Chapter Text
i. july fourth
Mel’s never cared for the Fourth of July.
It’s a fine holiday—hooray for America and its independence, or whatever—but growing up, it mostly signified the overly noisy and obnoxious use of fireworks, which Mel saw as her personal enemy. They were impossibly loud, and they could be unpredictable—more often than not, too, when you were using illegal ones (which many of her neighbors did, regardless of the lax fireworks laws in Florida)—so Mel spent many of her early childhood July fourth evenings holed up in her bedroom, her white noise machine playing soothing sounds into her tiny oasis.
When Mel became a preteen, the holiday twisted and changed into something else; mostly an excuse for barbecues and pool parties, both of which she rarely attended. She had been invited numerous times over the years by “friends” from school, but they never wanted Mel to bring Becca, and that instantly made each invitation a nonstarter, so. Instead of creating lasting memories with corn and the cob and red, white, and blue themed ice pops, July fourth ultimately became the catalyst that made Mel realize just how mean girls can be; a lesson Mel thought she could’ve been spared from, especially considering how kind she consistently tried to be toward everyone in her orbit.
As Mel grew into a teenager and young adult, she still never warmed to the holiday. It always felt like some kind of marker in her summer—almost a halfway point, a stark indicator that her time off from school was almost over, even though it felt like it had just begun. Growing up in Florida meant that while you might have ended your school year in early June (earlier than her Northeast family members), you also went back to school earlier. And in the hottest month of the year: August.
As she entered her later years of medical school, Mel’s disdain for the holiday only grew. It meant crazy (and severe) cases—most of which were often induced by fireworks, to absolutely nobody’s surprise—including burns, blast injuries that often led to amputations, as well as drownings and choking incidents… all completely preventable instances, which were Mel’s most anxiety-inducing kind of case, if she were honest. As she began her career, July fourth became a symbol of just how quickly things can change for the worse, and Mel doesn’t need a yearly reminder of that. Her current life is plenty proof of itself.
So when she entered PTMC’s Emergency Department on July fourth, she was prepared to be disappointed. She was ready to be irritated, to be bothered, to be knocked off-kilter by something, even if it were small. It was just how the holiday went for her, regardless of the circumstances, but what she didn’t expect was to be mere moments away from crying in the single-use bathroom in the middle of her shift.
It wasn’t supposed to be this bad.
She should’ve known as soon as she spilled coffee all over her collar as she got into her car. Not a terrible mishap, all things considered—she had a spare shirt in her emergency bag that she always kept in her trunk—but it was bright green and had shrunk over the years, so it only reached her belly button. Her scrubs would cover her, but she’d know, and she’d feel it, and it would just be one of those things that would eat at her as the day goes on, but what choice did she have?
None, to be precise. She had none, especially considering the big, fat, scary meeting she had to be an active participant in during the middle of her shift, but she was prepared for that. Or, at least—she was as prepared as she was ever going to be, anyway. She just wished that maybe she wasn’t going to be wearing a bright seafoam green around her neck when she was going to be sitting down in front of a team of lawyers, but there was nothing else to be done, so she tried to forget about it.
But then her misfortune only continued as she pulled into work. The lot closest to the ED was packed, not a spare spot in sight, but that happened sometimes. It wasn’t out of the ordinary. She tried the secondary lot next, but that, too, was overflowing with cars when she got there. That meant that she had to go to the lot all the way on the other side of the compound, the one that was conveniently located next to a creepy abandoned warehouse, which was also exceedingly creepy in the daylight hours—and even there, the only spots open were next to dead, dried shrubbery and a slowly decaying crow carcass.
In hindsight, that should’ve been what really tipped her off.
But the bright spot was coming, she thought, because it was also Dr. Langdon’s first day back, which was… well, it was a little embarrassing how much Mel actually had been looking forward to it, and she knew that. She knew it was a little weird to be as earnest and excited as she was, but it had been so long since she had something to look forward to that she tried—really tried—not to think too much about the reasons why.
She didn’t know why he had been gone for so long. Rumors certainly circulated, but they all ran the gamut so widely that it wasn’t entirely clear where the truth lay, and Mel was never one for gossip, anyway. She figured that if Dr. Langdon wanted to share the reason for his departure for the better part of the year, he’d tell her if and when he wanted. After all, it didn’t really matter to her why he was gone. She was just looking forward to seeing him and hopefully learning from him again. They had worked so well together on that one insane day last year, and the truth be told, she could really use some of his encouragement.
Especially now.
(For the last several months, actually, but Mel wouldn’t let her mind go there.)
But the thing was—Dr. Langdon wasn’t excited to see her. Not even a little bit, not even—actually, it was almost as if he were mad at her or something, which she knew felt absurd, but there it was.
When she finally saw him loitering by the charge desk, she wasn’t sure what instinct took over her body. She’d gotten through the past ten months just fine without him—or at least that’s what she told herself—but she couldn’t deny how lonely she still felt, even with the familiarity she’d established within her place of work. Sure, she might now know more about her co-workers and their habits—mostly their workflow—but even just looking at Dr. Langdon made her realize how much more familiar he felt than these other people she’d known for far longer.
It was a crazy, insane thought. But she’d had it anyway.
He seemed taller than the last time she’d seen him, and a little broader, maybe (in her memories, he was quite wiry), but none of that really mattered to Mel. All she could see, as she started to pick up her pace as she made her way toward him, was someone who had seen her all those months ago. Someone who had seen her and stayed, and—
“Dr. Langdon,” she said as she approached, her lips pulled in a giant smile. She couldn’t help it. Something about the ED suddenly seemed brighter, more manageable. For a moment, she even almost felt the same level of excitement that she had on her first day ten months ago. “It’s so good to see you.”
She stepped forward to get even closer, to maybe ask him how he felt being back after his absence, but she didn’t get the chance. He did a double-take at the sound of her voice, but his second look didn’t linger. He flicked his eyes over her for the quickest of seconds—God, were his eyes piercing and blue—before jerking his shoulders back to Dana at the desk.
“I’ll be right back,” he murmured, and for a moment—stupidly—she thought it was for her. “I gotta check something before rounds.”
And then he turned around, his long legs leading him in the opposite direction. Completely and totally away from her.
No acknowledgement, no response. Just… nothing.
Mel just watched his retreating back, which grew smaller with each step as he made his way toward the lockers, and she instantly felt an intense burning spreading across her cheeks.
The first thing that hit her was how much it stung. They had only worked one day together, she knew that. It was also more than ten months ago, and she knew that, too. But what she didn’t know was what she’d done, because—surely she’d had to have done something to warrant such a reaction? She had never been so pointedly… disregarded before. Maybe he hadn’t heard what she said?
“Don’t take it personally, honey,” Dana said, as though she had read her mind. Mel looked over at her to see that she was wearing a pitiful expression, and something inside Mel crushed into dust. It was one thing to maybe think he hadn’t heard her, but Dana’s all but just confirmed he’d not only heard her, but also chose to ignore her. “He’s—”
“It’s okay,” Mel interrupted, though it was really anything but. “I—um. I have to go check something, too.”
(She didn’t).
She couldn’t understand it, and almost didn’t want to understand it, so she pushed it aside. Her mind was riddled with ideas and concepts almost immediately, but she didn’t want to ruminate on them, didn’t want her mind to invent numerous reasons why he was so indifferent toward her. She couldn’t deny how it hurt in a way she wasn’t expecting—and in a way that would probably be perceived as overreacting if she tried to talk about it—so she soldiered through the better portion of her shift, her brave face adorned the best she could.
It helped that Dr. Langdon was immediately put on chairs, so she didn’t have to keep facing him while trying to figure out how to act around him, which would undoubtedly be a problem later, not during what was turning out to be a very daunting and difficult shift.
Because then Calvin Miller was wheeled into their trauma bay, and her day really took a turn for the worse.
She was in trauma two leading the case with Robby. Calvin presented with injuries from a high-speed MVC on the freeway—conscious but irritable, hypoxic, very obviously suffering from internal bleeding, with a head injury almost guaranteed—and Mel fired directives at one of the new interns to intubate while she grabbed the correct medication from the crash cart.
Or—what she thought was the correct medication.
“He’s crashing—where are we at with the meds, Mel?”
It was Robby, his eyes quickly cataloguing the syringe in Mel’s hands. She reached forward with it, her hands shaking, because today had her tied up in all kinds of knots she wasn’t prepared to untangle. “I’ve got it—pushing Rocuronium now.”
Robby tore the syringe from her hand before she had a chance to insert it. “Wait,” he said, turning the syringe toward them both. “It’s the wrong dose. This is—”
He didn’t need to say it aloud. He didn’t because Mel saw it the second he tilted the tube.
It was ten times the normal dose. All the nightmare scenarios played out in her head almost immediately: prolonged paralysis, more (and worsening) hypoxia, and delayed neurological assessment for his head injury. It could also have masked other fatal problems they would otherwise have been unlikely to catch.
“I—” Mel stumbled, the monitors still beeping aggressively around them. She must’ve missed the third row of digits, but how? She had never made a mistake like that before. “I don’t know how—”
Robby didn’t say anything. Instead, he reached into the crash cart and handed her the correct syringe, his calm demeanor somehow only making it worse. “No time; go ahead.”
So she did, and Calvin Miller was correctly intubated and ended up going straight to surgery several minutes later, but the damage was done. Both for her psyche, and for Robby’s apparent belief in her abilities.
That’s when he all but delegated her to chairs, his low voice ordering her to go take it easy, please take a few patients for the nurses, triage is backed up and suddenly it was last September again, except it wasn’t Dr. Langdon who’d told her to take a break. It couldn’t be, after all—it couldn’t be because he seemed to be indifferent with her, for reasons she still can’t figure out—and now she has to go work with him, she has to pretend to be normal and not upset, but what’s one more molehill turning into a mountain? What is it really, at this point in her terrible day?
It’s the thought Mel turns over in her mind as she stands in the single-use restroom, tears welling up in her eyes. It’s just one day, she tells herself. Just one day. She can get through one day, can’t she? After all, she’s had plenty of terrible days before. This one will just go straight into that pile and then she’ll only think of it when ruminating on other bad days.
Eventually.
Now, though, she has to face chairs, and it goes just as she anticipates. It’s awkward, and it’s uncomfortable, and it’s weird, because when she approaches Dr. Langdon to figure out how to best assist him in cutting down patient wait times, he does another double-take and his face scrunches up like he’s displeased, which again, Mel tries not to think too hard about.
“Why don’t you take the likely UTI patient back to north one?” he delegates, barely looking at her as he consults his iPad.
And so that’s how it goes. She and Dr. Langdon orbit around each other—never actually working together, really—trading short, clipped status updates back and forth as well as quick discussions regarding which one of them will take which patient to which open exam room. It’s professional, and it’s to-the-point, and it’s almost bearable—almost, but not quite—because she knows, in some other universe somewhere, these interactions go very, very differently. And she hates that she essentially mourns them.
It’s not until an hour or so later when he approaches her, his expression almost shy, or something, that Mel feels a flicker of hope. He looks—sheepish? No. Hesitant, maybe? It’s just—it’s different, and while she can’t place it, it’s a welcome break from his cold indifference. It’s actually so different that for the most minor second, Mel thinks she might have been imagining his entire demeanor up until this moment, that maybe she was just overly sensitive from how down and out she’s been feeling lately, but when he opens his mouth—it’s not at all what she’s expecting.
“Guy in central eight,” he begins, his tone the epitome of quick and professional and absolutely nothing else, “He initially presented with symptoms indicating a sexually transmitted infection—which he ended up testing positive for—so I’ve prescribed him doxycycline, but his diagnosis has since sent him into a full-fledged panic attack. Can you sign off on this additional recommended prescription, please?”
Mel’s brows pinch together. She gives him a look of confusion—not because of the turn of events he’s described—but because she’s never had someone other than an intern or med student ask her to sign off on an order before, let alone someone of Dr. Langdon’s status. Her attention turns to the iPad he’s held out, and she takes a look to see his recommended treatment plan: 2mg lorazepam.
“Sure,” she says slowly, reaching to take the iPad from him. “But why do I have to sign off on it?”
Dr. Langdon’s expression turns stony, though she’s not sure why. She just said she would do what he asked, didn’t she? She briefly scans the patient’s chart, quickly agreeing with his assessment and treatment plan. “Robby’s tied up with the influx of traumas,” he says, his voice low. “And so is Donnie; he got pulled in for the four-car pile-up.”
Mel hands him back the iPad, having just signed off on his request, tilting her head to study him. Maybe if she keeps looking at him, she’ll find the answer in his face somewhere. “I understand that,” she says patiently. “But—I’m not sure I understand why you need a sign-off in the first place. Can’t you order lorazepam like you did the antibiotics?”
Her question is punctuated by a long, silent moment that stretches and stretches between them. Dr. Langdon’s hand drops to his side, the iPad almost forgotten, and Mel isn’t sure what’s happening, but then he’s staring at her with an intensity she’s wholly unprepared for. Did she say something wrong? He’s—he’s looking at her like something is suddenly happening for him, and his mouth opens, but he remains quiet. They’re still in the middle of the waiting room, which crawls with impatient and loud, demanding people, but it doesn’t feel that way, not to Mel. Instead, it feels like they’ve stepped into some kind of echo chamber, voices and noises bubbling somewhere far, far away from where they’re standing.
Dr. Langdon eventually takes the iPad from her, his eyes still tracking her as though she’s about to run away or something, when suddenly a loud voice next to them makes Mel’s eyes fly shut and her shoulders tense.
“Excuse me! I’ve been waiting here for more than an hour, and I have an important meeting that I simply cannot miss, and here you both are, standing around as though—”
Mel cracks open an eye and looks to her right, where a tall, willowy woman has just interjected herself into her personal space. She’s clearly angry, her hands on her hips, and Mel’s about to explain that they’re working as quickly as they can based on medical severity, but Dr. Langdon beats her to the punch.
“Hey,” Dr. Langdon says, sharp. His eyes narrow, and he moves an arm out to provide a barrier from the woman as he maneuvers slightly in front of Mel to face the patient head-on. “Please take a step back. I assure you that we’re working as quickly as we can, but why don’t you tell me your name and we’ll see where you’re at in line?”
Mel relaxes as the woman does as he asks, and once it’s clear he has the exchange handled, she takes her leave. She doesn’t want Dr. Langdon to think she’s, like, hovering or something—she still feels so off-kilter with him, and she’s not sure how to fix it—so she figures she’s best off just trucking along, getting through as many patients as she can. She backs away slowly, her eyes lingering over Dr. Langdon and the way he nods at the patient.
It still hurts, is the thing. Maybe that day last year was a one-time thing, she thinks. Like a comet, or bioluminescent tides, or—
She’s almost halfway to central eight to administer the lorazepam when she suddenly hears her name being called.
She turns back, surprised, to see Dr. Langdon gesturing at her with his iPad. He’s wearing a grateful expression, though Mel’s still not quite sure what it all means. “Thank you,” he says, his voice sincere.
Mel hesitates. She doesn’t want to give him too much this time; she doesn’t want to try and extend this moment into something it’s clearly not.
She gives him a tiny nod before she turns away, the door swinging shut behind her as she leaves.
***
Mel all but blacks out during the deposition.
She still can’t believe it. Even now, when lawyers and fancy-looking people surround her at a long, circular table in designer suits and high heels and brogues, she can’t believe it. Even when Gloria squeezes her arm in support as they sit down, she can’t believe it.
But she really can’t believe it when she hears the lead attorney ask her, in a clear and authoritative voice after all the pleasantries, “Could you please state your full name for the record?”
She’s actually being sued. And not just for a fender-bender, or for some unforeseen accident she couldn’t see coming. No, she was being sued for medical malpractice.
Mel blinks. Then she clears her throat. Then she starts wringing her hands in her lap. “Um. Melissa Theresa King,” she says softly. “But you can refer to me as Mel.”
The attorney—a petite woman named Willa, who’s got a friendly face, all things considered—offers her a slight smile. “Thank you, Mel. And are you aware that you are being deposed in the case of Hillary Edwards versus Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center—also known as PTMC going forward?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever been deposed before?”
Mel swallows. “No,” she says, her voice small.
Willa nods, beginning to summarize what she can expect throughout the process, but Mel’s already aware. The hospital’s lawyers have already walked her through what today will be like; they also reassured her that they’re more than ready to jump in on her behalf, though she’s smart enough to realize that that’s not what they’re really doing. Everything revolves around money—it always has, and it always will—and she knows that what they really mean is: we’re ready to defend you as to protect the hospital from having to dole out millions of dollars in cash.
It isn’t until a few minutes later, when Willa asks her a typical, run-of-the-mill question, that she spirals into a slew of thoughts she wishes she hadn’t.
“Is there any reason, such as being under unusual stress, a physical or mental condition, or being under the influence of any substances, that would prevent or limit you today from giving truthful answers to my questions?”
Is it pathetic that her first thought circles back to Dr. Langdon? Actually, she wants to say, I’m kind of thrown off by a terrible day, and on top of that, my one-day mentor has returned to work but keeps ignoring me for no discernible reason. Does that excuse me from today’s deposition?
But she doesn’t say any of that. “No.”
Willa nods again. “Thank you, Mel. Can you tell me about yourself? Specifically where you went to college and medical school?”
“I went to the University of Florida in Gainesville for both undergrad and for medical school.”
“Florida,” Willa says, as though she finds the revelation interesting. “That’s quite a bit away.”
“Objection,” George, one of the hospital’s attorneys, interjects. His brows are pinched in an annoyed expression. “What’s that got to do with why we’re here today?”
“I was merely pointing out that it’s far.”
“For what purpose, exactly?”
Willa sighs before she turns to the court reporter. “Fine. Strike the comment from the record, please, Lilia.”
Mel’s hackles go up. The lawyers had told her this would be the easy part—her background. If this is how it’s going now, after she’s answered such a basic question, she fears for the rest of the deposition.
Willa spends the next few minutes asking Mel about her residency—what programs she had been accepted to, what types of medical procedures she’s practiced, what kind of cases she tends to see the most—which Mel thinks she answers relatively well. She keeps her replies short and to the point, making sure to answer only exactly what Willa is asking, and soon enough, they’re discussing the actual day in question.
Mel thinks she does okay on this part, too. She leans heavily on saying that a lot of things were at play that day, including the Mass Casualty Incident that occurred at Pittfest, and even Willa seems to understand the amount of stress and anxiety the entire hospital staff must have been under.
But then somehow, she brings the conversation back to Florida, and that’s when things start to go off the rails.
“Mel—earlier you had mentioned that you had completed some clinical shifts at—” Willa checks her paperwork, “University of Florida Health Shands Hospital during your medical school rotations?”
Mel’s brow furrows. “Yes.”
“What types of rotations did you do there?”
It takes Mel a minute—medical school was a few years ago at this point. “All sorts,” she says, hesitating. “I did rotations in Obstetrics, Dermatology, and Pediatrics. I knew I wanted to go into Emergency Medicine, though, so they saved that rotation for last.”
Something sparks in Willa’s eyes. “Pediatrics?”
It makes Mel nervous. “Yes?”
“Is that a question or an answer?”
“I worked in pediatrics, yes, during my medical school rotations.”
She nods, shuffling some papers around in front of her. “Can you tell us approximately what months and years you were in Pediatrics?”
Again, Mel tries to do some mental math. “I was in my third year of medical school,” she says, thinking out loud though she probably shouldn’t be. She remembers studying for finals during that particular rotation, and—COVID. And the flu. There was an influx of COVID and flu cases throughout that winter amongst kids, though that was pretty typical across the country.
“Rotations were usually three months long; I finished my rotation in that department in December of 2021.”
Willa passes a stack of papers toward Mel, her fingers pointing to the header on the first page. “Mel, can you read aloud to me what this says, please?”
Mel reaches forward and pulls the paper toward her, trying her best to calm her racing heart. “It says, ‘UF Health Shands Hospital Vaccination Data, years 2020–2021.’”
“Great. And can you read aloud the data under June 2021?”
Mel does as she’s asked. The data conveys how many vaccinations UF administered in that time period, though Mel isn’t sure what angle Willa is trying by showing this to her. It doesn’t stop her from attempting to figure it out—her mind whirls a thousand miles a minute, but Willa is too fast. She asks her to read the data from December 2021, and Mel hesitates. The data jumps a considerable percentage.
“Mel?”
Mel swallows before she answers with the figures. “But,” she begins to say, searching through the paragraphs that outline the data’s parameters, “This was after the COVID vaccine became available for children, and—”
“You’ve answered the question, Mel, thank you. Now, was administering vaccinations part of your clinical duties while you were there?”
Mel blinks. “Yes,” she says slowly, her heart sinking all the while. She might not know where they’re headed, but she has a very, very bad feeling about it.
“I see,” Willa says. “And how many vaccinations would you say you administered?”
Oh, God. A hundred? Two hundred? It could be as many as seven hundred, for all Mel remembers. It was COVID. “I don’t remember.”
“An estimation is fine.”
“Objection,” George says, this time louder. “She’s already said she doesn’t remember.”
Willa pauses before she tries again. “Would you say you’ve administered a lot of vaccines, Mel?”
“At that time in my career?” Mel asks, trying to be diplomatic.
“Objection, again,” George says over her, irritation lining his voice. “Relevance. What does vaccine information from five years ago—at an institution she no longer works for—have to do with this case?”
“My client’s son presented at this hospital with a presumed case of Measles, a disease for which there is a vaccine,” Willa says, and Mel’s stomach almost bottoms out. “A vaccine that is optional, as I’m sure Mel—Dr. King—is acutely aware. However—”
Mel doesn’t remember anything specific after that. It all hits her in a distant, dim way as the conversation flutters around her, phrases flying back and forth between Willa and George: how is it not relevant, vaccinations increased tenfold while she was employed there and she was one medical student! You think one medical student could have influenced such significant data during a global pandemic? For an entire teaching hospital? And even if she did, I ask again: what relevance does any of that have to this case?
Willa and George argue for the better part of five minutes, which doesn’t seem like a long time on paper, but in reality, it feels like torture. Eventually, it becomes too much even for Gloria, her temples glistening with a few beads of sweat as she reaches out to the table to try to calm everyone.
“Why don’t we take a break?” she suggests, a weak smile splaying across her face. “It’s only four o’clock, surely we can—”
Willa checks her watch, tsk’ing in displeasure. “I have another deposition in fifteen minutes. I know you’ve had a long day, Mel,” she says, her gaze dragging over to her carefully. “Because I know I certainly have, and I’m not a doctor. Perhaps it’s better to table this for now—I can’t get to my point in that amount of time, so I’d prefer to wait and meet again.”
Meet again?
Gloria all but jumps at the chance to end it here. She gives Willa and her team the runaround—well, we will have to check our calendars and get back to you with our earliest, next available date, but Mel can’t muster the wherewithal to care. The ridiculousness is still all swirling in her head, because they’re trying to suggest what, exactly? That Mel is some vaccine-drug-pusher? And that she forces vaccines onto unsuspecting parents and children? And then—she goes even further? Are they trying to suggest that she… forces procedures on patients who have refused them?
It’s all too much. She all but rushes out of the room as soon as she’s able, tears stinging her eyes as she pounds down the stairs. She needs a distraction, and she needs one now.
She storms into the entrance to chairs, snatching a tablet from the charging station as she goes, her eyes searching the room automatically for Dr. Langdon. She eventually spots him talking to Donnie with a familiar smile on his face, which almost makes her roll her eyes, and—gosh, what is wrong with her right now? It doesn’t matter that they’re talking and that he appears happy; she’s here with a job to do, isn’t she?
Peter Henderson is up next with a deep gash on his left shoulder, and that seems easy enough, so Mel hovers over his name on her iPad until a dropdown menu appears. She clicks her name to assign herself as his prescriber once, twice, three times without success before she groans in frustration loud enough for the people in her vicinity to turn toward her, but she doesn’t care. The stupid iPad isn’t recognizing her touch, and now she can’t get the patient’s records in her portal—
“Hey.”
She’s so not in the mood to be scolded, especially by Dr. Langdon—because of course she knows it’s him, but he hasn’t been here for ten months, and he doesn’t get it, he doesn’t know—and if he’s coming to tell her off for something she did wrong? The one person who actually believed in her all those months ago? If he’s here to do that—well, then she might actually fucking cry in the middle of the waiting room, screaming babies and all.
“What?” she asks, not even bothering to look up from her iPad. “I can take the shoulder laceration back to north three, if you want to then take—”
“Hang on a second,” he says, and he covers her screen with his large hand, forcing her to look up at him. He’s staring at her, the skin around his eyes creased, and Mel blinks. She’d forgotten just how deep and blue his eyes are, how piercing they can be when they’re trained on her like this, and she doesn’t remember what he’s said or even if he’s even asked her anything yet. “What’s going on, Mel? Why are you really back here?”
Mel takes in a shaky breath. She almost wants to tell him that he’s not the only one who gets to be regulated to chairs, thanks very much—it’s not like he has some unilateral claim on them—but she doesn’t. Instead, she swallows as she drops the iPad out from under his grip, debating what, exactly, to say. She feels her emotions getting the better of her, despite her trying so, so hard not to let them, but Dr. Langdon is in front of her with his demanding, penetrating stare and the fact of the matter is she did almost fuck up earlier, even if it wasn’t fatal, and the words end up tumbling out of her before she can stop them.
Because it’s him. And she’s always been honest with him, regardless of the fact that she’s only known him for a day.
“Dr. Robby sent me back here because apparently, this is what I’m equipped to handle,” she says, her eyes stinging with tears again. She’s able to hold them back, though her throat grows impossibly tight with the effort. “I’m a third-year resident, but I might as well not be, because I made a stupid mistake that could’ve been avoided—should’ve been avoided by someone at my level—and I also just got out of an awful malpractice lawsuit deposition when all I want to do is help people—”
“Mel.”
She’s not even looking at him. She’s found some place in the distance to stare at, some speck on the wall behind him, next to the big, obnoxious circular clock that hangs like the ugliest wall fixture she’s ever seen, and it grounds her, allows her to careen through her next words because she knows she’ll stop if she catches his eye, if she sees the pity written all over his face—
“—and I can’t even seem to be able to do that properly—not today, or yesterday, or any other day, take your pick—”
“Mel.”
“—so here I am instead, some uncertain, doubtful twenty-nine-year-old failure of a doctor, and who wants that as their physician when—”
It happens so unexpectedly that Mel actually forgets to be startled by it. All she knows is suddenly she’s being pulled gently by her wrist past trailing groups of people and families until she’s brought into a nondescript room with two big armchairs and, by her estimation, the largest, ugliest painting she’s ever seen.
The grip on her wrist is gone once she’s inside, her focus distracted instead by the sound of a door shutting behind her, and Mel slowly comes back to herself as Dr. Langdon makes his way into her peripheral vision.
“What are we doing in here?” she asks, all nerves and pretense gone. She just wants this day to be over, for fuck’s sake.
Dr. Langdon sits on one of the chairs’ arms, his forearms crossed across his torso. “It’s easier to talk in here.”
“I see,” she says, her voice flat. Now he wants to talk. After she basically had a mental breakdown and showed several signs of weakness in front of him since this morning. Great. “Right.”
Dr. Langdon lets all of that pass. “You mentioned a lawsuit,” he says slowly, and Mel chances a real glance at him. He’s watching her, his face so apprehensive it almost takes her aback. “What’s that about?”
Mel blinks. It’s the first somewhat personal question he’s asked her all day, and she’s so surprised that she finds herself actually answering him without any preamble. “It’s—well, it was the day of the MCI, actually, and Shen and I had a thirteen-year-old present with measles. His parents confirmed that he never received the MMR vaccine, and they were adamant against a spinal tap to test for ADEM—even though we explained several times that there was no significant risk; Dr. Robby even tried, too—but then later, after there was no visible change in his status, the father came to me and said he wanted us to do the test. So I did it.”
Dr. Langdon waits, as though he knows there’s more to the story, but Mel wants to hear his thoughts based on what she’s just shared. Instead, though, he asks another question. “Did you get written consent?”
Her heart sinks. “No. I—”
Nodding, Dr. Langdon licks his lips as he pieces together the rest of the sordid tale. “Let me guess: mom wasn’t too happy, was she?”
Mel shakes her head in shame. He must see it written on her face, because his voice softens. “Hey, it’s not that bad. Written consent definitely would’ve made this whole thing go away, but we’re in Pennsylvania. Verbal contracts hold up in a court of law.”
Mel swallows, her throat tight. “I don’t know, it—it doesn’t seem that easy. Not with the way I’ve been spoken to about it, at least.”
She tries to push away the memories of Gloria summoning her to discuss it, the terrifying moments of Dr. Robby leading her to a large, quiet conference room on the eleventh floor to go over “what it means.” And of course, her deposition only moments ago.
Dr. Langdon fixes her with a gentle stare. “It is, Mel. I know it must seem scary, but this isn’t going to go anywhere near a place where it could impact your career. Who talked to you about it, anyway? Gloria?”
“And Dr. Robby. And a whole team of lawyers.”
Something changes in his expression, but before Mel has time to register what it is, it’s gone as quickly as it came. “They’re just being overly cautious, I guarantee it. And I would know, so you can take it from me.”
Mel crinkles her brow. It’s the second time he’s puzzled her during an exchange, and she’s not sure what to make of it. Does she ask what he means? It seems rude, and she’s distracted, again, by the way he seems to be studying her. His eyes search her face, clearly looking for something, and she still doesn’t know whether he’s found it when he opens his mouth.
“You don’t know the reason I was gone, do you?”
Mel blinks. It’s not a question she had been expecting, and she’s not entirely sure what relevance it has to her near-mental breakdown, but she answers him anyway.
“No,” she says, and it’s here that she notices just how still he’s become. It doesn’t fit in with her memories of him—in her recollection, he was always moving, always flittering around the ED or fidgeting with something, even when they were stationary and speaking with one another—and she’d be lying if she said it didn’t slightly make her nervous, for some unknown reason. She swallows. “Dr. Robby didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask. It didn’t—it didn’t seem like my business. So.”
Dr. Langdon nods, his gaze dropping to the floor. If Mel didn’t know any better, she’d say he looks—pained, or something—but why? It doesn’t make sense, doesn’t fit with any of the narratives that she’s conjured in her mind over the last ten months. It occurs to her that she really doesn’t know this man in front of her, even if it felt, sometimes, like she did. She certainly has no idea what’s running through his mind right now, but whatever he’s holding back seems weighted, heavy—and for the first time she realizes that maybe she’s not the only one who’s been struggling.
“I’m sorry, for earlier,” he says then, and Mel’s eyes snap to him. His mouth is in a grim line, and if you were to ask Mel, she’d say he’s searching her face as though he’s waiting for something, though she has no idea what. “I didn’t mean to—I thought you knew. And that’s not even an excuse, I just—”
He stops, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat with a thick swallow, and Mel suddenly loses sight of what they’re supposed to be talking about. How they’ve managed to pivot from her professional failures to his months-long absence, she’s unsure, but something about the whole thing prickles like a needle at the base of her spine. She might not be sure of the throughline, but it occurs to her, in a dim and distant way, that she trusts Dr. Langdon. She has ever since that first day.
So she waits—it could be thirty seconds, it could be several minutes, she’s not sure—and when Dr. Langdon finally locks eyes with her again, Mel’s breath catches in her throat.
“I’m an addict. I was caught stealing drugs from the hospital, and I’ve spent the better part of the last year in rehab and recovering. That’s why I was gone for so long.”
It’s the last thing she expected him to say. She instantly thinks back to last year, during her wild and unpredictable first shift at the hospital, and she doesn’t—can’t—reconcile the words he’s just said with the man she remembers. She knows people with addictions aren’t uniform—they don’t present purely in a singular, stereotypical way of being—but it strikes something painful within her to imagine him struggling with such an issue on top of everything else going on that day. If anything, the first genuine thought that truly hits her is how she wishes she could have helped him.
His earlier request now makes a little more sense, too, regarding the benzodiazepines. There must be some conditions tied to his return, and while Dr. Langdon didn’t tell her what kinds of drugs he was stealing, she could probably take a well-educated guess.
“Oh,” she finally says, blinking a few times. He’s still staring at her, his eyes roaming over her face, but she’s not really sure what he’s looking for. It almost distracts her entirely, but she manages to straighten out her thoughts enough to say, “Are you—I mean, how’s that been going for you? Is there anything I can do to—”
“I just told you I was caught stealing prescription medication from our workplace,” Dr. Langdon says slowly, almost as though he can’t understand it, “and your first thought is to ask me how I’m doing.”
Mel doesn’t understand his confusion. She has more questions, of course—they all want to tumble out of her like a leaky sieve, actually—but that’s the most important one, and more than that, they’re medical providers in a metropolitan city emergency department. They see addicts more often than they don’t, though Mel doesn’t like to think of them in a noun format like that. She prefers to consider them as they are: just people who also struggle with one (or more) addiction(s). It’s not the whole sum of their person. Why is her question confusing him?
“Yes? I don’t—”
But Dr. Langdon looks away, and it makes her stop talking for some reason, because she’s not entirely sure what’s happening right now. She watches wordlessly as he stands and puts his hands on his hips, shaking his head for a long moment before he looks up and catches her gaze again. It’s direct, and it’s unnerving, and she’s not sure why her heart picks up speed when he finally speaks.
“Listen to me, okay?” And she notices that he’s suddenly breathing a little hard, which surprises her. “You’re not a failure. I mean—I know I’ve been gone for a while, but I don’t need to have been here to know that you are not that. Everyone goes through slumps—it just happens, especially in this specialty—because it’s so easy to get run down and demoralized. You just have to get back on the horse and believe that you can do it, because you can. I know you know you can. And,” he says, nearing her with a small, tentative step, “for what it’s worth, that lawsuit is bullshit. You had verbal permission to run the test—it’s not your fault that he didn’t talk it through with his wife first, and it’s also not your fault if he now suddenly has regrets. You took steps to save their son’s life, and any judge worth their salt will agree.”
Mel’s mind goes blank. He’s just uttered the longest string of sentences she thinks he’s ever said to her, and it’s all so much of what she needs to hear that she almost lets a tear fall, but by some miracle, she holds it together. All she manages to say, after a few moments of prolonged silence where he just stares at her, is a quiet, “I don’t know about—”
“I do,” he interrupts, his voice firm. “They’re not going to do anything to you, Mel. It’s just a very expensive and time-consuming way for this guy’s wife to get back at him, and that’s all it’ll turn out to be—unless you let it turn into something more in your head. Don’t let it.”
It all sounds so simple when he says it, and it suddenly seems so manageable, somehow, that she’s not sure what to say.
“How do you do that?” she asks, genuinely wondering. She’s been turning over this deposition for weeks, her stomach twisting itself into knots and making her feel ill, but somehow all of that now feels far away, off in the distance somewhere she can’t quite reach.
For the first time, she sees Dr. Langdon crack a tiny smile. “Minimize problems, you mean?” he says, and Mel is able to pick up that he’s joking. He turns serious after a moment, but Mel still catches the hint of a smile lurking beneath the surface. “I’m kidding, but really—don’t let it get to you. It doesn’t sound like time was really an option, and there was so much turmoil going on here that day that there’s no way this will last. If I had to guess, the hospital might settle with them out of court, anyway.”
“You really think so? They were—” she breaks off, her gaze dropping to the floor. She’s so embarrassed that she feels, again, as though she could cry.
Not that it’s hard today, or anything.
She takes a deep breath before she finishes. “They were pretty brutal up there. They pulled out these statistics about vaccinations at my university hospital and my rotations in med school—”
“Seriously?” Dr. Langdon interjects, and Mel looks up to find his face twisted in disgust. “If they’re pulling shit from your time at medical school, they have absolutely nothing to go on. Wow. They’re trying to link your—” he stops, scrubbing a hand down his face. He waits another moment before he faces her again; this time, his expression is lined with something she can’t place. “I am so confident in this that I almost want to make a bet with you, but I think that will only freak you out, so—just trust me on this, Mel. It’s not going to go anywhere.”
She wants to ask how she’s supposed to trust him when he all but disregarded her mere hours ago, but she doesn’t. Even with the knowledge she now has about his absence, she’s still self-aware enough to know that she doesn’t have all the answers, but maybe—just maybe—she might get them in time.
Instead, she swallows, her throat tight. “Okay,” she says, her voice soft. “Um—thank you, Dr. Langdon. I—I appreciate you saying all of that. I haven’t exactly had the best day today, and it just—it’s nice to hear. So. Thank you, again.”
She wants to add something about how she’s glad he’s back, but she decides against it. She’s not feeling entirely comfortable being that vulnerable again, not so soon.
Dr. Langdon mirrors her, his throat bobbing with a thick swallow. “You got it, Mel,” he says, and something about it gives her hope. Like they’re almost where she thought they’d be, after all this time away. “Don’t mention it.”
And she knows, somehow, that he means it.
ii. labor day
On Labor Day, a death row inmate is wheeled into PTMC’s Emergency Department.
Mel first notices it as she approaches the charge desk before the afternoon rush, only to find Dana, Whitaker, Perlah, and McKay staring toward the behavioral rooms, their voices hushed. She had been helping Mateo cut down the egregious overflow on chairs all day—an offer she made to Robby, who had been supremely grateful at the time—so she hadn’t been to this part of the ED in a couple of hours, but it seems she arrived just in time for gossip.
“Whoa,” Whitaker says, and Mel follows his gaze to find a slew of armed guards standing outside BH-Two. “Who’s in there?”
“His name is Miles Patrick,” Perlah answers with a sigh. “He’s a death row inmate from SCI Pittsburgh.”
“Whoa,” Whitaker says again, his brows disappearing under his hair. “What’d he do?”
“He was convicted of murdering Shelley Gordon, Allegheny County’s then-District Attorney,” Perlah says slowly. She swallows. “It was years and years ago, but—”
“Holy shit, I remember that case,” McKay interrupts. Her eyes are as round as saucers as they trail back toward his patient room. “And he’s here?”
Perlah nods, her mouth in a grim line. “He’s here, and apparently, his execution date is scheduled for next week.”
“I thought Pennsylvania stopped capital punishment?” McKay asks, confused. “I mean, when was the last time we actually executed someone?”
“Not since the nineties,” Dana says. She looks at McKay over the top of her glasses, her expression difficult to place. “But since Cole won the gubernatorial election last year, we’re no longer a democratic state. He lifted the moratorium that prevented executions from going through.”
They all consider that for a few moments. Mel hadn’t really given much thought to that particular effect after their new governor's election, but it makes sense. The country seems to be on a conservative tear lately, and she makes a mental note to dig in and examine which other potential policy changes could affect her workflow at the hospital.
Perlah leans forward, her brow raised. “Well, all I know is that he’s been here for more than an hour and no one wants to touch him. Langdon says he’ll buy lunch for whoever treats him.”
Mel swallows. She and Dr. Langdon had finally found a comfortable rhythm working together, but only fairly recently. July ended up being a wash—Mel had a two-week stint on the night shift to cover for a resident on summer vacation—and then she had some of her own time off, which she spent largely traipsing around Pittsburgh museums and parks with Becca. (A fun and respectable way to spend time, perhaps, but definitely not a vacation).
When they were finally paired together in the second week of August, their first few cases were a little awkward, but Mel figured the best thing she could do was to push through. She knew his emotions must be running the gamut after being gone for so long, and she felt responsible, somehow, to make him feel as though nothing substantial had changed. So she carried on as she normally would have—she pulled him on cases that stumped her, or particularly weird ones (like the forty-year-old man who came in with monopoly pieces shoved so far up his nose they had to refer him to surgery)—and after a few days, it began to work. He couldn’t necessarily supervise her during specific procedures because of his restrictions, but they were amicable.
On a random day toward the end of August, Kim had even told her that they were her favorite pair of doctors to work with because they were “so fun and funny together.”
She didn’t know why, but Mel all but beamed afterward. She refused to examine that too closely, because it all felt very precarious. She and Dr. Langdon might be inching back toward whatever baseline they originally had on her first day, but still—she didn’t want to jinx whatever dynamic they had managed to build over the past month or so.
He was back to cracking jokes, too, though Mel didn’t always catch on—but even then, she could tell he took delight in catching her puzzled expression, keenly watching her face for the moment when the punchline finally dawned.
But again, Mel was not thinking about the way his handsome face looked after he teased her, or—
“Well, that’s not going to be me,” McKay says now, her eyes darting back to the patient board, and Mel blinks. She points to something, then leans in toward Nora, one of the new med students. “Let’s take the projectile vomiting in north three. Unpleasant, but doable.”
McKay and Nora move to disappear off toward the north wing, and Dana sighs as she looks down at her clipboard. For some reason, Mel’s eyes wander over to BH-two, her gaze finding the inmate through the glass window. She can see he’s handcuffed to the bed, with one correctional officer stationed at his bedside and two additional ones outside guarding the door. He looks young—younger than she’d thought he’d be, considering he’s been on death row for a number of years—and she can’t help but notice the resignation in his face. Like all of this is merely something passive happening to him without his consent.
Mel looks back at the patient board again, her eyes finding Miles’s name. It appears he’s arrived with complaints of chest pain, and a vague memory from her medical ethics class resurfaces—inmates are always admitted to area hospitals for symptoms like that, simply because the prisons don’t want the liability—so it might not even be a complex case, per se. Before she even realizes she’s doing it, she’s already running through her first round of tests and labs in her mind, and that’s all it takes. She might as well see it through, right?
“I’ll do it,” Mel says, and she grabs a pair of gloves from the box on the charge desk.
Dana’s head snaps up, her gaze flying toward Mel so fast it’s a wonder her neck doesn’t develop a crick. “Honey, wait a second,” she starts, but Mel doesn’t really want to hear it. She already has a guess at what Dana is likely to say, and it’s not really a sentiment she’s particularly interested in or agrees with. She knows she’s a small, lithe woman who is probably similar to this person’s type of prey, but still. The idea that she shouldn’t do her job on that basis alone doesn’t sit well with her. She can handle herself just fine.
“Why don’t you wait for Robby to help? He should be out of the mess in trauma two soon.”
Mel shakes her head, snapping the gloves on as she begins to make her way toward the room in question. Robby is always ‘almost done’ with some kind of procedure; that’s the problem. As the attending running the ED, there’ll only be another case, another emergency, another delay. And Mel is perfectly capable.
“It’ll be okay; I don’t mind. Someone has to treat him, right?”
Mel doesn’t wait for a reply. She continues her stride until she’s outside BH-Two, the pair of armed guards eyeing her with interest.
“I’m Dr. King,” she begins, gesturing to the door beside them. “I’m here to examine Mr. Patrick.”
The one on the right gives her a cut nod before gesturing toward the door handle. “Let us know if you need anything.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary, but thank you,” Mel says, reaching forward to open the door. She turns the handle and walks inside, immediately noticing how cold the room is. Did they pump up the AC or something? Mel is wearing her jacket, yet she still feels the chill as she steps through the doorway.
She’ll deal with that in a few minutes, she decides. More pressing things need her attention right now, like the fact that a convicted murderer is lying before her in a hospital bed.
“Good afternoon, Miles. I’m Dr. King,” she says, trying her best to keep her heart rate steady. She knows the man is tied to the bed by handcuffs and that there’s a correctional officer stationed inside the room, but she still feels a little uneasy. “I’ll be treating you today.”
Miles looks at her, his expression weary. He shifts in his bed as she nears him, goosebumps materializing across his forearms. “Did you lose a bet or something?”
Mel pauses next to him. “I’m sorry?”
He gives her a wry smile, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’ve been lying here for the better part of an hour, Doc. And if you don’t mind me saying, you look pretty young, so I ask: are you in here because you lost a bet? Or—are you actually lost?”
Her mind goes blank. Is he—joking with her? Or insulting her? She’s not the best at these types of interactions on her best day, let alone one with someone who has been convicted with the intent to kill. “I’m here because I’m a doctor,” Mel decides to say, trying her best to steady her voice. “And you need to be seen by one, so… hence my arrival.”
Miles gives her a more thorough once-over, and something prickles against the back of Mel’s neck. “Carry on, then,” he says, gesturing with his hand. “Please examine me.”
Mel sits down on the stool next to the bed, slowly rolling toward him. “Great. Can you tell me what’s brought you in today?”
His hand immediately tries to fly to his chest, but is quickly halted by the handcuffs. He rolls his eyes, sighing. “I woke up this morning with unbearable chest pain,” he says, wincing as he tries to sit up instead. “I tried to get my guard’s attention as soon as the pains started, but no one would listen to me.” He says the last part extra loud, and somehow Mel picks up that he’s saying it to catch the correctional officer’s attention. He fails, and his gaze again reconnects with Mel’s. “So then I ended up fainting in my cell. And here we are.”
Mel tilts her head. “You fell?” she asks, standing and heading over to the computer stationed in the room. She logs in and pulls up his file, quickly searching his intake history from his transport. Nothing about a fall is notated. “Did you hit your head?”
“How should I know? I was knocked unconscious.”
So likely, then. “That’s okay, Miles,” she says as she starts to input some notes. “Were you doing anything prior to the chest pain beginning?”
“I was sleeping, as I said.”
That’s not what he actually said, but Mel isn’t about to split hairs over it. “Would you say you woke up because of the chest pain? Or you woke up and noticed the chest pain sometime after being awake?”
“No,” he says, after thinking about it for a moment. “It woke me up, for sure.”
Mel reviews his EKG results from the rig; they’re ultimately inconclusive, so no answers there. Hm. She pushes away from the computer and steps back toward the bed, her hands reaching for her stethoscope. “I’m going to listen to your heart, okay?”
Miles nods as she presses the cool metal to his chest. “Take a deep breath for me.”
He does as she says, and Mel continues that way as she moves around him, listening for abnormalities, only—there seems to be none. Strange, she thinks.
“Miles, I’m going to recommend some blood tests and a CT scan,” she says, taking one last listen right over his heart. “The blood test will tell us whether your troponin levels are increasing, which is a protein that rises in response to heart muscle damage, and the CT will also give us a clearer view of your arteries. Plus, we’ll be able to rule out any possible head injury from your fall. Hopefully, all these tests together will help us determine—”
The sound of a door opening makes her stop speaking. She looks over her shoulder to find Langdon, of all people, standing in the doorway. His eyes rove over Miles and Mel’s outstretched hand, and something about the look on his face startles her for reasons unknown.
“Dr. Langdon,” she says, straightening.
Langdon’s eyes flick again toward Miles, but Mel can’t read his expression; it’s one she’s never seen before. She remembers experiencing uncomfortable patients with him—namely the fight-bite mom from a year prior—but even then, Langdon was pretty unaffected. Cool, calm, and collected, if she remembers correctly.
But this is not that. It’s—well, it feels the opposite of all of that, actually. It feels… aware. Alert.
Awkward, if she really had to pick an adjective.
“Dr. King,” he says after a beat too long. He’s still standing in the doorway, his posture incredibly stiff. “How’s it going in here?”
“Just fine,” Mel answers, hoping she sounds at ease. Miles is far from her worst patient experience, all things considered. “I was just explaining my treatment plan to Miles.”
“Miles,” he repeats, his gaze returning to the man in question. He’s quiet again as he studies the both of them, the silence stretching into something downright uncomfortable. It takes him another few seconds before he slowly starts to nod, a lost look in his eyes. “Right. Can I speak to you outside, Mel?”
“Sure thing,” Mel answers, though she’s not quite sure what’s going on right now. “I’ll be right there—I just have a few more things I want to ask Miles about.”
Langdon hesitates. It takes Mel aback for a second, because—does he want her to leave right now? She’s in the middle of something, and she knows that he knows that.
But eventually, he gives her another nod, his hand already pushing the door further open. He had never let it close in the first place. “Just—find me when you’re done?”
“Will do.”
He leaves without wasting another second, and as soon as the door clicks shut behind him, Miles stares up at Mel with a pointed look. “What the hell was that?”
Mel blinks down at him. For some reason, she finds herself actually answering his question. “You know, I don’t… I don’t know what that was,” she says, thinking aloud. But then she thinks of who Langdon is: patient, thorough. An excellent doctor. Her hypothesis solidifies. “I think he was just trying to help, but saw we were almost done.”
Miles snorts, clearly unconvinced. “Definitely not,” he says. She watches as Miles’s eyes follow Langdon’s retreating back through the glass window. “That’s someone with ghosts, Dr. King. We all look the same.”
Ghosts?
Whatever that means, Mel can’t think about it right now. She turns back to the computer, begins requesting the necessary tests, and reiterates her treatment plan to Miles. Then she asks a few follow-up questions—medical history, family history, the basics—before she draws a few vials of his blood for the lab. He tolerates it without any complaint or aggressiveness, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d say that Miles is a normal, ordinary human man.
She’s not sure what she was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this.
“Alright, Miles,” she says, snapping off her gloves and tossing them in the waste bin. “I’m going to call and schedule a CT, and I’ll be back when they’re ready to take you.”
Miles doesn’t respond, but that’s okay. He doesn’t need to, Mel supposes. She’s almost to the door when she suddenly turns back, a thought occurring to her. “And I’ll ask about the temperature in here,” she says, gesturing to the room at large. “I know you must be cold.”
That gets him to look at her. “Thanks,” he says, the word coming out slowly.
Mel nods. “No problem.”
She then heads to her charting station, Miles’s blood samples dropped off at the lab on the way, and she begins adding details to his chart before she forgets. It isn’t until she’s on the phone with Radiology that Langdon ends up wandering over, a sharp look written across his face. It hits her too late: she was supposed to find him. Oops.
“Great, thank you,” she says into the receiver. Miles is on the schedule for a CT scan, which will be in—Mel checks her watch—about an hour from now.
She hangs up the phone as she turns to face him. “Sorry, I got caught—”
“It’s fine,” he says briskly, his gaze switching from her face to her computer screen. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m also on the inmate’s case now.”
Mel furrows her brow. He’s on the case? But—he left. In the middle of her examination. “What?”
Langdon gives her a curt nod. “Yeah. Robby asked me to senior it,” he says, and Mel can’t help but feel like he’s pointedly avoiding her gaze. “Just as a precaution.”
“A precaution?”
She notices when he bites the inside of his cheek, his face twisting as though he’s thinking about something rather unpleasant. “Yeah. Don’t worry about it, okay?” He sounds tired, aggrieved—almost as though he’d rather be doing anything else than working this case—and something about it has a large pool of discomfort settling in her gut. She would prefer not to have him senior this if he doesn’t want to actually work it with her, and—
“What tests are you ordering?”
Mel blinks. He’s now looking at Miles’s patient file, having somehow scooted her out of the way of her own charting station, and she can’t help the way her brows pinch together in something that feels very similar to annoyance.
“A blood workup and a CT,” she says slowly, still trying to figure out what exactly is happening here. “His initial EKG was inconclusive, so I was think—”
“Yeah, I see all of that here,” he interrupts, his voice clipped. He’s not even looking at her. “Did you call to schedule the CT?”
Oh, she’s definitely annoyed now, because—is this how it’s going to be? The last thing she needs is to be distracted by Langdon and his weird mood, because it’ll only have her mind going in circles, wondering whether it’s all because of something she’s doing. Her case is heart-pounding enough; she does not need to add this particularly thorny layer.
“Yes, he’s scheduled for one in an hour,” Mel says, and another thought occurs to her. “But I also think we should consider—”
“Let me know when he’s ready to be taken up.”
Mel rears back. That’s it? That’s all he has to say, especially after he interrupted her? Twice? He’s not even casting her a passing glance as he gives his directives.
He signs off on the tests at her station before closing the browser, his eyes automatically shifting to the patient board. He steps around her, not saying a word, and Mel stares after him with her mouth slightly open.
She wants to ask him what his problem is, but then Dana crosses through her sightline, and she decides to pivot while she has the opportunity.
“Hey, Dana,” she calls out, successfully capturing her attention. She pauses next to Perlah and Langdon, a smile on her face. “Can we check on the temperature in BH-Two? It’s pretty cold in there, and I was wondering if we could make it a little warmer for the patient and the correctional officer?”
The smile slips the tiniest bit, and Perlah and Langdon both turn away from the patient board to stare at her. They’re all wearing expressions of something, but Mel can’t put her finger on it.
“Sure, honey,” Dana eventually says, her lips returning to a small, encouraging smile. “I’ll get facilities on it.”
“Thanks.”
She goes back to her computer. She doesn’t want to be distracted by the looks she’s receiving, so she decides to throw herself into her other cases. She checks her portal to find that results confirm a torn ACL for a high school athlete in south fifteen, as well as a positive flu test for a young girl in north three, so she focuses on those for the next half-hour.
(The young girl receives the news better than the high school athlete, as expected.)
When she checks her watch to find that it’s been almost an hour, she reroutes herself to make her way to BH-Two, but the correctional officers keeping guard outside his room are gone when she gets there. She looks in the window to see the bed is gone, too, though the correctional officer is still in there. She walks in without a second thought.
“Where is Miles?”
The officer gestures behind her. “He went up to Radiology.”
“By who?” Mel asks, confused. She’s not sure why she’s asking a correctional officer this, but here she is anyway.
“The doctor who was in here before,” he says, shrugging. “Tall, dark hair?”
Mel closes her eyes. Langdon. But—why didn’t he tell her? It’s incredibly frustrating, she thinks, to be working this case with him today, if she could even call it that. They’ve hardly spoken despite being paired together for Miles, and it’s never been like this before. It reminds her of his first day back, actually, where he spent a large amount of his time ignoring—
Her eyes snap open. This is exactly like that, she realizes. While they’ve been somewhat back to normal since that fateful day, he’s been acting eerily different, and of all things—it’s this thought that ultimately sends a shiver down her spine.
“How long ago did he take him?” she asks.
“You just missed them,” he says. “They said they’d be back—”
“—in a half hour,” she says in unison with him. “Got it. Thanks.”
Mel sets up a new plan of action. If she can’t be the one who takes Miles up to Radiology, she sure as hell can monitor his patient portal for his results, which is exactly what she does. She hits the refresh button roughly every minute, her eyes scouring her computer screen as though it’ll provide an answer to every question in the entire world, and eventually, after several long minutes, his scan populates.
She jumps up. Her fingers click open the file with a slight tremor, but she doesn’t care. Her eyes rove over the CT scans—both his head and his chest—but they’re both clean. There’s not a single abnormality in either one, and Mel is stumped. For all intents and purposes, his head and heart appear fine in these scans.
She checks his blood results next, and those, too, are within normal limits, though troponin is markedly elevated. What could—
“King, get up,” a voice calls, and Mel startles to find Robby gesturing at her from across the way. He’s half-hanging out of trauma one, his brows raised and his expression expectant. “I need you in here.”
Mel gets wrapped up in a particularly tragic trauma—a father of three whose grill went up in flames before it was ultimately transferred to him, too—so all thoughts of Miles and his CT scans fall by the wayside. She, Robby, and McKay try every trick in the book, flinging directives and ideas and new last-ditch efforts from medical journals, but in the end, it’s just not enough. The patient’s heart gives out before they’re able to stabilize him.
“Time of death, fifteen fifty-three,” Robby says, his voice detached. “I’ll call the family.”
Mel and McKay lock eyes, both diminished. They walk out together after a heavy moment of silence, tearing their PPE gear off as they go, and it’s then that Mel spots Dr. Langdon casually stepping out of BH-Two.
Miles.
Tossing her gown in the garbage bin, Mel all but barrels into him as he nears the trauma rooms. “Why didn’t you page me for Miles’ scans?”
Langdon blinks down at her, startled, but he regains his composure just as quickly. “You were busy and I had the time, so I handled it. I just went over his results with him.”
Something about his response feels disingenuous, but she can’t discern why. All she knows is that he’s never left her out of a case like this before. “But you barely read his patient records.”
His eyes narrow. “Presumptuous of you to say that, Dr. King,” he says, and it’s impossible to miss the slight edge in his voice. “For your information, I read it thoroughly before I took him up for his CT.”
Okay, but not when Mel was ready to discuss it with him? She has no earthly idea what’s happening right now. He didn’t seem to want anything to do with the case in the first place—he walked out of Miles’ examination; he barely wanted to engage in a differential with her—but now he wants to do everything? Without her? A sharp pain slices through her chest.
“Which you neglected to tell me you were doing.”
Langdon steps back, his head tilting as he studies her with a keen eye. “You were with a patient,” he says again, matter-of-fact, “And I’m the senior resident on the case, so I took care of it. I also paged Cardio for a consult, because we’re out of ideas—so you’re welcome, by the way.”
Then he walks away, his shoulder almost brushing hers as he does it, and Mel stares off into the ether for a good thirty seconds before she realizes what he’s said.
“What’s his problem?” McKay asks, and Mel turns to find her still outside trauma one, a look of distaste on her face. She saw the whole interaction, and rather than feeling embarrassed, it actually makes Mel feel better. At least she knows it’s not all in her head. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”
Mel doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns on her heel and finds herself trailing after him. She’s not sure why, because all of her instincts are telling her to leave him alone, to let him handle his emotions and his feelings on his own time, but she can’t let it go. She just knows it’s got something to do with her, and she’s so tired of feeling like she’s done something wrong. All she’s done is her job—today, at least—and if there’s an underlying issue that is causing all of this, she’d like to know what it is so she can fix it.
“Dr. Langdon,” she calls out.
He pauses, taking a beat before he turns around. When he finally does, Mel can’t help but feel as though he’s… steeling himself for something.
He shoves his hands in his pockets. “What’s up, Mel?”
It’s too casual. It’s off, somehow, though Mel can’t exactly parse out how. Everything seems off with him.
“What is going on?” she asks, totally at a loss. They’ve barely even interacted all day, yet he’s treating her as though she’s radioactive when they do cross paths. She has to address it.
“What do you mean?” he asks, and again, Mel doesn’t buy the false innocence that lines his voice.
“You’re being avoidant,” she says, point-blank. Her blunt honesty must surprise him, because his eyes widen and he looks at her as though she’s made some kind of faux pas, but she doesn’t care. It’s the only way she knows how to be. “And if it’s because of something I’ve done, I’d like to know so I—”
He sighs, his shoulders dropping. “Mel—”
“Or is it Miles?” Mel interrupts, frustrated. He was about to give her a non-answer, she just knows it. “I can go talk to Robby and see if he’ll take over instead, you know. If you’re uncomfortable treating someone on death row, I’m sure he’ll understand.”
That gets to him. He steps forward, something frantic flickering in his eyes. “Do not get Robby,” he says quickly, glancing around for the man in question. Mel looks, too, and they both spot him over at the charting station, his expression harried as he looks over Dana’s shoulder at a tablet. Langdon turns to look back at her again with a dramatic sigh. “Okay,” he says, sounding like he’s trying to convince himself of something. “Okay. Here’s the thing—you’re right. I didn’t want to take this case.”
Mel’s not really sure what to do with that—especially when he doesn’t offer to elaborate—so she just stares at him. “Can you pass it off to someone else? Zig, maybe?” she asks. “Because this isn’t—”
“I can’t give it to someone else,” he interrupts, and wow, does that sting. So he’s sticking around because he literally has no other choice? Yeah, that’s who I want on my team for an enduring case, she thinks darkly. Someone who doesn’t want to be there in the first place.
Mel’s eyes crinkle. “I don’t understand,” she says slowly, her arms folding across her chest. “What do you mean you can’t?”
Langdon looks around, probably concerned whether someone’s listening, but of course, no one is. The ED is a chaotic bustle of activity on its slowest day, and that’s certainly not today, so he heaves another sigh as he reluctantly catches her eye again. “For one—I’ve been back for two months and this is like, the first real thing Robby’s actually asked me to do, and two—God, Mel. No. I don’t care that the guy is an inmate. You’re getting it all wrong.”
“Well, can you explain it to me, then?” Mel asks. He’s right—she isn’t getting it, clearly. “I’m just trying to do my job, Dr. Langdon, but you’re—” she breaks off, catching herself.
Langdon’s eyes flicker with renewed intensity. “I’m what?” he dares, his voice edgy.
“Never mind,” Mel says. She suddenly wishes she could harness a superpower that would let her rewind time or erase this entire conversation from both their memories. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No. Please,” Langdon says, waving his hand as if to say ‘the floor is yours.’ “Say what you were going to say.”
Mel bites her lip, her heart pounding against her ribs. She knows she’s backed herself into a corner; now she has to find her way out of it. Shit.
“I was just going to say that you’re making it rather difficult,” she says after a pointed beat, choosing her words carefully. “He’s our patient whether we like it or not, and I’m trying to workshop differentials with you, but you can’t even—” she breaks off again, suddenly awkward. God, this is terrible. How is she supposed to explain to him that she knows he’s capable of being patient and kind with her? And that it—it hurts when he’s not? It feels beyond embarrassing to say out loud, but she’s going to have to do it, isn’t she?
She forces herself to make eye contact for the next part. “You can’t even look me in the eye, and then you steal him right out from under me for his CT scans, and it—it makes me second-guess all of my instincts because I know what it’s like when we usually work together, and now it feels like I did something wrong and I’m just trying to—”
“You did nothing wrong.”
Mel blinks again. He’s only said four words, but they were said in the soft, gentle tone he usually uses with her after a tough case, and—
“What?” she asks. It comes out winded, though she’s not sure why.
Langdon swallows as he looks away, a haunted expression marring his face. “You didn’t do anything, Mel. It’s—” he stops himself. He hangs his head, his hands coming to rest on his hips, and Mel doesn’t think she’s ever been more confused in her entire life. “Just—trust me, okay? Nothing you did was… wrong.”
As far as reassurances go, this one is pretty weak, but that’s all Langdon appears willing to give her. He lifts his head to look at her one more time, and Mel’s surprised at the sudden tenderness she finds written across his face. “I’m sorry I’m making it, uh—difficult. It’s just a habit I have, I guess. You can even ask Abby.”
Mel doesn’t know what to say. Her mouth opens, searching for something—anything—to say in response, but nothing comes to mind. What is she supposed to do with that information, exactly? And she can’t even touch the Abby comment. It’s hard for her to grasp subtext on a regular day, and this scenario isn't exactly one that lends itself to clarity.
“Okay,” she eventually says, after what feels like a lifetime of awkwardness. “But how is this going to work, exactly? If you want, I can run the—”
“I’ll fix it.”
Didn’t he just say there was nothing to fix? Something still isn’t adding up. “I’m sorry, I’m still not understanding. Do you not want to pony up for lunch, or something?”
Langdon stares at her. He clearly doesn’t find her question amusing, but what else is she supposed to do? She has no idea what’s going on.
Mel bites her lip, suddenly nervous. She can’t read him. His face is expressionless, but he’s looking at her in the way he does sometimes and it makes her palms sweaty, though she’s not quite sure why.
“I was stupid to say that,” he finally says, and Mel pinches her brow at the rawness in his voice. “But not because I don’t want to pay for it. It was stupid because—”
Another show of weakness, she thinks bitterly. Did people not trust her to handle things? After all the work she’s put in to prove the opposite? “It’s fine, Dr. Langdon. I know how to handle tough cases. I took care of it.”
“Mel, it’s not—” he cuts off, and Mel snaps her head back to see he’s agitated. “It’s not about that, okay? I know you can take care of things. None of this is about that. I need you to just—”
But Mel never gets to hear what Langdon just needs her to do, because a frantic voice rings out within their vicinity. “Langdon! King!”
They whirl around to find Princess headed toward BH-Two, her hands tight around her stethoscope and her face pinched. “Miles is coding.”
Both of them dart forward, their weird argument-not-argument forgotten, and when Mel is the first in the room, Langdon lets her lead the charge. She directs Princess on the crash cart, calling for the required doses of epinephrine without hesitation, and Langdon even helps her kneel on the bed to perform CPR.
It all happens very uneventfully. Robby joins the room at a certain point, his presence somehow grounding and encouraging, but just like the father in the trauma bay, it’s not enough. They go through several rounds of epinephrine, Mel’s arms threatening to give out all the while, but she hears Robby gently clear his throat after ten minutes of no change.
“Mel.”
She swallows, not allowing her rhythm to slow. She can’t say anything. She doesn’t want to, because she’ll know how it’ll sound, but—there’s just no reason. His scans were normal, his bloodwork was normal. How does a healthy man just drop dead? In the middle of an ED?
Robby must be reading her mind, because he steps behind her, his voice low. “Mel. It’s just—it’s his time. You’ve done what you can.”
Surprisingly, it works. She halts her movements, her arms feeling stringy and like goo, but it’s the last thing on her mind. She looks down at Miles to find his eyes closed, his face frozen, as if in a peaceful sleep. Maybe—
“He was going to kick it next week, anyway,” someone in the room mumbles, and Mel closes her eyes.
She vaguely hears Robby’s deep voice admonishing them, but it’s too late. It’s just enough to tip Mel over the edge. The room is too crowded, the temperature is too warm—her good samaritan deed finding a way to backfire—and it’s all just too much in general, so Mel begins to gently remove herself from Miles’s bed. Langdon helps her by reaching out to cup her elbow, but she barely registers the gesture and even if she did, it wouldn’t matter. She’s so, so tired.
Mel leaves the room without a word. She beelines for the ambulance bay, fresh air basically a requirement at this point, and when she finally gets outside, she collapses on the half-wall that lines the driveway. Her head falls into her hands, but the tears don’t quite come. She’s not distraught, exactly, but something deeper, heavier. Emotionally exhausted, maybe. She’s spent more than half her life trying to get others to understand there’s more to a person than a two-line summary in the context of her sister, but does that apply to convicted murderers?
She’s not sure.
“Are you okay?”
The question startles her. She looks up to see Langdon standing near her, his hands in his pockets again, and Mel doesn’t know what to make of it. He’s all but avoided her for the entire day, gave her run-around answers to her very pertinent questions, and now he wants to know if she’s okay? After she fought to save (and lost) a patient’s life for more than twenty minutes?
She sighs. “Please,” she pleads, tired.
A pained expression crosses his face. “What?” he asks, and to Mel’s surprise, it seems that he’s genuinely asking.
How does he not understand what he’s doing to her? It seems impossible, but yet—here they both are: outside in an ambulance bay, awkwardly talking around their weird fallout after losing a (somewhat controversial) patient.
“It would be really nice,” she muses aloud, not really sure where her thoughts are taking her, “If you could make up your mind on whether or not you like working with me. Because this—whiplash thing you’re doing to me—is really, really confusing, and I have enough on my plate without—”
“I like working with you.”
Mel blinks at him. He’s looking at her in that way again, the way that makes her think things she probably shouldn’t be thinking, but she can’t get distracted by that right now. She fixes him with a pointed stare. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes.” He doesn’t hesitate. Not for a single second.
Swallowing, Mel breaks away from his gaze. “Okay,” she says, somewhat lamely. This all feels very inconsequential after the day she’s had, but she’s beyond tapped out. What else is there to add? She just wants to go home at this point; maybe tomorrow they can start on the right foot. “Great.”
“Glad we cleared that up,” he says, and Mel knows, somehow, that he’s trying for humor. “Now, though—can you answer my question?”
Oh, God. Did he even ask her anything? “What question?”
“Are you okay?”
Oh. Right.
Mel looks at him. His hands are still in his pockets, his gaze piercing as always, and she finds herself sighing. She really is tired, she thinks. “Yeah,” she says, though she knows he won’t take her answer at face value. He’s nothing if not eerily perceptive. “I just—I know he did some horrible, awful, unspeakable things, but—he was still a person. He was still my patient. I tried to save him, and at the end of the day, I failed.”
“I understand,” Langdon says slowly. He looks down at his shoes, hesitates, then speaks again. “Mel—it’s not a bad thing, you know. To care in the way you do. Your dedication to this case today was a strength, and you should know that. No matter what other people say.”
Mel, you’re a sensitive person. This—this is a tough place for sensitive people. But we need them badly.
The memory slams into her like a freight train. If she tries, she’s certain she could feel Crosby’s soft fur between her fingers and the strong, steady beat of her pulse against her skin. It’s almost nothing at all to recall the gentle way Langdon sat next to her, his voice soft and his eyes even softer as he murmured words of encouragement. That message, too, struck her most that day; even now, it replays in her mind whenever she finds herself struggling with the harsh reality of a difficult case.
“You said something similar to me, once,” Mel says, because it occurs to her that Langdon probably forgot that he did. She imagines it’s tough for him to remember anything about that awful day, and she can’t exactly blame him. She knows such a small interaction likely had no lasting effect on him whatsoever, and that’s perfectly understandable.
She just wishes it wouldn’t hurt so much.
She takes a deep breath, her chest wracking with something she can’t explain. “I—I think about it whenever I have a bad case, or a terrible day. It—it helps, sometimes.”
“I remember.”
Mel’s neck cracks when she snaps to look up at him. “You do?”
Langdon nods. “It was only a year ago, you know. Exactly a year ago, actually.”
Oh. Oh.
That’s right, Mel thinks. It’s Labor Day. It’s—it is one year to the day. Shit.
Mel grimaces. “I totally forgot,” she says quickly, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry. Are you—”
He cuts her off by laughing. It’s a nice sound, and she almost wants to pay more attention to it, but her confusion is far too encompassing. Why is he laughing?
“No, don’t,” he says, putting up a hand. “You were right to say those things. I was being avoidant, and… I should be the one apologizing to you.”
Mel swallows, her throat growing tight. It feels like they’re balancing on a tightrope, and Mel doesn’t want to do anything that has them both careening down into the depths. “How about,” she says, her voice shaking for a reason she doesn’t want to explore, “we just—call it even? No more apologies.”
The corner of Langdon’s mouth turns up in a crooked smile. “Deal,” he says, punctuating his decision with a small nod. But then he hesitates again, an unguarded look passing over his face. “Though, you should know something else, too.”
“What?”
Langdon takes a breath. “When I told you that, last year,” he says, and Mel finds she can’t look away from him, “It was for me, too. I think I needed to believe it as much as you needed to hear it.”
The admission lands squarely in her chest. Minutes ago, she didn’t think he remembered the interaction at all, and now he’s all but sharing his own emotional attachment to the moment, too. There’s so much more to Dr. Langdon than meets the eye, and she’s surprised at how much she wants to unravel his layers, though she knows it’s not really her place to want that.
The knowledge doesn’t stop it, though—the wanting. It settles in her bones, lying in wait.
Mel clears her throat, shaking the intrusive thoughts aside. “Well, I’m glad you said it. It’s comforting to know we’re not… alone in that.”
“No,” he agrees, though it’s so quiet she almost missed it entirely. “We’re definitely… not alone.”
She can feel the tightrope wobbling, so Mel gives him one last look as she rises from her seat. He’s still got his hands in his pockets, and he’s staring at her with such a gentle expression that it feels as though he, too, feels the precarious thread they’re balancing on, so Mel takes one last shaky breath of her own.
“I’m thankful for that, but now I’ve thought of something that you should know.”
He tilts his head, curious. “Oh yeah?” he asks, the crooked smile reappearing. “And what’s that?”
“My favorite to-go place is Ray and Mike’s,” Mel says, backing away toward the entrance. She mirrors his smile when she adds, “And my standard order is the chicken salad sandwich, extra red onions. Oh, I also add chipotle mayo.”
Langdon drops his head, his smile growing. “You know, technically I—”
“We could be here all day discussing technicalities,” Mel interrupts. The energy has lightened, and she doesn’t want it to end. “But I’d really love lunch, Dr. Langdon. And you did promise.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Langdon says. He’s turned so he can see her off as she backs toward the automatic doors, and something about the way his eyes follow her makes butterflies flutter in her belly. It shouldn’t—she knows that—but it does, and Mel’s not in a strong enough mental place to admonish herself right now. “Sounds like I’m ordering a chicken salad sandwich, extra red onions with chipotle mayo soon. Any drink requests?”
“Unsweetened iced tea would be great.”
Langdon lets out a wisp of a laugh. “Let me guess, too much sugar in Brisk?”
“Obviously.”
Nodding, Langdon gives her one last small smile. “You got it, Mel.”
It doesn’t escape her notice that he said that to her on July fourth, too, but this one feels different. It feels—warmer, more connected. She likes it.
Mel bites her lip as she twirls to walk inside, unable to stop her smile. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say that the tightrope between them just grew another thread, making it stronger.
iii. veterans day
On Veterans’ Day, Mel volunteers at the veterans clinic downtown.
Her time at the VA shaped her, and while it was only a brief rotation in the larger arc of her career, she makes a point of giving back every year by volunteering. It’s the least she can do, and when she approached Dr. Robby about taking the day off, he didn’t even let her finish her sentence. He entered it as “volunteer time off,” so she’d be paid for the day by the hospital, and he even told Dr. Abbot, who promptly texted her to ask which clinic she was planning to go to. It turned out that he’d been volunteering for years downtown; Mel was very unprepared upon her arrival to find him waiting outside the building, brusque demeanor and all, practically thrumming as he took her under his wing.
He introduced her to the medical and administrative staff, who were all kind and very, very grateful to Mel for her time, though that felt a little awkward, truth be told.
“Of course,” Mel had said, her brow almost furrowing. “It’s the least I can do.”
Abbot shows her around the clinic next; he advises where and how to request supplies and other specialty consults, should she need them, and Mel jumps in without a second thought as soon as all the administrative paperwork is done. She and Abbot work in tandem, treating mostly superficial wounds and requesting more psych consults than Mel thought she’d have, but it’s a difficult day for some people. She can’t imagine fighting for a larger purpose for so many years to only feel as though that very purpose turned its back on you at the end of it all.
She says as much to Abbot while they’re in the middle of a lull, her thoughts tumbling out before she can stop them.
“It’s definitely a complicated issue,” he agrees, nodding. “But doing this—helping when you can—might be small, but it matters. I hope you feel that, too.”
“I do,” Mel says. “I just wish there was more we could do.”
Abbot lets that pass, and Mel knows it’s because there’s nothing to say. Of course he wishes there was more to do—it’s expected, even if it is hard to reconcile.
What they both aren’t expecting, however, is Dr. Langdon showing up in the middle of the afternoon, dressed in scrubs and looking like he’s ready to work.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?” Abbot asks, slowing to a stop in front of Langdon. “Aren’t you off today?”
“From PTMC? Yeah,” Langdon replies, swiveling his head to nod at Mel. “Hey, Mel. Fancy seeing you here.”
Mel straightens; she hadn’t even noticed she had been slouching. “Hi, Langdon.”
Abbot stares at Langdon, his eyes wandering down to his hands. They look normal, so Mel’s not sure why, but then—
“While we’re grateful for the assist,” Abbot says, angling his head to stare at him dead on, “if you’re here because you’re avoiding something, I’d—”
Oh. Oh.
Langdon hadn’t said anything to her about it, but she’d heard the rumors. Or, more specifically, she overheard McKay in the breakroom last week giving him some particularly tough love about his unsigned divorce papers, but it felt too personal, so Mel darted away as soon as she pieced enough together before they’d noticed.
The story went that Langdon didn’t want to sign them—despite receiving several calls from Abby’s attorney as well as his own—and that he was doing everything and anything to avoid it. Mel didn’t know the exact details, of course, but it was all anyone in the ED could talk about. She’d heard tales that widely varied regarding Langdon’s marriage over the past few months, and she tried very, very hard to forget that she ever heard them in the first place.
It doesn’t stop her from thinking about it, though, despite her best efforts.
“I’m here because I want to be here,” Langdon says now, his voice strong. “I’m not distracted or whatever you’re worried about.”
Abbot raises a brow, clearly displeased, but he acquiesces a moment or two later. “Just keep your head on straight. I don’t want any drama. Not today.”
“Done.”
“And you’re with King,” Abbot adds, gesturing to Mel with his thumb. “She’s a pro now; she knows how this place works.”
Langdon’s mouth presses into a pleased smile. “Also done.”
And so it goes. She and Langdon make their way through several patients over the course of the afternoon, and Langdon brings just as much patience and professionalism to all their cases as he does on a regular day in the ED. Abbot keeps a keen eye on him, but by the third hour, he’s all but given up whatever crusade he thought he was driving.
“Keep it up, you two,” Abbot says, breezing by as he goes toward the administrative wing. “We’re doing great work today.”
“I swear he’s on me more here than he ever is in the ED,” Langdon mutters, and Mel laughs.
But then Bill Chapman enters the clinic, and his case hits a little too close to home.
Bill presents himself to Mel and Langdon as a forty-four-year-old man with severe leg pain. He broke it years prior during one of his deployments and it’s mostly healed, but there’s some lingering nerve pain that’s been exacerbated by a fall down his front porch that morning. He’s a recovering addict from painkillers, he tells them, and he’s got a custody agreement that forbids him from going near any kind of opioid, judge’s orders. Mel and Langdon treat him to the best of their ability with aspirin and other low-grade alternatives, waiting for a radiology consult to take him for some X-rays.
He also has some lab results out of range from his intake tests—nothing dramatic, but enough for Langdon to suggest a broader workup.
“Let’s run the rest while we’re at it,” he says, already typing in the orders. “Blood, urine, the usual. It could be nothing, but let’s be sure before we start to rule things out.”
Mel nods, not thinking much of it. Patients on edge from pain often forget to eat or drink enough, and it’s been a long day for him in the clinic, waiting to be taken back to their exam room. Maybe it’s nothing.
But an hour later, his urine sample comes back positive for tramadol.
Mel stares at the screen, her expression blank. But she was just talking with him, she thinks. He was sharing stories about his eleven-year-old daughter, Harriet, and her love for the outdoors. They were going on a camping trip out west this weekend, he said, which is why he came to the clinic today. He wants to make sure he’s up for easy hikes and building a fire. Harriet just learned how to start a spark with wood found in the wilderness, and she wants to show him.
Mel’s hand holding the iPad trembles, and before she knows it, tears cloud her vision. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why, either.
“Results back?” Langdon asks, sidling up next to her.
She hands over the iPad wordlessly, and Langdon shoots her a look of concern before he looks at the screen.
Mel sees the precise moment Langdon reads the red positive result. His chest deflates and he sighs, also disappointed, but—sad, too. They both are.
“Admittedly, we don’t know the full story,” she says, studying Langdon as he looks at the iPad with a guarded expression. “There could be an explanation.”
Shaking his head, Langdon catches her eye. “I think we both know that’s not true,” he says quietly.
Because he knows that test results like this can’t lie, and even if Bill Chapman took the tramadol without realizing it was an opioid, it’s a prescription drug and a controlled substance at that. He must have obtained it second-hand, whether from a friend or someone he found who could offer substantial pain relief, but it doesn’t really matter.
Mel turns away, his gaze too intense to bear, but she can’t deny that she’s worried about him. This can’t be what he was expecting when he drove here to volunteer this afternoon, and on top of his impending divorce issue, she wonders what he must be thinking—what he must be feeling.
“I can go talk to him,” Mel says, her voice soft. “I can—”
“No,” Langdon says, and she notices the haunted look across his face. “I can do it. I should do it. I—I know what to say.”
Mel nods, her throat tight. “Do you want me to go with you?”
He shakes his head, his lips twitching the slightest bit. “That’s okay, Mel, but no. I appreciate your offering, though,” he says, and Mel knows he means it. He’s looking at her in a way that feels meaningful, somehow, and Mel doesn’t want to ruin the moment, so she remains quiet. Whatever he’s feeling—it’s moving him in a specific way; she can see it. He gaze goes back at the tablet, his eyes tracing across the different results as he places it on the lip of the intake desk, still in a daze.
He lays his hand flat across the surface, and Mel’s not sure what moves her, but she reaches out and gently covers his wrist with her palm. His skin is warm—surprisingly so, especially since there’s been a particularly chilly draft in the clinic all day—and she watches Langdon turn his attention to the gesture, his chest inhaling with a sharp breath.
Mel still doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t think she needs to, and seconds later, she knows she’s made the right decision because his eyes lift to catch hers, and there’s so much emotion staring back at her that it almost makes her catch her breath.
Langdon swallows after a moment, his eyes dropping back to the tablet. “I should take care of this,” he says, his voice soft. Then he checks his watch before he adds, “It might take some time, but do you—I mean, you definitely don’t have to, but would you be up for grabbing a quick bite after this is done? We’ve been working like dogs for the past few hours and I’m starving.”
Mel blinks. Did he just—
“I totally understand if you don’t want to wait,” he continues, and it clicks in Mel’s brain. He’s about to do a very hard thing and is asking her to eat afterward. To decompress, probably. To have a human connection, most likely, because he’s supposed to be getting divorced, but he doesn’t want to and—
“Yes,” Mel blurts, the word tumbling out far too quickly but also not fast enough. He waits for her, though, because he has begun to do that, too—waiting for her. He does it after patients, after rounds, after a really shitty case; so it’s the very least she can do for him today, she thinks.
She clears her throat as she starts to wring her hands. “I’ll wait however long you need. Don’t—please don’t feel like you need to rush. I have plenty of audiobooks I can listen to in my car.”
That makes his mouth pull into a tiny smile. “Audiobooks, huh? Anything good?”
The truth is her library is filled with what Becca calls “cliterature”— aka dirty smut novels—but she’s surely not going to let that phrase leave her lips, so she tries to shrug in a way she hopes is casual. She can’t stop the blush that blooms across her cheeks, though. “I love a good whodunit.”
Not a lie, technically.
Langdon casts her a glance as if he knows she’s not being entirely truthful, but he lets it go. It’s so not the time. “Great. Let me go talk to Bill, and I’ll come find you when I’m finished.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
She doesn’t go to listen to her audiobooks, though. Instead, she watches. She watches as Langdon takes a deep breath before stepping into exam room eleven, his expression neutral. She watches through the small slice of the window as he sits next to Bill, his posture open and welcoming even as he delivers the difficult news. She watches as he waits patiently, Bill's hands rising to cover his face, devastated. She watches as Langdon moves to sit on Bill’s bed, as he talks to him with what she just knows is his soft and gentle voice. She doesn’t know the words, exactly, but she can imagine his delivery crystal clear. She hopes Bill knows he’s being supported and heard, because he is. Even if he isn’t necessarily in a place to feel like he is. Langdon is the best possible physician he could’ve asked for in this moment; Mel is sure of it.
So she watches, but she sees, too. She sees everything Langdon is, even through the small sliver of glass, even though she can’t hear him. She—she almost thinks she can actually feel him, too, even from this far away. It’s a startling and wild thought, but it’s there.
She finally steps away for a few minutes to find Abbot and the on-call attending. When she locates them toward the rear of the clinic, she fills them both in on Bill’s case—she wants to relieve Langdon of having to retell the tale again. Abbot immediately recognizes the gravity of the situation and takes Mel’s tablet without question.
“We’ll take care of it from here,” he says, folding it under his arm. “Thank you for all your work today. Please tell Langdon I said so as well.”
It’s close to forty minutes when Langdon finally emerges from Bill’s exam room. He shuts the door with a soft click, and Mel tries to slink away while his back is still turned. She doesn’t want him to think she was snooping, but she must not move fast enough, because she only makes it a few paces before she hears his voice behind her.
“You waited.”
Mel turns, a sheepish expression emerging as she faces him. He’s surprised, she realizes. She’s not sure why. “Of course,” she says, playing it aloof though she knows what he really means. “I told you I would.”
Langdon opens his mouth to elaborate, but he must think better of it. His lips morph into something just shy of a smile, and it’s here that Mel notices the rims of his eyes are swollen. The knowledge slams into her: he cried in there with Bill.
She steps forward without realizing she’s doing it. “I signed us out with the front desk,” she says, quiet. “I also told Abbot—he’s said we’re free to go after you input your notes.”
Looking down at his tablet, Langdon swallows thickly. “I—uh. I already did them. While I was in there helping him look into recovery programs.”
Now Mel’s swallowing. “Okay,” she says, reaching forward and taking the tablet from his hands. “Are you ready to go?”
Langdon nods. “Yeah. I—I think I need to, actually.”
“Then let’s go. Do you know Luigi’s on Maple Street?”
He blinks at her. “Yeah,” he says, coming back to himself. “I can meet you there?”
“That was my next question,” she says slowly. She studies his face, but he looks relatively fine. Shaken, for sure, but he’s got good color and he’s aware, alert. “Are you okay to drive?”
“Yeah, absolutely. I just—I need to get out of here, I think.”
“Understood, but one last question and then I promise we can go.”
This gets him to give her a tiny smile. “Fire away.”
Mel swallows again. “Should I—uh—call anyone? For you? For extra support, I mean. I’m always happy to listen, but I’m wondering if—”
He inches toward her, a foreign expression crossing his face. “I promise I’m okay, Mel. Just hungry, and we know how to solve that, so…”
Placing the iPad back in its charging station, Mel clears her throat. “Right. Let’s go.”
They both head to their cars, and Mel notes the old Honda that Langdon claims as his own. It’s dark blue and looks clean inside, save for a car seat and empty snack wrappers that are strewn across the back seat. It makes Mel smile—his kids seem to have a frequent hankering for Smartfood white cheddar popcorn.
He looks at her over the hood of his car, leaning on his arms. The fading sunlight catches the bright blue of his eyes, making them seem almost glowing, and Mel pauses.
“See you in ten?”
He sounds hopeful, like he thinks she might suddenly back out at the last minute and say no. Her heart twinges at the idea.
She nods. “You will.”
***
Luigi’s is a casual pizza place, all things considered. It has an old-fashioned counter with old-time cash registers, and all its employees wear the same bright red aprons. Something about all of that reminds Mel of the places she used to go to as a child—it’s nostalgic, even if she didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh.
“Great choice,” Langdon says as they stare up at the lightboard menu above the cashiers. “I haven’t been here in forever, but I came here a ton when I was an intern.”
Mel smiles. “Becca and I like it, too. She swears they have the best spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Do you guys come here a lot?”
Nodding, Mel gestures to the menu. “Oh, yeah. I think I’ve tried everything on that menu by now. Becca’s not really an adventurous eater, but it can get pretty monotonous pretty quickly if I keep ordering the same things.”
Langdon gives her a crooked smile as he turns back to the menu—he had been looking at her without her noticing, and something about it sends a slight shiver down her back.
“Well, allow me to buy you whichever item you please tonight, Dr. King. Unless you’re a Hawaiian pizza fan,” Langdon says, his expression turning judgmental. “If that’s the case, then I refuse to buy you dinner out of respect for pizza.”
Mel crinkles her nose. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t like it anyway, but—I’m allergic to pineapple.”
Langdon considers her for a moment before he nods, moving to stare up at the lightboard menu on the wall. “What it’ll be, then?”
“Pepperoni, please.”
“One slice? Or two?”
Mel tells him one, and after a minute or two of him making sure that’s all she wants, they have calzones, you know, or a chicken parm roll, which sounds bomb—he orders for them both, barely acknowledging her sad attempt at handing over her debit card.
“Put that away, Mel,” he says, shaking his head as he makes eye contact with the cashier. “Let me buy you a slice of pizza.”
The cashier smiles as she takes his credit card. “I agree; let the man buy you pizza,” she says to Mel, and she tries her hardest not to blush, because she knows how this exchange appears. The cashier probably thinks Langdon is her husband, and the thought is so foreign and so off-putting that Mel mumbles something about finding a table in the small vestibule outside the parlor—clearly a COVID holdover—just to escape the moment.
She picks a picnic table next to the window, because the heat from inside emanates across the table and while it’s only the beginning of November, the temperature is dropping. She eyes a space heater in the corner, too, which seems to just be loud and noisy rather than providing any actual heat, but alas. It’s only pizza, anyway; it’s not like she and Langdon are going to be here for hours. She can manage thirty minutes in an outside-adjacent vestibule.
Langdon returns with both of their slices a few minutes later, along with a Coke Zero (for him) and an unsweetened iced tea (for Mel). She smiles as he drops it all onto the table.
“You remembered,” she says, reaching forward and taking a satisfied sip from her cup. Langdon had made good on his lunch promise shortly after Labor Day, and he hasn’t forgotten her favorite drink since. “Thank you.”
Langdon gives her a pleased smile. “My pleasure.”
She looks down to see that he’s ordered a buffalo chicken slice, and she’s about to tease him, about to make a joke about how Hawaiian pizza is arbitrarily forbidden but putting all of that on pizza is somehow okay, but—
“So,” Langdon continues, folding his massive slice of pizza in half, “you’re not going to ask me why I’m avoiding signing my divorce papers?”
Mel’s hand freezes mid-air. “Um,” she flounders, caught completely off guard. He dives into his pizza without a second thought, and Mel feels like she’s flopping around like a fish out of water. Is she curious as to why he’s doing such a thing? Of course she is, but she’s not so sure that asking him about something so personal over paper-plated pizza in an outside vestibule is the type of thing she should be doing. “No?”
His brow raises. “You’d be the only one who hasn’t, you know.”
“It doesn’t seem like my business.”
Langdon chews thoughtfully, considering. He waits until he swallows to say, “I never thought reverse psychology was a thing, but now I think it might have some merit.”
That makes Mel huff out a laugh. “You want to know what I think just because I didn’t offer my opinion unprompted?”
The corner of his mouth turns up, and Mel tries very hard not to catalogue the dimple that appears as a result. “Not entirely,” he says, and she’s thankful when he drops his gaze to reach for the hot pepper flakes next to the napkins. “But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more interested because you’re withholding.”
Why does everything he says sound so… she can’t put a finger on it, but suddenly her heart is racing for a reason she can’t figure out.
Mel shrugs, chewing slowly just to buy herself some time. She lands on absolutely nothing to say, but she can’t just stay silent, so she settles on a mantra she often uses with Becca. “I think you should do what feels right.”
He tsks in displeasure as he places his Coke Zero on the wooden table. His eyes are so, so blue and—curious, too, that it’s distracting. “Come on, King. That’s not your real answer.”
“Okay,” Mel says, giving up. She drops her pizza onto her plate before dusting off her hands—somehow, she feels the need to be singularly focused for this type of exchange. “Before I say anything, though, I think I’d just ask why you think avoiding the issue is the solution.”
“Nuh-uh,” he teases, and he reminds Mel of a second-grader who’s trying to get her to reveal a secret. “I asked you first.”
She sighs, tired. “Really?”
“Really really.”
She’s not sure why she’s surprised. She knows, of course, that Langdon can be open with his sensitivity when he wants to be, but those moments always seem to happen while the pinnacle of something larger than both of them lingers in the background. Last year, it was after a pair of young sisters were torn apart; on July fourth, it was her ongoing legal battle and his return to work after several months of sobriety. Emotions are expected to run high in those situations, and some of them are all but expected to reveal themselves in front of others, but—this?
This… this is a regular Wednesday evening. This is a quick bite after volunteering at a veterans’ clinic. This is, and Mel finds she can’t stress this enough, happening over paper-plated pizza in an outdoor vestibule. It’s even happening as Langdon swipes away a trail of oil dripping down his chin, and Mel wonders how she’s supposed to find her voice for something like this.
She decides to angle for relatability, though obviously, Mel has never been married. She’s never been in a serious relationship, even, but there’s so much more to human connection than romantic relationships that there must be some kind of thread she can tug on.
“Once, when I was in medical school,” Mel eventually says, and even she’s surprised by what’s coming out of her mouth, “Becca tried to run away. I came home one night only to find a note left on—”
“What?”
Mel doesn’t look at him. She knows she’ll lose her nerve if she does, so instead she focuses on peeling off the remaining pepperoni on her slice of pizza. “Yeah. She left me a letter, in which she explained how guilty she felt, how she hated that it had fallen to me to take care of her all the time, because I was trying to become a doctor to help ‘real people.’ She saw herself as a burden. And I—” Mel takes a breath. She hadn’t thought about that day in years, but the overwhelming emotions still bubble inside her as though it were yesterday.
“It was really hard, you know, after our mom died. Becoming a full-time caregiver while attending medical school was—well, you can imagine. I didn’t have any support, I was running on fumes, and the saddest part of it all was that I actually thought I was doing okay. I thought I was getting by; I thought I was being a good sister, a good student, a good person. And then I came home that day and clearly—no. I was not any of those things. I was giving everything I had, but I was still blind to what was going on with Becca, and it felt…”
She doesn’t want to finish her sentence. It felt terrifying, truthfully, and even years later, it still brings a sharp prickle to her eyes.
“Mel.” Frank leans forward over the small expanse of the table, and Mel knows he’s trying to get her to meet his gaze. She can’t, though. “What happened?”
“Our neighbor intercepted her,” Mel says, swallowing. “We lived in an apartment complex, and our next-door neighbor was this elderly widow who had no children of her own. She was extremely kind, and after a few months of us living there, she had wormed her way into Becca’s heart. She’d schedule game nights, craft projects, baking challenges… she was a wonderful woman. She caught Becca as she was leaving, with a backpack and a rolling carry-on suitcase, and after Becca admitted to her grand plan, she convinced her to have ‘one last meal’ before heading out. It was her stalling until I could get home, of course—she wasn’t actually going to let Becca go. She was next door the whole time.”
“Jesus, Mel,” Frank says, and Mel finally looks at him. He’s wearing such an anguished expression that it makes her chest twinge, and she suddenly feels as though she’s overshared. She needs to get this back on track immediately, because there is a point to this and she needs to get to it quickly.
“When we finally talked that night, I asked her a million questions—am I neglecting you, is there something else I should be doing instead, or something better—because obviously, it had to be a response to me and something I was or wasn’t doing—or, at least, that’s how it felt. But it turns out… no, not necessarily. It was also about Becca; it was about her feelings and what she needed to feel secure, and she just kept saying she wanted me to be happy, and I think—I think that was the worst part, really, because it suggested that she thought I wasn’t. Or that she thought I was too much of something else instead.”
Langdon is quiet for a long minute. When he speaks again, his voice is laced with something that she can’t put her finger on. “But were you?” he asks, and Mel finds now that she can’t not look at him. His eyes trace her face, trailing down her cheeks to her jaw and back up again, and her skin tingles. “Happy?”
Mel licks her lips. They feel dry, suddenly, for some reason. “No,” she admits, soft. “And I think, at the end of it, that’s what she was also trying to show me—that something needed to change. For both of us.”
A long moment of silence stretches between them. They’re the only ones in the vestibule now, and Mel’s never been more aware of how close their legs are under the picnic table. She can feel his body heat seeping into her knees despite the loud, rattling space heater in the corner, and it almost feels as though any micromovement she makes will destroy whatever moment they’re having. An intrusive thought crosses her mind: she isn’t sure she wants to do that.
It happens anyway.
“You never talk about that,” he eventually says, and Mel blinks in surprise. He clears his throat, and if Mel didn’t know any better, she’d say he looks guilty, but she doesn’t understand why. “That… time in your life, I mean.”
How is this what’s happening right now? Somehow the conversation has swiveled, leaving her as the one who’s revealing personal things, not Langdon, and she clamors to fix it. It feels too vulnerable, too exposing. While she was aiming for relatability by sharing that particular story, this needs to remain about Langdon and his divorce. She already feels a certain amount of attachment to him; the last thing she needs is for him to want to peel back her deepest, most personal layers and to mean it, too.
Especially with the way he’s looking at her. That, above all, is what really can’t happen.
“It was a long time ago,” Mel replies. She grabs a few napkins from the holder, just to keep her hands busy. “Plus, no one really asks, anyway, and it’s not like it’s a cheery conversation starter at a party or—”
“I’m asking,” he says, and dear God, what is he doing to her? He’s looking at her in a way that’s so earnest and genuine it almost makes her want to cry. “I’m sorry I didn’t before, especially when I came back. You know so much about me, and—I’m feeling kind of slighted, here, at the imbalance.”
Things were different then, she wants to say. Priorities, dynamics, circumstances… all of it was different. Plus—
Mel almost smiles. Almost. “You were… kind of busy, I think. Both last year and on July fourth.”
Langdon is the one who actually smiles, his head dropping as he does it, and Mel’s heart skips a beat. Again. “That’s a generous way to put it.”
“I appreciate you wanting to know, but you’re getting away from the point,” she says, and the smile slowly fades from Langdon’s face. She softens her voice for the next bit—the part that is going to sting a little. “I shared that with you as a means to say that I can understand when it feels like you’re trying your best, but somehow it’s still not enough. And…” she trails off, trying to figure out how to phrase it. It takes her a few seconds. “I think—as much as those situations can strip you bare—it doesn’t mean that avoiding it is the answer. Avoiding it only makes it worse, I think. This isn’t something that’s going to just… go away because you leave your signature line blank.”
Langdon studies her for a moment, his pizza long forgotten on his plate. She notices that he’s left only his crust, and some kind of internal parasite in her brain wants to ask if he isn’t a pizza-crust kind of guy, but then he shifts his gaze to his hands and Mel knows, without a second thought, that this is it. He’s about to open up—for real, and about something that’s intimate and deeply personal—and suddenly, Mel’s not sure she’s ready for it.
“It feels like giving up,” he says, and Mel watches as he twirls the loose gold band around his ring finger. “It feels like—like if I sign it, then I’m not fighting for my family. For my kids. I’d get split custody, but who wants to be the type of person who doesn’t fight until the end? It’s—that’s not me, Mel.”
Mel gets that. Really, she does. She can understand how ultimately submitting to a decision you disagree with can feel like you’re surrendering something you don’t want to give, but he has to know that’s not the total sum of what’s happening.
Right?
“I don’t know your marriage, and I don’t know Abby,” Mel says softly, though not unsteady. “But I know you, and I don’t really think you’re someone who does things halfway. You did try. Besides, the longer you wait on something like this…”
It takes Mel a second, but she realizes the space heater has stopped rattling. When did that happen? It’s so quiet she’s convinced she could hear a pin drop, and she’s scared, almost, to look at Langdon. Every sense suddenly seems heightened—the smell of marinara sauce mixed with something woodsy; the creeping, bitter coldness that begins to seep through her winter jacket—that it takes her a prolonged moment to gather the strength to do it.
But she does do it, and his eyes catch hers in a millisecond, and Mel’s a little surprised at how… rapt he seems. His gaze shifts over her face once, twice, before he repeats, “The longer I wait…”
Mel exhales, her breath visible in the increasingly frigid air. “The more torturous it will be,” she says, her eyes shifting and following a couple as they walk to their car. “I mean—for you? Think of it like this: the longer you don’t sign those papers, the longer you’re standing still. And you’re not someone who knows how to stand still.”
Langdon laughs at that, and Mel allows a slight one to escape her, too, as she looks at him again. She doesn’t know what she wants to say next, and she hesitates for the briefest of seconds, but then a memory resurfaces. One from a short time ago, and one that feels pertinent.
“When I was dealing with legal problems not so long ago, someone told me that it was all just a very expensive and time-consuming way for someone to exact revenge,” she says, and Langdon’s stare turns enraptured in a way she’s never seen before. She’s certain he hasn’t blinked in at least a minute, but she manages to forge ahead. “But—this doesn’t have to be that. It can just be… your chance to stop holding onto something that only wants you to let go. It can be the start of something new, even,” she adds, her voice catching though she’s not sure why. She clears her throat. “If you let it.”
And why, she suddenly wants to know, did it have to sound so suggestive? Her cheeks burn despite the cold, and her throat feels scratchy, and it feels imperative, now, to run from this particular exchange. She wants to dart to her car, to escape this tiny little vestibule that’s somehow become entirely suffocating, but she can’t. She can’t because when she goes to look at Langdon, her breathing shallow and her pulse thready, he’s looking at her in a way that takes her breath away.
It’s not how she meant it. It’s not, and she thinks he knows it’s not, because he clears his throat after another second or two and breaks their staring contest.
She scrambles to rectify it. “Sorry if that was—”
“No,” Langdon interrupts, and he glances at her again. His face is full of something she can’t place. “That was—you were honest, Mel. And you were—real, and I appreciate you sharing, because I know it’s not always easy to talk about these things. I wouldn’t have asked for your opinion if I truly didn’t want or value it.”
Mel almost isn’t sure how to respond to that. It’s… really nice, she thinks, to hear that Langdon values her opinion.
She clears her throat. “If you do sign them,” she says, her voice tentative, “It’s not defeat. It just means it’ll be… different. And different is not always a bad thing.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he agrees, a long sigh escaping him. An amusing thought must occur to him, though, because his lips perk up in a tiny smile. “You’re not going to tell me things have to get worse before they get better?”
Mel manages a small smile back. “I’m trying to avoid the classics.”
That gets Langdon to let out a light laugh again. “I appreciate that, too. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard that one.”
“I bet.”
Langdon hesitates then, and something in Mel goes on alert. “It’s not a wrong sentiment,” he says after a moment, and Mel watches as he traces the wood grain in the picnic table. “I just… I don’t know. I think it wouldn’t bother me so much if things hadn’t been feeling the worst they could possibly be for a long, long time now.”
“Well,” Mel says. “Maybe this is your chance to change that.”
Mel tries not to catalogue the way his Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “Yeah,” he replies, and he pulls his left hand from the table. She doesn’t notice it, though. “Maybe it is.”