interesting to see how it’s advanced in such a short amount of time! Well, that and the Colombian PET scan development.” She finally looks up at him, and he tries to mirror her excitement despite the fact that he’s been watching her ponytail swaying for the last 20 minutes.
“No, yeah, it sounds incredible. You’ll have to send it to me.” He says, blinking quickly before finishing the rest of his juice.
“I found it in a book in our research library, but don’t worry, I’ll let you borrow it.” And then the expression on her face drops. She looks up, as if she’s just recognising her surroundings. “Oh! Oh no! I just made you walk all the way to my house. Langdon, I’m so sorry.” She frowns, pulling her eyebrows together regretfully.
“Mel, no, you’re fine. I didn’t mind the walk. And the report was really interesting – if I’m here, I might as well take the book off you.”
“I feel bad, though. I’ve just delayed your entire morning.” She shakes her head, squeezing her hands together.
“Seriously, Mel, it’s okay. Abby’s taken the kids to some birthday party. I wouldn’t have followed you if I were busy. Honestly.” He tells her, trying everything in him to make her feel better. He’s very aware of the fact that he puts so much effort into fixing Mel’s emotional state when he’s got a wife at home who is slowly distancing herself from him. Maybe it’s because he knows there's no use with Abby – that’s at least what he tells himself.
“You parked at the centre.”
“I could use the walk.”
Mel tilts her head. He can tell she’s not entirely convinced, but she looks back at her own house. It’s a modest fixer-upper. She rents, just as he does, but it’s still on a semi-sketchy street. It’s a small two-bed with an in-unit washer and dryer, which apparently have minds of their own.
But there are wind chimes hanging off the gutter just above their porch and a few plants which he knows are Becca’s – Mel’s not a very proficient gardener as Becca likes to remind them whenever they pass the little plant nursery near the rec centre.
There’s even a little silver bowl of water sitting in the corner on the first step, and a small wooden sign that says water fountain for furry friends :) leaning against it. One of Becca’s creations, he assumes.
“I wish you had told me you were free. I would’ve cancelled my plans and invited you in for lunch or something.” Mel shrugs regretfully before reaching into her bag to pull her keys out.
Becca turns and pulls her headphones off just in time to pluck the keys out of Mel’s hand. She runs up the few steps of the house and opens the front door.
“Well, if you were planning on cooking, I think I just saved all three of us from a trip to the ER.” He jokes, not hesitating to follow her.
“I would never subject you to my cooking.” She throws over her shoulder before pushing the door open fully.
It’s not lost on him how eager and nervous he is now that he’s entering Mel’s house. It should not be as important as it seemingly is, but when he’s crossed the threshold into her hallway, he can’t help but smile. This is as close as he’s going to get to being in Mel’s brain, and he doesn’t take that lightly.
It’s warm, cosy and clean. All three things that Frank knows are missing from his own house. It’s not overly decorated, he realises as he walks into the living room. The stairs leading to the second floor are situated in front of the door, and the living room sits just to the right of them. It’s a small room with their L-shaped couch taking up the majority of the space. Still, there’s a wooden coffee table adorned with candles and medical textbooks. A few plants sit in the windowsill, looking out onto the street, all green and growing thanks to Becca.
Through a small archway, the kitchen looks out onto the small backyard. It’s a decent-sized, Frank thinks as he peeks his head into it. Doesn’t look like it’s used outside of cereal and microwavable meals, which makes him grimace slightly. It’s sort of nice, though, knowing Mel has a fault even if it is just being unable to cook. Makes him feel just slightly better because he can.
“Sorry for the mess. We weren’t expecting company.” Mel blushes as she tries to sort through the medical journals and junk mail on the coffee table. He notices an empty tub of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream on the corner and pockets the information for later. What he’s going to do with it, he’s not entirely sure, but it’s there in case he needs it.
“I live with two kids under the age of six – this is like a museum in comparison.” He says, waving his hand as he mindlessly walks over to the TV cabinet. He picks up a picture frame and tries to hide his smile when he sees Mel and Becca, probably around 8 years old, in Halloween costumes.
“We went as Glinda and Elphaba,” Mel says quietly from behind him. He feels caught, so he sets the picture down and looks over his shoulder at her. She looks different from how she does at the hospital. She’s wearing different clothes, obviously, but maybe there’s something about being in someone’s home that makes them look more vulnerable.
Becca calls out for Mel, something about a watering can, and Frank sees the back door open in the corner of his eye. He watches Mel follow her, just enough to peek her head out of the door, and he takes the moment to glance over the other few pictures. He recognises a few with whom he assumes is their mother.
Mel mentioned her mom’s passing during that first month where they were working together, which made him feel like a real asshole, especially as he had just complained about his mother being too overbearing and sending too many care packages.
For a person who can talk for 20 minutes straight without a break, Mel has never seemed too eager to give up a lot of information about her mom aside from the fact that she died a few years ago.
Their mother looks lovely, in a quiet, soft kind of way. She’s got dirty blonde hair like Mel, but she looks more like Becca. She is the image of those neighbourhood housewives from those old black and white shows, who bake pies and cookies for her kids when they come home from school. Just entirely sweet. His mother is sharp at the edges and loud – she’s great, but he realises how vastly different his childhood must have been compared to Mel and Becca’s.
There’s no picture of their dad, and Mel’s never mentioned him, not even when Frank asks her for advice on what to get his own for his birthday. It’s like he’s never existed to her, which might be true, but Frank has this itch - he wants to know, wants to pry open her head and learn everything about her, but he’s trying really hard to be a good friend, so he doesn’t bring it up.
“Do you want something to drink? I’ve got water, Dr Pepper and a lychee vitamin drink.” Mel’s voice catches him, and he turns to see her bent over, head stuffed into her refrigerator.
“Er, just water. Thanks.” He replies, following her into the kitchen. She pulls her head out and passes him a water bottle, keeping one for herself.
“Becca’s got a little vegetable garden growing in the back, so she’s very busy.” Mel laughs softly, pressing the cool bottle to her face. “I’ve got the book in my room if you still want it.”
“Well, you found it interesting, so how can I not read it?” He flashes her a smile, and she mirrors it before walking past him and up the stairs. Frank follows, not really sure if he’s allowed to, but he gets up on the first step, and she doesn’t say anything, so he keeps going.
She actually looks over her shoulder, as if she’s checking if he’s still following. Frank doesn’t breathe the entire walk up. Not even when Mel starts going on about how their AC is on the fritz and how her washer and dryer can only take one load every couple of days, which wouldn’t normally be an issue except she’s a doctor and needs to wash her scrubs every day.
Frank nods along and steps onto the landing. There are two doors in front of him and a bathroom on the side, which, from a quick glance, is adorned with a light purple shower curtain and bathroom accessories to match.
Mel opens the door in front of the stairs – her door is plain, whilst Becca’s is decorated with stickers and a whiteboard. There’s a drawing of a pumpkin on it, and Frank is struck with the realisation that he needs to sort out his kids’ Halloween costumes before next Friday.
He stops in her doorway and leans against the frame, unsure if he should step inside. Now, Frank’s not stupid, not entirely anyway. He knows he has a kind of affinity for Mel – he respects her deeply and is in constant awe of her work as a doctor. She’s his friend – his good friend, but he also knows that he has to stop himself from bringing her up in every conversation, has to mind himself whenever Abby’s in the mood to ask him about his day at work. He drops her name here and there, but he feels a bit calculating about it, making sure that it’s just enough times and just as common as other names like Cassie and Mohan.
Standing in her bedroom shouldn’t be that big of a deal, not really, because they’re friends. And he’s not doing anything wrong! It’s not like this was part of his plan – he didn’t anticipate all of this, and again, he’s not doing anything wrong! He’s just borrowing a book from his good friend. No funny business, not like he even believes Mel would allow it! Becca’s downstairs anyway. He’s not even sure he would, if the opportunity arises. God, he’s the biggest asshole on earth. This is what happens when he befriends a woman who isn't a lesbian or 10 years older than him.
He stands over the threshold of Mel’s bedroom, glancing at her bed with the pale pink sheets and the desk in front of the window, again covered in medical books and old mugs. It reminds him of the picture of her mom downstairs. Her room is tidy and neat, which makes sense, and it’s so quintessentially Mel. There’s one picture on her wall just above her bed, and it looks to be some kind of celestial chart.
“I used to be a really big astronomy geek.” She says after Frank’s stares at it for a minute too long. She turns back to her desk and plucks one of those hefty books off it. There’s a yellow sticky tab sticking out from the top, which Frank presses when she hands it to him.
“I didn’t realise you were so interested in endocrinology.” He muses, resting the book on his forearm as he flicks through it gently. “Are you writing a paper on pheochromocytomas, or is this just casual reading?”
Mel laughs quietly – the kind where she smiles and lets out a puff of air from her nose. She sits on the corner of her bed and sets her hands on her knees. “No, I, er, my mom died of a malignant pheochromocytoma, so I just like to keep updated on advancements in treatment.”
Frank looks up, all the colour draining from his face as he freezes. “Fuck. Oh. Shit, Mel, I’m so sorry, I forgot, I…”
Mel waves him off. “It’s okay, it’s not like I talk about it a lot.”
Frank winces, carefully watching her eyebrows settle. “I saw a picture of her downstairs. She looks just like Becca.” He says, biting on the inside of his lip, unsure if it’s the right thing to say.
She looks up at him. “Yeah. I feel like I’m more similar in personality, though.”
“Well, then, she must have been pretty great.”
“I really wish you had said something earlier. I would’ve cancelled my plans.” Mel tells him as they trudge down the stairs. Frank stops in the small hallway, his back against their winter coats. The cold water bottle stings against his thigh as he stuffs it into the pocket of his shorts.
“Going out with Becca?” He asks.
Mel purses her lips, shaking her head. “I’ve got a date. It’s just a quick lunch thing between his shift, but I said yes last week, and it would be rude to cancel at the last minute.”
Frank looks up and tries his hardest not to look startled. He’s not surprised Mel has a date – he wants to make that very clear. He’s just surprised that she would divulge that kind of information to him. But it’s not weird, is it? They’re friends and friends talk about their personal lives. He talks about his kids and his family, and what he’s done on his days off. He’s well aware of the fact that he doesn’t bring Abby up in conversation as much, but that’s a separate issue that he has to reckon with himself before he brings it up to someone else.
“That’s nice. Are you dropping Becca back to the facility, then?” He asks, trying to look interested in a completely appropriate way.
“No, Samira is coming over to hang out with her.”
“I noticed you guys have become good friends. You’re always giggling in the lounge.”
“I don’t think we giggle.” She says, frowning with an amused smile. “But yeah, we’ve got a lot in common. And her and Becca get on really well. She’s actually the one who set me up.” She reveals, and Frank’s eyebrows fly up in curiosity. “We were working together on New Year’s and realised just how pathetic our love lives were, so we made a pact to set each other up on dates. That way we can hold each other accountable.”
“That’s nice,” Frank replies, his voice coming out more strangled than he anticipated.
“Yeah, I guess so. But it’s been ten months, and so far, the pool’s been pretty dry. But I guess it’s nice to get dressed up and go out for dinner. Only, I wish she would stop setting me up with doctors from the hospital. I’m always terrified of running into them.”
“Is it a doctor you’re going out with?” He really wishes he didn’t have a stupid look on his face.
“He’s a dermatologist. I don’t like to play into stereotypes, but I’ve heard some of them can be quite superficial.” She sighs, shrugging her shoulders.
“You don’t seem too excited.”
“Well, I’d much rather hang out with you.” She says, and Frank has to stop his entire body from smiling. He frowns gently, biting the inside of his lip like he doesn’t totally believe her. “It’s fine, though. Samira keeps telling me how nice John is, so I’ll give him a try. If not, at least I might get a free coffee out of it.”
Frank lets out a breath from his nose, amused. “What about your matchmaking skills? Has Mohan found the love of her life yet?”
Mel rolls her lips into her mouth, as if she’s trying to hide a smirk. She leans her head forward even though there’s no one else in the house. “If I tell you something, can you promise not to tell anyone?”
Frank mirrors her and nods, completely intrigued. “Okay.”
Mel clasps her hands together. “Have you ever gotten the feeling that Dr Abbot might have a…thing for Samira?”
Frank cocks his head back in disbelief. “Our Abbot? Jack Abbot?”
Mel nods enthusiastically. “I might be completely wrong, but I’ve worked enough night shifts with the two of them and, well, there’s something there. She has no idea, but he flirts with her, or at least, it’s some kind of attempt at flirting with her.”
He lets out an awkward, kind of strangled laugh, trying to figure out what the hell to do with this information. “Abbot and Mohan?”
“Have you never noticed? Well, you’ll see it now that I’ve told you. 80% of the time, I look up at him during the night shift, and he’s looking at her or trying to look at her. He is constantly checking up on her, giving her snacks and reassurance and sure, he’s a great doctor, but he’s not that attentive to the rest of us.”
“Now that you’re saying it, he would always get really defensive if any of us called her slo-mo.”
Mel frowns. “Well, I would too. She’s an amazing doctor.”
Frank immediately backtracks. “I’m not saying she isn’t! It’s just, it was in the past! I wouldn’t dare call her that now.”
She narrows her eyes like she’s sussing him before making a neutral expression. “Anyway. It’s something I’ve noticed. And Samira is so clueless about it. She keeps asking me why I haven’t found anyone to set her up with, and I have this urge to just tell her, but I don’t really have any concrete evidence. I’m also not sure it’s my place.”
Frank contemplates it. “They’re adults. They’ll figure it out. Or, at least Mohan will realise and do something about it. Abbot, on the other hand, is a widowed veteran. I honestly don’t have a lot of faith in his emotional capabilities.”
“Wait until your next night shift. Honestly, it was like the moment I picked up on it, there were signs everywhere.” Her eyes go wide in wonderment. “I’ve honestly been waiting to tell someone about them, but I didn’t want to be seen as the hospital gossip. I’m not sure I could trust many people with this information.” She says, warily.
“Your secret is safe with me, Mel.” He says, keenly.
The next time the two of them are on a night shift with Mohan and Abbot, he sees it – he feels it. He looks up and locks eyes with Mel from where she is all the way on the other side of the nurses' station, and her eyes widen just slightly before gently tipping her head in the direction of the other two.
They’re in an open bay, but the curtain is shut, so Frank picks up a chart and slowly tries to make himself look busy and interested in the diagnosis notes he wrote up 20 minutes ago, all whilst trying to listen in. Listen, he’s nothing if not nosy.
Mohan is saying something in a tense voice. Unfortunately, her voice is strained, and Frank can’t really make anything of it. He glances up at Mel, who’s looking at him with an amused expression that says You’re going to get caught.
He grins and looks down at the tablet. Abbot says something and Mohan replies, and Frank realises he has actual things to do, actual patients to look at, but then Mohan draws the curtain back and she’s huffing, about to storm off.
That’s when Abbot grabs her wrist and pulls her back until she’s facing him. “Samira, I will not compromise on your safety. That’s final.” He drops her hand and walks out of the bay towards the staircase. Frank looks down at the tablet as if his life depends on it. It probably does.
He gives it a couple of seconds and then slowly peers up cautiously until his eyes land on Mel. She’s approaching Mohan slowly and carefully, like she’s a scared fawn, and Mohan furrows her brows like she’s not really sure what’s just happened. Mel wraps her arm around the other’s shoulder and angles her towards the lounge. She then looks over her shoulder with an obvious look and Frank looks back with a you were right! look on his face.
They grab breakfast after the shift, and Mel fills him in on all the other ways Abbot has been completely obvious before trying to devise a plan on how to get them together. Frank isn’t too sure Abbot could handle a relationship, but Mel reminds him that he was once married, to which Frank replies that it doesn’t really mean much because anyone could get married - doesn’t mean they’re good at relationships.
Mel offers him the rest of her French toast before she makes a pros/cons list on the diner napkin on whether to relay this information back to Mohan. Frank watches in pure astonishment as she manages to get at least three points down in each column. He’s not sure he’s ever thought that critically about anyone’s relationship, not even his own, maybe.
In the end, Frank drops her home because she still hasn’t bought a new car after hers broke down on the highway, and they come to the conclusion that Mel might nudge her in the right direction without being too obvious. She’s weirdly scared of it backfiring, but Frank tells her: No risk, no reward, which coincidentally is the same thing he used to tell himself when popping a benzo before work. This feels like a more appropriate situation to say it in, though.
When he wakes up on November 22nd, Frank turns around in bed to find Abby asleep, her back towards him. He looks over at the alarm clock on his nightstand, and it reads 5:20am. He gets up, walks around the bed and opens the door to their en-suite.
“Wait. Come here.” He hears Abby’s voice, laced with sleep. He looks over his shoulder and sees her blinking quickly with her arm out. Her hand is cupped, like she’s waiting for him to slip his hands into hers.
He walks over slowly, puts his hand into hers, and then settles down on the bed next to her body. Her fingers feel foreign between his own.
Abby turns onto her back and stares up at her husband for a moment, pulling their interlocked hands close to her heart. “Happy one year, Frankie.” She whispers, and Frank takes a deep breath as she presses her lips to his knuckles. “I’m really proud of you.”
Frank has sex with his wife that morning. It’s quick and emotional – she doesn't orgasm, but she tells him it’s okay. It’s the first time in months that they’ve touched each other, really touched each other. It fills Frank with an undeniable sadness because it’s pitiful. The whole thing, it’s pitiful.
She kisses him before pulling away and heading to the bathroom, leaving him flushed and stripped on their bed. He can’t remember the last time he hugged her.
He’s downstairs having his first coffee of the day when he hears Tanner whispering in the childlike way where they don’t really have a strong grasp on their own volume. Frank smiles and places his mug in the middle of their coffee table before looking over his shoulder at his two kids walking in with coloured paper in their hands.
Tanner slips into his lap, and Sadie tries to climb up on his shoulders. They show him the cards they made with mommy the day before, whilst he was at work. Tanner’s handwriting is improving so much. Frank looks over both cards before setting them down on the couch next to him.
He wraps his arms around his kids and rocks them both whilst pressing kisses to their heads. He has to try so hard to keep his composure, but his kids are also both under six, and he can only hug them for so long before they get irritated, and eventually, they slip out of his grasp. Sadie tumbles off the couch, probably on the hunt for some crumbs, and Tanner takes Frank’s card back because he’s actually not done with it yet.
Abby walks in a few minutes later with a stack of pancakes. There’s one candle sticking out of the top, and Tanner assumes it’s Frank’s birthday, so he sings Happy Birthday, Daddy! before he blows out the candle. Abby looks at him with a weighted smile before settling in next to Tanner so they can all share his breakfast.
Cassie finds him at the lockers when he gets into work and squeezes him tightly before ruffling his hair. She stands close to him during morning briefing, and he has to resist the urge to grab hold of her hand just so he doesn’t lose his footing.
Mel’s working nights, even though she hinted that she tried really hard to swap with someone. Frank appreciated the thought anyway.
The day goes by without any life-changing events. Dana presses her hands to his cheeks again and tells him that she had no doubt in him, which feels a bit strange because he did. He did even last night when he crawled into bed, sweating. He kept envisioning himself waking up in the bathroom with a mouthful of pills.
He sticks with Cassie when the day feels heavy, but mostly he just does his job because he’s good at it. Collins knocks his shoulder when they’re waiting for the head and neck surgeon to do a consult, and asks him if he’s had a good day. He knocks her back and replies, “Can’t complain,” because he can’t, not really. He wouldn’t want to anyway.
He eats lunch with Cassie and Yo, which means sandwiches from the deli around the corner, up on the roof, whilst he tries not to blow smoke in their faces. They both try to reprimand him for the bad habit, but he’s got to be allowed something.
Two people die during the course of his shift, but he deals with them. He goes outside and takes a few deep breaths, listening to the crashing waves audio on Spotify that Mel recommended. He comes back and he does it all again.
He’s in the middle of stitching up a head lac on an unhoused man when it hits him - the crushing realisation that actually he’s done it, he’s done something. He’s stayed sober for an entire year, an entire three hundred and sixty-five days.
And he feels as if he’s going to pass out. His sight blurs and his hands shake whilst tying off the stitches. He mumbles something about discharge papers and runs out, clutching his chest until he drops down to the tiled floors underneath the stairwell.
He presses his clammy hand against the cold flooring, trying to ground himself as he counts back from ten, over and over again. He can see flashes of his kids, Abby, Robby, his parents, his coworkers – everyone that he's disappointed over the last year. He gently rocks his head back, tapping it against the wall behind him whilst he counts.
“That’s it, deep breaths, Langdon, there you go…” He hears a voice behind the ringing in his ears, and he claws at the floor, as if it will open up and swallow him whole.
A hand covers his own, and he knocks his head back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. He remembers what Dr Mona told him all those months ago, remembers the techniques he learnt in med school about calming down from a panic attack, deep breathing, rational thinking. Say it again and again.
It takes him a minute to come to, but he doesn’t move. His eyes open and he looks down, recognising the hand over his. She doesn’t say anything, and he’s grateful. He sniffles a few times and clears his throat. She squeezes the top of his hand before letting it go so he can wipe his face with the bottom of his scrub top.
“How’d you find me?” He whispers, chest rising and falling in a familiar sequence.
“You ran right past me,” Mel whispers, looking up at the side of his face.
He frowns. “Sorry. I, er. Sorry.”
Mel pauses for a moment. Frank still can’t look up at her. “Tough day?”
He contemplates it but shakes his head, chewing on his lip. “I was fine all day, it just got to me now. I don’t know.”
“Hey.” Frank reluctantly turns his head to look at her. Her hair is in a ponytail today. Not a hair out of place. She smiles at him, bright and proud. “Happy one year. I knew you could do it.”
Frank rolls his eyes and manages a small smile.
“I’m serious, Langdon. I knew you could. I tend to be right about these sorts of things.” She says.
Frank struggles to accept it. He looks down, rubbing his hands over the curve of his thighs and knees. “How am I going to do this for the rest of my life?” He confesses with a pained expression. He doesn’t want to have to admit it because it’s terrifying, but Frank isn’t sure he can take another year of this.
He expects Mel to, well, he’s not sure what he expects from her – she’s been subverting his expectations since they met - but he’s not expecting her to shuffle closer, until their shoulders are touching.
“The first year is always the hardest. It’s going to get easier.”
“How do you know?” He asks.
Mel looks at him, tilting her head. “Because I know. You trust me, right?”
Frank looks up at Mel, brows furrowed and lost for words. He nods because he does; he’s trusted Mel since they first met – she’s never given him a reason not to, so it’s that easy.
“Listen,” She turns to face him. “What you’ve achieved is…incredible. And it will get easier. Think about how much you’ve changed since July.”
Frank tries not to. He doesn’t give himself the courtesy. “I just keep thinking about all the people I let down in the last year. My kids, Abby, Robby, everyone here…you.”
Mel frowns at him. “You didn’t let me down.” She says, puffing her chest out a bit. “You didn’t let us down, Langdon. You needed help, and you got it. You had a problem, you fixed it, and you came back. I can’t see anything wrong with that; if anything, it’s really admirable.”
Frank winces, pressing his teeth into his tongue. He blinks quickly, averting his gaze before scratching his neck. He can feel himself breaking into hives. “I feel,” he pauses and glances up at Mel before looking down at his legs, “It feels stupid that people are congratulating me over being sober. You’ve never abused drugs, and no one’s congratulating you.”
Mel contemplates what he’s said and looks around the little alcove they’re tucked into as if she’s very carefully planning what to say. Frank feels like an ass. His face contorts into something uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry,” he says quickly, before Mel gets the chance. “That was insensitive. I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve seen the stats, I know there’s cause for celebration, but I can’t shake the feeling of dread whenever I’m at work. I just don’t know if I belong here anymore.”
Mel nods thoughtfully before dropping her hands into her lap. “You’re thinking that you maybe don’t have what it takes anymore. That maybe the drugs and rehab have, what, weakened you? Made you worse?” She offers, and Frank nods sheepishly. It’s like she’s in his mind.
“Okay.” She says and then locks eyes with him. “Can I tell you what I think?” She says it in a tone where Frank wouldn’t dare to disagree with her. He nods again.
“I think that what you went through has actually made you a better doctor.” She says firmly, tilting her chin up slightly. Frank stares at her dumbly. “I think that because of what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced, you kind of have a duty to keep going. We see addicts come through all the time, but the difference between Robby treating them and you treating them is that you’ve been on their side. And that kind of empathy and compassion and understanding – it’s really valuable, Langdon. We need people to advocate for them, to go the extra mile. We need people who won’t look at treatment so clinically. We need people like you.” She says, her gaze unwavering.
“I don’t always agree when Robby says to leave your personal experiences at home, because those are what make us better people and better doctors. So, yeah, what you went through was awful and probably really debilitating, but I don’t see it as a weakness. If anything, I think it shows real courage – that you care about your sobriety this much. I think, especially in this job, you have the chance to make a real difference. You already do.”
Mel smiles when she’s done, and Frank has the fleeting thought that she might squeeze his hand again. Jesus Christ.
He’s going to throw up, he’s certain. He can see it playing in his mind, just upchucking right in front of her, maybe on her from sheer stress and panic and embarrassment. He doesn’t, but he does sit there, frozen, staring at her like English isn’t his first language.
He really needs to stop being so self-pitying around Mel because it’s getting embarrassing, listening to her as she tries to talk him up to himself. Distantly, Frank is aware that what he’s done is a good thing, and that she’s probably right. He’s not sure he can see it, but if Mel does, he’ll believe her.
Despite this, he’s still not sure what to say in response, so he decides on some take of a guffaw whilst blinking quickly, as if she’s a mirage. “Mel, what the fuck?”
She smirks, rolling her lips into her mouth before containing her composure. “I told you I don’t like it when you talk badly about addicts. This is your fault – you shouldn’t have moaned, otherwise you wouldn’t be dealing with my philosophical rants about sobriety. I’ve got lots stored here,” She taps her temples, “So I would watch what you say to me.”
“Remind me to never get on your bad side.”
“I’m not sure I have a bad side.” She says, shaking her head slightly. “I actually have something for you. It’s not…it, okay, wait.” She leans back and reaches into the pocket of her jacket before pulling out a small token. It’s bronze, kind of worn, with a triangle in the middle. Slightly bigger than a coin, he thinks as she holds it in her palm between the two of them.
“This belonged to someone very important to me, and I want to give it to you because you’re important to me.” She says softly, glancing up at him before looking back down. “I know you didn’t want to make a big fuss, but if it’s any consolation, I’m very proud of you and I, erm, want you to remember how far you’ve come. And that what you’ve done isn’t wasted.”
Frank’s eyes blur with tears. He blinks a few times, letting a small drop run down his cheek before looking up at Mel. She looks hesitant and cautious, as if she’s still debating whether or not what she’s said is appropriate.
But he doesn’t think twice before he pushes forward and wraps his arms around her shoulders and tucks his head next to hers. Mel squeaks, jutting her chin out so it rests on his shoulder before patting his back. They’re at an odd angle, and he has to stop his knee pressing into her leg, but he holds onto her, squeezing tightly before realising what a fucking idiot he is.
“I’m sorry. I know you hate people touching you.” He says, sniffling as he pulls out of her personal space.
Mel shakes her head like she’s trying to convince herself that she didn’t hate the hug. “Only strangers. I don’t mind friends.” She says, and Frank has to look away before he chokes. “Also, Becca is a big hugger. You know all about that.”
Frank laughs, taking the chip from her hand when she offers it to him again. “Yeah, I do.” He says, fondly. He presses his thumb into the embossed metal. “Thank you, Mel. This means,” he sucks in a sharp breath before dropping his head against the wall and swaying it over to look at her. “This means a lot. Really.”
One day, he’ll be able to thank Mel for everything she’s done for him, whether she knows it or not. One day. Not today, but he’ll figure out a way. He’ll figure out a way to thank her, and Cassie and Abby and Robby and even fucking Santos for not ratting him out. He’ll do something, give back to the universe, fucking sacrifice himself if it means making sense of this last year where he’s been given more second chances than he can count.
He thinks about going back to church and then immediately vetoes the idea, mentally scolds himself for even thinking of it, because he knows his mom will have sensed him even having the thought. No, he’s not that forgone yet. Maybe. Fuck.
“Where’d you get this?” He asks, reaching up to grab Mel’s hand as she pulls him up off the floor. She gently brushes the dust off her butt before tucking her hands into her jacket pockets.
“It was my mom’s.” She says, smiling sadly as they push through the double doors into the ER. Frank waits for her to explain further, but she doesn’t, so he doesn’t push. “I should get back otherwise, I’m going to miss rounds.”
“Seriously, Mel, thank you. For everything.” He says, pointedly.
She smiles, happy to have done it. “I’ll see you on Sunday, for yoga?”
Frank nods. He presses the chip between his thumb and index finger. He turns after he watches her head towards the nurse's desk. And then he looks over his shoulder a few more times, watching as she ducks into a bay with Abbot and Ellis.
He slides the chip into the inside pocket of his coat – the pocket on the left side. It feels right there.