Archive of Our Own

There are many shitty things about grief, but one of the shittiest, Trinity thinks, is its ability to transcend time, proximity—even the law of cause and effect. So you could (completely hypothetically, of course) be at the GetGo refilling your roommate’s car at eight on a Saturday morning, on one of your rare Saturdays off, and find yourself crying at the pump about something that happened last year. A terrible something, sure, but so buried under all the other terrible things sliding into Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency department on a daily basis that it’s practically prehistoric.

I used to want to do surgery, she thinks plaintively, which makes the stupid tears roll faster down her stupid face while she honks snot back up her nose and wishes for the slow, sweet release of death.

“Hard day, hon?” someone the next pump over asks.

Trinity raises her arm to scrub her jacket sleeve across her face. The tears grab for purchase on the slick surface of the nylon and spread all over her skin instead. Scratch the slow part, death better come fast.

“Fuck off,” she says crisply, and bolts into Dennis’s dumpy Prius.

It’s this stupid fucking city, she thinks on the way back to her apartment. Pittsburgh is mean and that doesn’t have a calming effect on her tendency to be kind of horrible. If she’s being honest.

Dennis is scheduled for a night shift, but he’s already awake and sipping a mug of tea when she tramps in.

“Your car is a mess,” she tells him.

He blinks at her and then, weirdly, smiles. “My car.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“It feels so good to have a car again,” he says. Completely, unironically wholesome in a way that makes her want to ruffle his hair and then spit in his tea. Her car is in the shop. Again. It’s a newer model than the one she had before, but so far has required three times as much maintenance.

Dennis is being a great sport about the latest crisis.  She refilled his tank because of how many times he’s let her borrow the Prius, or awkwardly carpool with him these last three days. She still can’t help some sourness from leaking into her tone. “I bet.”

His expression switches to guilt. “Sorry.”

“No—it’s just. Bad mood. PMS or something. Sorry for being a bitch, Huckleberry.” God, this pause is excruciating. “I’m going back to bed.”

Half an hour later, buried under her duvet with the comforting drone of YouTube echoing from the phone jammed between her and the wall, it occurs to her that Pittsburgh isn’t actually all mean. Take the random dude, a friend of Abbot’s, offloading his ancient, yet reliable, Prius on Huckleberry for practically nothing. Or Dennis himself, who has managed not to punch her in their year and some change living together. She, apparently, is the problem.

Even later, when the phone has lulled her into a twitchy half-sleep, she’ll remember what she was thinking of that got her sad in the first place: her first day in the emergency department. The one that’s become bound up in all the miserable things that came before it, plus all the ghosts of miseries yet to come.

Most days, Trinity’s able to acknowledge the good that came from that shift too. Dennis, the people they managed to save, the sharpening of interest and adrenaline that pulled her to emergency medicine even as she was planning to shake the dust of the Pitt off her feet. But there are days when that gets very, very hard.

Okay, the people she worked with are another thing that pulled her back. Some of them, anyway.

Mel called her a few days ago, the other woman’s awkward, insistent kindness almost making up for the fact that Dennis must have been doing some major narcing.

“How’s your shoulder?”

“Fine,” Trinity chirped. “Great, actually! You should’ve seen me flexing it when I was doing a hip reduction. Full range of motion and everything!”

She was in an accident almost a year out from PittFest. The one that totaled her old car. It was two—no, three—months after Dr. Langdon came back.

Sometimes Trinity has trouble convincing herself that reporting to Dr. Robby wasn’t payback. She remembers her thoughts about the bottle very clearly, and she knows the not-rightness was central. The Ativan should have worked. Sure, the thought of the warm glow of satisfaction that would come from proving an arrogant prick wrong was nice, but not something that would have carried her all the way to snitching on a senior resident. It was the snowballing of tiny clues, the persistent feeling that something was wrong.

And it was: so catastrophically wrong that Langdon disappeared after PittFest, and didn’t reappear for months. Through some snooping (mostly eavesdropping on Perlah and Princess’s Tagalong gossip seshes), she got the bare details. Self-medicating, outpatient rehab, and a leave of absence.

Learning that left her a little sick—the ugliness of it, and the pain. Trinity is smart; she knows about the chain of harm, knows that being cruel to others can come from circumstances or cruelties levelled on the perpetrator themselves. How couldn’t she, being who she is?

But also: fuck that guy. Fuck him and his all-American family, and his recovery journey, and everything that makes him feel he’s moving up from being the kind of asshole who blows out his vocal cords yelling at women ten years younger and thirty pounds lighter than he is.

Assuming, of course, he thinks about her at all. Which Trinity very much fucking doubts.

Or not. She’s not really being honest with herself, but after a few hours in bed, watching people going about their daily lives in Svalbard or England or wherever, and drifting into and out of a couple sweaty naps, she’s finally starting to feel normal again.

Wrapping a throw blanket around her shoulders, she opens her door and eases past Dennis’s room, where she hears snoring. She lets herself get louder, and messier, in the kitchen, grabbing rice left over from last night to make sinangag. Trinity finds comfort in cooking, probably because she’s too busy to do it regularly. Sometimes she listens to music or audiobooks while she chops and stirs.

Sometimes, like today, she craves quiet. She focuses on the knife blade thudding against the countertop and the oil sizzling and hissing in the pan. (She’s gone so long without a cutting board it feels like a statement.)

When Whitaker comes out of his room, she points to the rice cooling in a plastic mixing bowl. “It’s kind of burnt.”

They’ve roomed together long enough that he recognizes the invitation and scoops himself some. She lifts the pan off the burner and slides a fried egg and some spam on top of his rice pile.

“What’re you doing the rest of the night?” he asks when she sits with her own plate.

“Shower, read some case studies, do a blood ritual—the usual.”

He’s not impressed.

“I’m kidding, Huckleberry. Jesus.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I’m hilarious.”

“You were talking about asking off on the tenth, did you get it?”

They’ve fallen into a rhythm living together. Not perfect understanding, but they’re both more willing to listen and pick up on the other’s conversational shorthand and quirks. “Yeah, why?”

“I might see if it’s not all booked up. Maybe we could do a roommate thing. You know,” he clarifies before she can fire off the joke begging to follow that phrase, “a trip.”

It’s been a long time since “Quick, before I change my mind,” but attempts to socialize outside of work and the apartment have been bumpy. When Dennis took her to his favorite bookshop, she Googled it and found out the owner had been busted for stealing rare books. (She thought it was hilarious; he took it very seriously and no longer shops there.) When Trinity took him out for dinner to celebrate him starting his intern year, he ordered calamari for the appetizer, and they both got food poisoning.

“Is this something you want to do or something you think you should do?” she asks.

“They can be the same thing, Trinity,” he says, farm-boy earnest.

She wrinkles her nose. “Now you sound like that prick Langdon.”

But.

“Being around people helps,” he says. “For me.  When I’m stuck in my head.”

He says they should go to the Carnegies, and Trinity finds herself agreeing.

Dennis is the only one she’s told about the conversation she had with Langdon. This was after her accident, when she’d only been back from leave a week or two. Her arm was better, everyone was being painfully nice, and Langdon (quieter since he came back, but nowhere near as crushed as Trinity would have liked) asked if they could grab coffee in the cafeteria.

She would’ve declined with withering politeness—her version of it, anyway—if she hadn’t seen Dr. Robby a few yards away at a charting station, stress radiating from his arrow-straight back. He’d definitely heard Langdon. Now he was probably waiting to see her reaction. Maybe wondering if he needed to step in.

She wouldn’t usually attribute that pure of a motive to anyone, but for all his many (if you believe Collins, many, many, many) faults, Robby has always done right by Trinity. She finds herself surprisingly reluctant to fuck up his shift with her personal drama.

Trinity attempts a bubblegum smile she knows doesn’t hide the rage just behind it. Langdon’s married, so he should be familiar with that one. “Okay!”

They sip burnt-tasting coffee from identical plastic cups, staring at each other awkwardly across the thick linoleum tabletop.

“How’s your arm?” he says.

“How’s your pill addiction?”

Langdon’s eyes narrow. “Really?”

“Oh, you walked right into that one, buddy.”

Maybe someone laced the coffee and that’s why she’s even more snippy than usual. Langdon is still her senior resident. Not that she can bring herself to care much.

“I assume okay since, you know, you still have a job.” She picks at the cardboard drink sleeve, refusing to meet his eyes. “What do you want?”

Langdon does that guy thing of inhaling just slightly deeper than normal. Not quite a sigh, but just as soaked with disappointment. “We still need to work together.”

As if she could forget. “Okay, has my work been unsatisfactory, Dr. Langdon?”

Even though she’s being sarcastic, Trinity hates the assumption underlying that response. She’s still speaking to—maybe thinking about—him as someone who matters, whose moods she needs to learn and skirt around. Like a teacher, which is what he’s making it abundantly clear he still sees himself as.

“No,” he admits.

 Ha! Got you, dickweed.

“But—look, a lot has gone on between us, obviously. I’m trying to clear the air.”

“Why?”

 What would be the point for either of them? If they’re making it work now, that’s more than she would have thought possible last year. A horrible suspicion begins to grow. “Oh my God,” she blurts out. “You’re trying to twelve-step me!”

Langdon draws into himself, like a sleek turtle. The fingers gripping his cup go white, but Trinity’s on a roll now; couldn’t stop herself if she tried. “‘We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.’ My grandpa was in AA,” she snaps at Langdon’s raised eyebrow. “He’s a massive asshole. What the hell, man.”

“So you don’t think I wronged you?” Langdon shoots back. “I find that hard to believe.”

Fair point. She flashes the bubblegum smile again. “You’re forgetting the next one.”

“What?”

“‘Step nine,’” she recites. “‘We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

“Injure you. Seriously?”

As a heart attack. Afterwards, when she’s talking it over with Dennis, she’ll wonder if Langdon remembers one of his final blowouts at her, right before intern Trinity Santos became both the cause and the least of his problems.

Stupid or arrogant, you need to realize that you are a beginner, which means your job is to shut up, listen, and learn. Because so far today, the only thing you have been successful at is proving repeatedly that you know nothing.

She’s have remembered that even if the MCI hadn’t burned the day into her mind. Langdon being fuzzy on the details doesn’t surprise her.

There certainly isn’t  a trace of irony in the cafeteria when he says, “I think we can both learn from this.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“You decided to specialize in emergency medicine. Something I’m kind of amazing at. Ellis, Abbot, Robby—they all say you’re doing well. I can teach you to be better.”

Warmth does spark in her, although she quashes it. If only it could be Ellis across from her saying those things, instead of the worst man she’s ever met.

“You brought some things to the surface I wanted to keep packed away,” he admits, and the teeth-pulling vulnerability is worse than everything that came before. “I needed that to happen. It would—I don’t want you to go through your time here thinking. . . I hold a grudge. That I hate you.”

“Langdon,” Trinity says. “You do hate me.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you—”

“No, I get it. I mean, if my secret drug addiction got found out by a bitch on her first day, I’d be furious. And if I thought she was a terrible person, I’d definitely take it out on her. But you know what I wouldn’t do? Come back and try to act like nothing happened and we could be simpatico, you fucking self-righteous piece of shit.”

“I don’t think you’re a terrible person,” he says. It’s the quietest she’s ever heard him.

Trinity stands up. “Right. Just stupid and arrogant.”

The anger feels good. She lets it carry her away from him, out of the cafeteria, and through the rest of her shift.

This is the kind of person Trinity Santos is: someone who likes to know when she’s excelling. To be told, and encouraged. The biggest cliché in the book—sparky and sassy on the outside, desperate for approval underneath.

Not a lot of approval going on at home. Don’t blame her parents. They had a lot going on (see alcoholic Grandpa Donnie). She went elsewhere to get what she needed, and when she found it, it was really good. School, which was mostly a grind, but occasionally made her feel like the world outside was opening to greet her; and gymnastics, which showed her how to push and push her body until, for a few seconds that seemed to stretch beyond time, she could escape it entirely and become one intense, exquisite feeling.

Basically, the kind of kid adults love to praise. Cocky, sure, but teachable. She made sure people knew that. She had a best friend, and was mostly happy.

Even after the worst of the bad things happened, she could still count on the nods, the strained, earnest eyes looking into hers, and the words, horded and clutched close. It’s hard now, but you’re a smart, brave girl. You’ll get through this.

She thought she had got through, and left her compulsion for approval behind in the process. Developed a healthy skepticism towards authority, in fact. But as it turns out, hating someone and wanting their respect aren’t mutually exclusive. One might even fuel the other.

What shook her about that day with Langdon—other than getting yelled at by the department golden boy who looked ready to backhand her across the ER, of course—was the way her mouth dried and her stomach clenched, not just from pure fear, but also shame and hurt.

You are a beginner. Your job is to shut up, listen, and learn.

I know! And your job is to teach me!

Now, because of PittFest, she carries that moment with her, tangled up in her grief. For weeks or months she’ll forget about it entirely, and then at the gas station, at home in bed, stalking out of a cafeteria—it rises up and claims her again.

While Trinity would rather yank her shoulder out of its socket again than admit this to herself or anyone else, her conversation with Langdon does cut some of the tension between them. Now that his. . .apology? Backhanded compliment? Self-serving rewrite of their short, horrible history? Who the fuck knows—is out of the way, he seems more comfortable acting the long-suffering resident and she can be frank (hah) about her disgust for him. In her head, that is. During the shifts they share, she’s generically polite, diligently toeing the line between indifference and dislike. That makes it easier to observe when they work a case together, to file his feedback away like she would Ellis’s or Mohan’s. Because one of the worst things about Langdon is that he doesn’t overestimate himself. He is amazing at emergency medicine.

By the lockers after a shift one evening, she finds herself watching him while she grabs her stuff. She had a tricky case that afternoon. 70-year-old male, diabetic with a slew of comorbidities whom EMS trundled in after his neighbors noticed him acting “confused.” With that supremely helpful description to go off of, she did her exam. Labs pointed towards sepsis. Okay, getting warmer.  But infection wasn’t showing. Plus, the patient’s very harried son was driving down from Ohio, per Kiara, and Trinity wanted to have a little more than “Sorry, still checking” when he rolled in. Not because she liked the patient, who could have given Grandpa Donnie a run for his money in the asshole department, but as a point of pride. She does well. She shows promise. Maybe even extraordinary promise.

She was savoring the sound of those words in her head when she realized that Collins, who was supervising her case, had been pulled into trauma one with an overdose patient, leaving—oh sweet Christ, of course—Langdon as the only other senior not otherwise occupied.

He pauses his usually frenetic movement while she reports to him, running a hand through the weird side-part situation he has going on. Whatever fearless moral inventory he’s been doing, it didn’t catch that sin. “Repeat the history?”

Schooling her face to smooth over the annoyance she feels rising, Trinity rattles off what she’s gathered, throwing in the patient’s extensive list of current medications for good measure. Pointing her gaze above and to the right of Langdon’s face, she catches the flicker of plastic beads on his wrist. A friendship bracelet, the kind a little kid would make.

“Metformin?”

She nods. Too far away to read the alphabet beads surrounded by bright, colored plastic, but she thinks she remembers from other cases, when they were forced into closer quarters. Daddy.

His eyes sharpen at her nod. “Any history of renal failure?”

“No, none.” That’s right, he did have kids. Plural. Poor things.

“Other systems beside brain fog before he came in? Nausea, any diarrhea?”

Her brain snaps back into focus; she meets his eyes. “You’re thinking lactic acidosis?”

Langdon nods.

“There’s no history of kidney disease,” Trinity repeats, but while she talks she’s flipping through scenarios, discarding some and holding back others. A puzzle piece is about to click into place.

“If he’s been dehydrated, you could be looking at an acute kidney injury.”

As if to underscore Langdon’s point, Perlah yells at Trinity that her patient’s unresponsive with dropping blood pressure.

Now, hours later, he’s improving with IV fluids, his son’s pulling his hair out at the thought of dear old dad having to move in while he recovers, and Trinity is wishing she could pop the top off Langdon’s skull and root around in his brain. It would be easier than trying to talk to him about it.

Mohan nods goodbye and strides towards the doors. With her gone, Trinity and Langdon are the last ones at the lockers.

“It was in a case report.”

She doesn’t look at him or respond.

“I’ll send you the link.” Langdon shoulders his backpack and yawns.

Trinity snaps the straps of her own backpack against her shoulders. “Not your project, remember?” She’s clocked out, she can be a little shitty. “Keep me out of your recovery journey, please and thank you.”

He stares at the ceiling. Probably doing mental gymnastics to keep the rage out of his expression. She could dash out of the ED, but she wants to keep poking the wound. Doesn’t know why.

“Teaching hospital, Dr. Santos.”

You have enjoyed that title for what, ninety days?

“We’re off the clock, and I didn’t ask.” Now she’s the angry one, of course. Idiot.

“I can feel you burning a hole in the back of my head,” he snaps. “Get over yourself and ask the question.”

“I don’t want you teaching me because you think this is how you unfuck your life,” she hisses.

He’s pissed and for a second she thinks she’s gone too far. But then he breathes, collects himself. “Sometimes what you want to do and your responsibility—they can be the same thing.”

What the hell does that even mean?

Being Langdon, of course he has to twist the knife. “You spend a lot of time convincing yourself to be miserable.”

And then he gets to be the one righteously stalking out.

That conversation sticks with Trinity as much as the coffee chat from hell. She doesn’t tell anyone about it, but it gets so mixed up with the other shit, she forgets which words belong to what encounter. It’s only when Dennis looks at her quizzically for a second before he starts pitching the Hall of Architecture that she remembers she never told him about what Langdon said that night. It had hit too close to the bone.

The Wednesday Dennis and Trinity make it to the Carnegies, she’s bracing for hordes of kids on field trips. Instead, it’s quiet and they find parking outside instead of below the museums in the parking garage. They walk against the wind, towards the sculpture court entrance of the Museum of Art, double doors cut into a wall of glass.

“It smells like snow,” says Dennis. He opens one of the doors for her.

“Those are the deductive skills that make you an ER wizard, Huckleberry.” She bumps him with her elbow as she walks through the door. Hopefully he recognizes the joke. She’s going to try today.

“Stop being an asshole.” He stays at the door, holding it for an elderly couple who beam at him as they shuffle through.

Yeesh, okay.

But when he’s finally inside, he smiles at her. “Let’s get tickets.”

Past the fancy café and expensive gift shop, the museum morphs from glass to dark walls and marble. The atmosphere feels heavier and older. Trinity can see why Dennis loves it, even if it feels a little like a place where a vampire would suck your blood.

The Hall of Architecture is Dennis’s favorite place in the city. When she asked why, he shrugged and said, “It’s hard to explain without sounding completely obvious.”

She thought that meant he wanted her to shut up. When they climbs the stairs and she gets her first look at the purple walls and what feels like miles of yellowed plaster, she understands.

The size of everything is what bowls into you first, but “it’s really big” would be doing this place and its weirdness a disservice. There are doors and archways leading nowhere; statues, massive tombs, lots of carvings. The frieze on the roof of a huge pulpit is so crammed with lifelike bodies that she feels a little sick looking at it, like witnessing a mob crush into each other in slow motion.

She whistles. “Damn.”

Dennis nods.

Trinity points at a doorway to their left. “You know what that one is?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t really pay attention to the labels. Sometimes I try to, but I end up forgetting them.” He shrugs. “It’s more about the feeling I get here.”

She fishes for something funny and cutting to answer with, but. . . hell, she can see where Huckleberry’s coming from. She blows an approving raspberry and walks across the room for a closer look at one of the doors.

A few minutes on her phone reveals that plaster casts used to be all the rage in the 1890s, when the museum was set up. Which, first, what a Huckleberry thing to fall in love with, and second, this is still objectively crazy, right? Who copies the glories of the ancient world and slaps them down in Pittsburgh? She spends a few more minutes Googling Andrew Carnegie who, aside from being obscenely rich and doing the usual shady rich guy things, seems pretty cool. Then pockets her phone and keeps staring. Surrounded by it all, you feel small and uncomplicated.

Maybe that’s why you bring this stuff to Pittsburgh. Like the adult version of what she used to feel in gymnastics, it pulls you out of yourself and into something that can’t be contained or explained. You just have to lean into it.

The problem with feelings like this is that they might seem like forever, but they actually burn out in seconds and you’re left with much less comfortable ones leading to questions like “What am I doing here? Am I a bad person? Am I wasting my life?”

At PTMC, not the Carnegies.

Trinity thought she made the right decision a long time ago, when she clicked “Pre-Med” on her college applications. It’s only easy to act like you have conviction, though—feeling it is harder. Just like with school, and gymnastics, and her brief flirtation with Garcia (another thing she can thank Langdon for torpedoing), and every other girl and boy she’s ever slept with, what she wants most is for someone else to tell her, You made the right choice, the best one. You’re good.

The only thing she feels confident about regularly are her actual medical skills, which should be the most important part. And yet.

Joke’s on Langdon, cause she doesn’t need to convince herself to be unhappy. These days, it’s coming naturally.

The vibes have really taken a turn for the worse, so Trinity scoots back across the shiny floor to a display set up in the middle of the hall. Accordion room dividers turned into a gallery wall for a kids’ art program. Lots of blocky paintings, awkwardly stapled zines, and ceramics. She’d love to hear the conversation that went on when the museum decided to plop them here—it doesn’t exactly fit with the whole “grandeur of the ancient world” theme. There is something charming about it, though. She reads the tag next to what’s either a picture of a house or. . . she has no idea, actually.

Tanner Langdon, 5.

Oh for shit’s sake. Langdon isn’t a rare last name, but she’s pretty sure she’s heard Langdon mention his son’s called Tanner. Which, incidentally, is a hideous name to saddle your baby boy with, but exactly the kind of thing two white people called Frank and Abby would come up with.

So, this goddamn man and his family will not stop hounding her, even on her days off. What a good thing she doesn’t believe in omens. What a bad thing she can never not believe in them as much as she would like.

Someone taps her shoulder. “Fuck!”

It’s Dennis. “Sorry.”

“Maybe just say something next time,” she says through gritted teeth.

“You ready for lunch?”

“At the fancy-schmancy café?” Trinity can think of few places she’d rather go less right now.

Turns out what Dennis has in mind is the Fossil Fuels Café in the bowels of the science museum. It serves things like pizza and dirt pudding and is much more Trinity’s style. They share alfredo pizza and fries and laugh about the hideous Stanley cup Shen’s started bringing on shifts.

Maybe Trinity is just doomed to have all her personal revelations around coworkers now. A couple weeks after the Carnegies, she finds herself on a riverboat tour. Yes, a fucking riverboat, but since seeing plaster casts with Huckleberry turned out to not be the worst thing ever, maybe it’s time to ease up on her standards for cool vs. unbearably lame.

They’re going under a bridge now, and some people on the walking path start waving down at them. The boy standing next to Trinity waves back, looking at her expectantly. She forces a smile; raises her hand half-heartedly, but now they’re almost through and she looks like a moron.

Shoving her hands back into her pockets, Trinity peers at her fellow passengers. Mel’s sister, Becca, goes to a day program that reserved a bunch of tickets right before norovirus started wiping through their staff and clients. It’s plus-ones galore to make up the difference. Becca is one person over from Trinity, standing at the rail between the kid, Harrison, and Mel. Mel’s quizzing Becca and Harrison on the sights they pass, as happy as Trinity’s ever seen her.

She was surprised when Mel invited her. They’re friends—a friendship Trinity worries gets carried on the back of Mel’s decency more than anything else—but so are Mel and Langdon, and he and his family make a much better fit for the whole riverboat scene. But apparently they’re spending the weekend in the Laurel Highlands, which left Trinity, Dr. McKay, and Harrison, McKay’s son.

McKay emerges from the stairwell, holding a water bottle. She slips next to Trinity and asks her to pass it to Harrison. “Enjoy, this was almost four dollars,” she tells him.

“That’s a lot?”

“When you can get it from the tap at home, yeah.” She smiles at Trinity. “What’d I miss?”

“Uh, Acrisure Stadium?” is the best Trinity can come up with. McKay is such a weird combination of disarmingly open and steel-tight closed. She throws Trinity off. With most other people in the Pitt, she can guess how they’ll react to what she says. McKay’s like trying to look into a window that has blackout blinds.

“Overrated,” she now says cheerfully. “How’re you doing, by the way? I see you at work a lot, but we’re not really bumping elbows these days.”

Trinity eyes her beadily. Is that an actual how are you? Or a polite one? Probably polite. “Okay. My shoulder’s doing pretty good. That’s a relief.”

“I bet.” The wind whips McKay’s bangs over the crown of her head. “Other than the shoulder, though—how are you?”

You asked for this, bitch, Trinity thinks, turning to face the woman directly. “Not great.” She’s unable to keep the bright, mocking tang out of her voice. “Pretty shitty, actually.”

She’s fully expecting McKay to change the subject. It’s not that the other woman strikes her as weak (the opposite, actually), but polite is easier to deal with, especially when you’re trying to enjoy a day out with your kid.

Instead, McKay smiles ruefully. “I figured.”

It’s a little humiliating that she’s so easy to read. Maybe, secretly, also a relief.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

McKay nods like that makes perfect sense and turns away to face the water. The blow of missed opportunity hits Trinity so hard, she decides fuck it. “Someone told me something,” she blurts out. The words feel clumsy as she tries to shape them. “I can’t get it out of my head.”

“Do you know why?”

How does McKay do it, make you feel so reasonable? Her patient satisfaction scores must be through the roof. It probably comes from the kind of crummy, hard-won experience that some people are able to polish into hard, bright, little pearls, while others push it down farther and farther and end up rotting from the inside out. McKay is very careful about what parts of her life she reveals at work, but stuff still gets out.

“I’m not trying to be an asshole,” Trinity says, the words still feeling physically painful to bring up. “But, um. Are you in NA?”

McKay blinks. “Yeah. You want to talk about recovery?”

“Maybe? Not for me, I’m not, like—I don’t know. I just have questions, I guess.”

“O-kay.” The smile McKay gives her is quizzical, but it’s still a smile, so way better than any version of this conversation she was imagining. “Why don’t we go inside? It’s quieter there.”

Trinity watches her push off from the railing and tap Mel on the shoulder, probably asking her to keep an eye on Harrison. Then she’s striding past the metal chairs and tables scattered around the deck and Trinity goes after her, feeling sick to her stomach. She’s started something she can’t walk away from, and that suddenly feels like a really, really bad idea.

The second deck has beige wallpaper and scalloped half-curtains, like it hasn’t been redecorated since the eighties. The tour guide’s voice fades into the background, piped belowdecks by speakers. When Trinity ducks into the bathroom, it reeks of cigarettes, like every fume let loose before smoking bans was cordoned off here. The smell does nothing to help her stomach, which feels like it’s slamming into her pelvis, only to bob back up like the contents of a lava lamp. A panicked reaction, but none of the rest of her feels panicked. Just removed, like—

Goddamnit, she’s about to have a panic attack.

At least she knows how to deal with those. She breaths in and out, doing her best to focus on the inhales and exhales instead of the smell of the bathroom and everything else cramming into her head. Stares at herself in the mirror for a minute and heads back out.

McKay’s picked a table in the middle of the deck, away from the other groups who are piling by the windows. She’s bought two more bottles of water, and slides one over when Trinity sits across from her.

“So,” she says, “what questions do you have?”

Trinity rattles off her experience with Grandpa Donnie, explaining the principles are something she learned from him but never tried herself. “It’s all about giving up, right? You’re supposed to figure out you can’t do it on your own?”

“Do what?”

She feels herself bristling. “No offense, but you’re the addict here, so—”

“We’re not talking about me, though,” McKay says, infuriatingly reasonable. “This is about you. What I think about NA probably isn’t going to help.”

Fucking fantastic.

McKay leans forward. “You said you’re hung up on what someone told you.” She repeats her question from the top deck. “Do you know why?”

“He said I was convincing myself to be miserable. He’s an idiot. But maybe he’s onto something, I don’t know.”

“Was it Langdon?”

She’d really hoped it wasn’t that obvious.

“No! Why would you think that?”

McKay shrugs. “Sounds like something Langdon would say. And you guys definitely got off on the wrong foot. He’s got a lot of stuff to work through right now.”

Thanks, Trinity’s figured out that much for herself. “You know it was me who reported him?”

McKay nods. “Sorry. Down there the walls have ears. You did the right thing, though. I know that probably doesn’t help.”

“Then why say it?”

“Because it’s important for you to know that, so you do the right thing next time too.”

“Shit, I hope there isn’t a next time.”

“There always is,” McKay says. “Trust me.”

Trinity knows she’s right. She squeezes her water bottle, feeling the sides crunch. “He tried to talk to me a couple months ago. I guess he was trying to apologize. I really, really don’t want him to do that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I like staying pissed at him.”

McKay smiles. “That can make things easier.”

“Yeah, but it’s just—he’s really good at his job, okay? And he acts like we can go back and start over and if we did that—I mean, I would be a better doctor. I know I would.”

“We have a lot of great doctors at PTMC. Trinity, you don’t need to forgive Langdon to be a good doctor.”

This is the most naked, the most needy, she’s ever been. Trinity realizes the panic is gone; she’s crossed the line and now all she wants to do is talk, carve out what’s been inside, wounding her.

“I know,” she says, “but if I don’t forgive him, I stay like this. Which I don’t want to do, it’s fucking miserable. The fucked-up thing is, I don’t know how not be angry either.”

Here’s the problem: she wants to be sure that Langdon’s venom is still there, that even if he’s been able to fool himself, she still knows he’s just trying to cross her off his recovery checklist. The reason she can’t do that goes back to her accident last year. It feels like an aftershock of PittFest, even though all the drama was on her end, contained in her experiences instead of spilling out to the rest of the ED.

It was a car accident. No fault on her part, she always feels the need to add, even though no one asks. Who’s surprised if you total your car in Pittsburgh? The shitty exits and nonsensical layout are made for that kind of thing. And Trinity may be a risk-taker, but not when it comes to her car.

That car, which saw her through most of college and all of med school, that still has the stupid bumper sticker her dad bought her, was rammed off course in an intersection, its left side caved in. She has strange, out-of-order memories of the crash itself: first she’s out on the sidewalk, staring at her car. How did I get out of there? Then she’s back inside, her body jerked like it’s in the grip of a giant hand, realizing that this is very, very bad. She’s on the sidewalk, pacing up and down and realizing that the pain radiating from the right side of her body is familiar. She’s dislocated her shoulder. Then back in the car, clambering over the console and out the passenger door, pinning her right arm to her chest with her left, because it’s floppy and useless.

She’s not sure how accurate any of those images are. By the time things started feeling linear again, she was back on the sidewalk, walking in a tight, tiny circle, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

When she’s strapped in a stretcher, blaring down the street, she asks the paramedic which hospital they’re taking her to. “Please tell me it’s not PTMC.”

“Sorry, ma’am, it’s the closest one,” he says, leaning over her as he reaches for something. “Don’t worry, they actually have a pretty good ED—”

“I know,” Trinity groans, “I work there.”

“Hey, no shit! I thought you looked familiar.”

Trinity closes her eyes and prepares for the worst.

The next time she remembers opening them, the strip lights of the Pitt are flashing past and Drs. Shen and Langdon stare down at her.

“Yo, Dr. Santos,” Shen says, “didn’t you just clock out?”

Trinity realizes that, as much as she despises Langdon, she might hate Shen more right now.

“I got in a car crash,” she tells them, getting the uncomfortable feeling that the words she’s saying aren’t as clear and logical outside of her head as they sound in it.

“We gathered,” says Langdon.

Okay, she hates him most. Order has been restored.

“It’s dislocated. Probably anterior.”

They look at each other over her head. “Yeah, probably,” Shen says at the same time Langdon gives her a clipped, “We’ll need to examine it and confirm.”

“Duh,” she growls. “Just know that I’m right.”

“Oh,” says Shen, “this is going to be fun.”

But he disappears from her memories soon after, and then it’s just Langdon and a night nurse she doesn’t know. “I really wish you weren’t here tonight,” she says at one point, and he gives her an exasperated look. “I know, Dr. Santos, that’s the second time you’ve told me that.”

She doesn’t remember the first time. She also doesn’t remember when she started crying. It hurts so fucking bad.

“This might be the worst day of my life,” she slurs to the nurse, who looks at her sympathetically and responds in Tagalong. “Don’t worry. He’s an asshole, but he’s really good.” She’s clearly picked up on the vibe.

Langdon clears his throat. “We’re giving you a muscle relaxant and then we’ll do a closed reduction. Then I’m ordering a surgical consult since this is your second time dislocating it. Okay?”

She can push through pain. She’s done it enough times. In a couple hours, this will be a memory that she’ll cope with or not—her life and her body will be under her control again.

“Okay, Santos?”

It’s going to be really annoying if he makes her respond to everything. Trinity nods tightly.

Abbot sticks his head in when they have her in traction. A bedsheet is wrapped around her chest, the nurse holding onto the ends of it, and she feels like she’s in some demented BabyBjörn. “How’re we doing?”

The promise of getting her shoulder back in place has obliterated any embarrassment she had, but Abbot’s face opens up a whole new can of anxieties. “My car’s totaled,” she blurts . “I don’t know how me or Dennis are gonna get to work, and I have a shift tomorrow—”

“I think the day shift’ll survive without you,” he says with the sardonic edge that makes new residents either skitter away in confusion or cream their pants. “Relax, Santos, we’re just happy to see you in one piece. How’s she doing, Langdon?”

Trinity leans back against the bed. Langdon’s good, but unless he’s Jesus Christ Himself, she’s not getting out of this without recovery time. Her brain veers, trying to comprehend what weeks outside of this place would even look like. Or maybe it’s the muscle relaxants. When she comes back to herself, Abbot is gone, and it sinks in that she’s practically alone with Langdon, in some of the worst physical pain she’s felt in years.

“I want to go home.”

“We’ll get you there,” he promises, and she thinks that maybe, hopefully, Trinity Santos has receded from his view and she’s become another patient to him. A case to tick off. “I’m going to take your hand, and then I need you to breathe in deeply.”

There were guided meditations the therapist she saw in high school recommended. Focus on the breath, this moment is the only one that matters. Tries to bring some of that back, but then his other hand is on her shoulder, gripping the skin and muscles, and she feels cold and sick and her whole body jerks as irresistibly as when she was in the car, pulled back to before med school and college and therapy. The time when her body will be her own again seems impossibly far away.

The hand on her shoulder is gone. She’s still bound up in the sheet, her right hand still being gripped by his, and Langdon is still talking to her. “. . .fine. Santos? Look at me.”

She looks. Stupid hair, baby bracelet, and all. He seems so clear, sharp in the foreground of her vision. A pillar.

“It’s going to be okay,” Frank Langdon tells her.

Trinity doesn’t believe him. But she nods.

He goes back to massaging her shoulder. The nurse coaches her through breathing, but the whole time Trinity keeps her gaze glued to where his hand grips her wrist, like it’s the center of a maze she’s trying to solve.

“I’m going to try external rotation.” His voice is somewhere above her head, and he lets go of her shoulder to wrap that hand around the inside of her elbow. He’s slowly, painstakingly stretching her arm out. Standing up, he moves his right hand from her wrist to her palm, clasping it like a handshake. He extends her arm out even more, turning it so her knuckles are facing up, then lifts her whole arm up.

The bone pops back into place.

Pain ebbs so quickly she starts to get dizzy. Her eyes snap up to meet Langdon’s and she sees his face relax into its typical self-satisfaction. Her stomach and head lurch in unison.

“Oh fuck. Move!”

He’s barely out of splatter range when she throws up all over the bed.

Later, when the blankets and sheets have been whisked away and replaced, and the nurse has wiped her face like a baby’s, after her arm’s been secured in a sling, Langdon watches while she tries to navigate her phone one-handed.

“If you’re feeling nauseous, you might want to give screens a break.”

Trinity rolls her eyes without looking up. Dennis needs to know why she won’t be home tonight, not to mention she needs to email the program coordinator to explain that she’s moved from resident to patient. “Yeah, thanks for that.”

He leans an arm against the doorframe, raps his knuckles against it, and then turns back, like he can’t help himself. “Word of advice? Take the time and let the damn thing heal.”

She does look up then. “You do realize I was being sarcastic, right? Not asking you to keep talking?”

The smile he gives her is quick and humorless. “I’m not an idiot, Santos.”

Highly debatable. “Well, I’m not about to start mainlining benzos so. . . rest easy, I guess.” She’s too tired to think of anything smarter.

It bothers her, though. Bothers her intensely that he was the one to see her like that. Even more that he reached out and reassured her. It’s going to be okay.

Her arm’s fucked, she has no car, and she’s about to take an unexpected, unwelcome break from the one thing that keeps her feeling like a human being. It is most definitely not okay.

As she’s thinking about all of this, more stretchers roll into the ED, more crises brew, and Langdon is gone.

Waiting on the surgical consult, she sleeps for hours. Nurses cycle through to check on her. Around nine in the morning, when she’s finally awake, Dennis comes to see her. He’s been on shift for a few hours and already has that harried ED glaze to his eyes. He still hugs her, and she actually finds it comforting. More than that, she’s so grateful for him it scares her. When he leaves, she yanks the blanket up over her head and sleeps some more.

She expects Dennis when she wakes up and hears another knock, but it’s actually Dr. Robby. Trinity scrabbles with her feet to push herself upright. Even though she’s off-balance and feels like shit, the guilt is automatic, like he’s caught her sleeping on the job.

“How’s it going, Dr. Santos?” His face always wears this gentle, mildly exasperated look. It puts her on guard.

“I’m fine.”

He hmms, as if this isn’t the most demonstrably stupid thing she’s said since being wheeled in. She lifts her chin as her cheeks prickle.

“Dr. Abbot said you might be anxious about taking leave.”

She gets why they do it, but the whisper network those two have going on is annoying as hell. Get a room already.

“Does it really matter?” Trinity nods at her arm. “It’s not like I’m going to be able to do anything with this for a while.”

He smiles, even though there’s nothing funny about what she said. His eyes crinkle at the corners. “Sounds like you’re being hard on yourself.”

She’s an overachieving medical resident. No shit. Also, she and her attending aren’t exactly best buds, but is this not maybe a little of the pot calling the kettle black? After PittFest, it took him forever to even consider a sabbatical.

“Don’t burn yourself out, Santos. We need you here, when you’re healed.”

Now it’s her turn to hmm awkwardly. Kind as the words are, and as much as she craves that kind of acknowledgement, she doesn’t know how to receive it when it’s offered. Also, considering how she’s wiped out in a hospital bed, it’s not like he’d use the time to deliver a withering performance review.

Robby’s also not a liar.

“Still waiting on that surgical consult?”

She nods. “Sorry for taking the bed.”

“Don’t be. We’re glad they brought you here.”

He turns to go, and Trinity has a jittery urge to ask the question that’s been forming at the back of her mind while he’s been talking. “What are the things you tell families? When someone’s going to die. It’s Hawaiian or something, I forget.”

“Oh. Ho’oponopono.”

That’s a lot of o’s. “Um, what are the things?”

“I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.”

She takes a deep breath, letting some of the pain, and the fear, and the embarrassment—everything, basically—go. “Okay. Thanks.” She tries to smile. It probably looks like a rictus. “I think I’m going to go back to sleep till surgery gets their shit together.”

She’s afraid he’ll stay, maybe ask why she’s curious about Hawaiian grief practices or bring up talking to a hospital social worker. With all respect to therapy, Trinity would rather be dipped in acid than do that right now. Instead, Dr. Robby nods, gives her another kind/pissed smile, and leaves.

Trinity burrows back under the blanket and tries to take deeper breaths as her thoughts rev. Worries about leave, about the consult (with the luck she’s been having, she’ll find herself reviewing treatment options with Garcia) and how fucked up her arm actually is bounce off the things Robby told her. She quickly dismisses the first two, but the others won’t leave her.

I forgive you. Please forgive me.

Well, she doesn’t forgive Langdon. Couldn’t even if she wanted to. And why, exactly, would he need to extend the same thing to her? Sorry I revealed your criminally irresponsible, highly dangerous drug habit—please.

So he wasn’t a complete ass to her last night. That’s a job expectation, no matter how hard. Not something to add to her ongoing existential crisis. Right?

No, because in some fucked way their personalities are similar enough that she can feel how tough it must have been for him.

It’s going to be okay.

Langdon has terrible bedside manner. He does his best work (and it is really good, she’s forced to admit) when the patient is unconscious or so far gone they’ve passed the point where a reassuring smile or a pep talk makes a difference. Pausing to say what he did to her took effort, and thought. Trinity knows it instinctually.

Fuck.

She ends up talking to a surgeon she’s never met before, who thinks she can recover without surgery—for now. The chances of her arm popping again, and doing more damage when it does, are higher. So Trinity takes her leave, is meticulous with physical therapy, and tries not to let herself see the accident as some sort of omen, or physical symptom of the depression she can never entirely shake. She tries not to think about the time with Langdon at all. Does a terrible job at it, and when she comes back to work it’s even harder since they’re regularly forced back into each other’s orbit.

Talking to McKay doesn’t fix anything, but it feels like a build-up, from PittFest to her accident and Langdon’s attempt to clear the air. A build-up demands a payoff. While Trinity’s scared, she’s never been a coward.

The morning of the shift after the cruise, she waits till the hallway by the lockers is almost empty. Rushes in, plunks her shit down, and stares at her lock while she speaks. “You can send me the link.”

“Sorry?”

She turns to face Langdon. He’s staring at her, Tupperware lunch container half-out of his backpack. “The case report about the kidney injury. From, like, a few months ago? You can email it to me.”

“Are you sure?”

She thinks he can read between the lines enough to see what she’s offering. “For now.”

His eyebrows rise, but she can see the corner of his mouth twitch upward for a second, like maybe he’s happy—or, more likely, smug—with this surrender. Trinity resists the urge to break that look apart. Still, whatever she’s doing doesn’t feel as bad as she expected. She spins around and starts walking towards the noise and rush of the rest of the ED. “Don’t get used to it,” she throws over her shoulder. “It’s just something new I’m trying.”

She keeps it together for three weeks. During that time, Trinity is surprised by how not-terrible getting along with Langdon is.

It’s not that they suddenly become friends (puke) or start swapping jokes and smiling at each other (double puke). Well, there was a time he gave her a “good job” after she managed to calm down a frantic teen and drain her peritonsillar abscess. It felt pretty good, so she wasn’t exactly frowning at him then. That was hardly normal, though. Most of the time, they’re just learning how to do the whole resident-senior resident thing without a big, flaming ball of animosity between them. It’s hard, but the results aren’t bad.

She can see some of the tension drain out of Dr. Robby when he looks across the ED and doesn’t see them pretending they’re not at each other’s throats. A less tense Robby means a marginally less tense workplace, and Trinity flatters herself that this has a drip-down effect everyone, patients, residents, and attendings, can benefit from. So her sacrifice isn’t just for herself—she’s nobly making the Pitt a better place for everyone! Great job. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Outside all of that, she thinks that maybe, in some small way, she’s doing what she talked to McKay about. Trying to do things differently, be a better person. She has no idea if it’s working, but she’s stopped crying at gas stations, which has to be a good thing.

“Just slow down,” Langdon says at one point when she’s spitting differentials out at him. “Think them through. You’ve got it, you just need to focus.”

And, remarkably, Trinity doesn’t throw out Slow down? In the ED? back at him. Because she gets what he’s saying, and, more importantly, it doesn’t feel like a personal attack. He sounds like he really thinks the correct diagnosis is at her fingertips. Like all she needs is to pause between the inhale of breath and her next word and she’ll have it. Maybe it’s the same way with forgiving someone. Maybe, when she’s ready, if she just stops and lets her thoughts settle, she’ll see her resentment fading. Maybe Langdon meant what he said about them learning from this—maybe he does want to teach her.

All good things must come to an end, and this one starts unraveling on the back-half of a Thursday shift with a CVC insertion. The woman has some of the worst vein scarring Trinity’s seen. She’s crashing from an intracranial hemorrhage, and Trinity’s found the femoral, got the needle in—she’s almost home free, can feel the way her body will relax when she’s placed the wire—when someone knocks into her from behind. Her hand jerks, the needle plunges to the side—she’s lost the vein.

“Fuck!”

“How’re we doing on that line, Dr. Santos?” Langdon barks from the head of the gurney. He definitely heard her.

“Lost it,” she snaps, teeth clenched so hard she can feel tension racking up and down her jaw.

“Goddamnit.” Like a sped-up tape, he’s suddenly at her side. Now she’s on even higher alert, somehow, and her hand spasms again.

“I got it!”

“There’s no time.” He takes her whole set-up in in a glance, dismisses it with a frustrated huff. “Your grip is shit.”

He grabs the ultrasound probe, pulls a new syringe up, shoves it into her hand. Trinity doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, but her body takes over while her brain melts down. She locks her eyes on the ultrasound, inserts the needle—

He clamps down on her hand, the one holding the syringe. He forces it down, against the patient’s body. “Grab it,” he says about the needle. When she’s not going fast enough for him, he curses, stabs a finger between her middle and index fingers, and jerks her index and thumb up until she’s got the needle gripped between them, anchoring it, with the rest of her hand still steadied by the patient’s body.

“Feed the wire in,” he commands, and then he’s gone, back to the head of the patient with Mohan and Jesse.

Trinity finishes the line placement. Once the patient is stabilized and headed to neurosurgery, she strips her PPE off and tries to breathe, throw off the encounter with Langdon. It’s a pothole on this road, not a sinkhole widening and gobbling up whatever’s in its path.

She can’t do it.

Other doctors have guided her hands before. Garcia, Ellis, Robby, and Mohan have all stepped in when she needed it. But they weren’t Langdon, and they weren’t using her like a puppet. There was something—desire or trust—between her and the others that softened the uncanniness of feeling someone else move her body for her.

She hates that feeling. It’s a queasy reminder of the parts of gymnastics she doesn’t like to think about. At the time, she trusted her coach completely. It only became a bad memory later.

Trinity. It was just your hand.

Nope. It’s not working.

By end of shift, she’s shaky and still fighting off bursts of chest- and stomach-tightening anxiety. Her mouth tastes sour, and she knows she’s not going to sleep well tonight. She runs into Langdon at the lockers, and it’s too much; she knows in her bones that thinking she could get past anything with him was a colossal mistake.

“Good work today,” he says, shouldering his backpack.

“Don’t ever fucking touch me again,” she says.

His back stiffens. “What?”

She’s walking away from him. Still scared. And now, stupidly, guilty, because, yes, he sounds angry, but who wouldn’t if someone bit their head off out of nowhere like she just did?

Because he doesn’t remember this afternoon. She knows he doesn’t.

So, like a dumbass, Trinity turns abruptly, making an awkward circle as she comes back to face him.

“Can we talk?” she spits.

“It’s seven o’clock,” Langdon snaps back.

“Look, I know you have NA or family dinner or whatever to get to, but this is kind of important.”

She turns and starts walking. He can follow her, or not. His choice.

She’s not sure where to go at first. ED lore has it that the roof is where the attendings go when they need a breather, and some of the residents and med students copy them. There’s no way Trinity is going to risk running into Robby or Abbot, or even Shen. Instead, she heads for the empty wing she found Dennis in last year. There’ve been plenty of promises, but so far no action on hiring the people to staff it. Picking a room at random, she flips on the light. When she turns around, Langdon is in the doorway.

“Are you coming in or what?” she asks.

He actually looks nervous.

She snorts. “Worried I’m going to shank you with a scalpel or something?”

“I don’t know, maybe?” He sounds more aggravated than angry now. “You’re not exactly acting stable.”

“God, how do you always sound like a douche?”

“Why’d you drag me up here, Santos?”

Now he looks tired, because they’ve slid backwards into their old roles, where he’s the professional and she’s the problem. You try and try, and try, and for what? It’s impossible to grow beyond your personality, at least if you’re her. Probably if you’re him too. They’re too fucking alike.

That’s how she knows he doesn’t remember earlier with the CVC, because if their places were reversed, she probably wouldn’t either.

All of this is too ugly and messily emotional to blurt out, so she just raises her palms, shrugs. “You win.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m unstable, I’m stupid, I’m a shit doctor—whatever.”

“Wait, is this about placing that wire?”

Trinity closes her eyes and gives her head a tiny shake, trying to reorient herself. When she thinks of these kinds of confrontations, she never imagines the other person answering.

Langdon, of course, keeps talking. “Correcting your technique doesn’t mean you’re stupid, we teach at PTMC—”

“I’m fucking well aware,” she snaps. Why does she keep hearing that excuse from assholes? Well, and Robby.

“Then where the hell is this coming from?” Langdon says, and she’s pulled away from memories of better attendings to the asshole standing in front of her. All the anger, shame and anxiety—the acidic fog she’s felt rising in the last few hours—rolls back in and the words she meant to say come back.

“I was trying to be better!” She hates how raw that sounds. When she was pouring her heart out to McKay, at least she knew she was a kind person. At least when Langdon blew up on her her first day, she’d managed to keep it together. Not a word or sound or anything to show how scared she was.

“I don’t want to be like this,” she continues. “You said we could learn from the shit that went down—I’d love to, okay? Thinking about my first shift and PittFest and—and all of that makes me miserable. But you scare me, and you fucking piss me off, and I can’t get rid of that, and I don’t think you can either, so, yes, that probably makes me a bad doctor and a garbage person—”

“Wait—”

“Christ, fucking let me finish! That’s another thing, you always have to be saying something. And you know what? It’s really fucking disrespectful and it gets so old so quickly. I should know!”

It’s pretty good advice (again, she should know), but instead of listening, Langdon has a look on his face like he’s found something moldy at the back of the fridge. “I scare you?”

Her anger burns hot. “Fucking duh! You’re bigger than me, you’re my superior—you have my life in your hands, man.”

“I thought the same thing about you,” he says. “That day.”

“Get out of your ass. I’m never going to be any kind of threat to you.”

“It didn’t feel like that then.”

“I hope I never get like you,” she snarls.

Langdon scoffs.

“I fucking mean it. I want to be better because you’re oblivious, and blind, and somehow I thought forgiving you would—”

Her mouth has run completely away from her. Trinity feels like she’s come untethered; like she’s standing outside herself while her words become more and more jumbled and make less and less sense. She sees Langdon’s face change again, going back to the moldy food expression. “Dr. Santos,” he says, and then louder, when she doesn’t stop. “Dr. Santos!”

I’m scaring him now, Trinity realizes. Even that sick little thrill isn’t enough to raise her out of the hole she’s dug herself into. She shuts up, gasping at him through a rising tide of panic.

“Can you take a deep breath?” Langdon asks.

“The hell?” she gasps.

“Come on. Breathe with me, okay?” He inhales and puffs it out theatrically, like he’s an actor in some cringey video tutorial.

I know about breathing! she wants to scream, but finds herself mirroring him instead, pulled back to her therapist’s office, the riverboat bathroom, a room in the ED.

I’m going to take your hand and then I need you to breathe in deeply. It’s going to be okay.

Of course it works. Of course she comes back to herself and the yellowish cast of the light, and how it makes the dark screen of the TV bolted to the wall reflect them standing, staring at each other.

Langdon breaks the silence. “With deep breathing, you bring more oxygen into your brain. It makes the vagus nerve kick in. Kind of like giving a dehydrated man a glass of water.”

Trinity rolls her eyes. “Thanks. In the, like, nine years I’ve been studying medicine, that never came up before.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think about it much until I got into recovery.” His eyes rove around the room before coming back to hers. “Santos, let’s get a coffee.”

How is he not completely drained? She is.

“Didn’t go so well when we tried that, remember?”

“You said you wanted to talk. Let’s really talk.” He looks around the room again. “Also, this place is fucking creepy.”

“Pretty good place for a scalpel murder.”

He snorts. “I’m going. You in?”

They steer clear of the hospital cafeteria and its burnt coffee. Trinity follows Langdon’s car out of the parking garage to a chain diner she’s never been to before. Looks like the kind of place you can take little, screamy kids to, so it makes sense he’d be comfortable here. Trinity, who’s had a strict policy of avoidance towards screamy kids since she stopped being one herself, feels completely out of place.

Langdon waits until she gets out of her car, then falls in step with her across the parking lot. He’s clogged up her thoughts for months, but she’s never seen him outside of the hospital before. It’s weird.

They don’t say anything. She doesn’t even make a jibe when he opens the door for her. None of this is how she imagined things going when she decided to talk to him this evening, and Trinity doesn’t know what to think or feel or plan. She knows this will only last seconds, a minute or two at most, before she begins to calculate, figure out the balance and angles of the situation. The blankness is still almost unbearably frightening.

Not helping her fear are the boxes of cookies that greet them at the counter by the host stand. Each one has an uncanny, frosted smile. Nothing that’s about to be eaten should be smiling.

They’re seated at a window booth, in the middle of tired families, couples in football hoodies, and old men in ball caps and button-downs. At least Langdon, still in scrubs like her and family-less, looks awkward and out of place too. The mirrors look like magnified versions of the TV in the hospital room they just left. She tries to push back the nauseous feeling that this is a purgatorial loop they’re doomed to keep repeating.

Trinity orders an ice cream sundae; Langdon a coffee. When the waitress leaves, he reaches into his backpack and pulls out his lunch Tupperware.

“Are you serious?”

“What?” He takes out a wrap. Trinity thinks about his wife making it, and that’s another thing about this crazy night that feels deeply sad. She cuts her eyes at their waitress, who’s grabbing plates from another table.

“She’s not going to care.” He takes a bite.

“God, just try to finish it before she comes back. You better leave one hell of a tip.”

Langdon rolls his eyes, but finishes the wrap in about two bites. He’s stowing the Tupperware back in his backpack when the waitress drops off his coffee. “Sundae’s coming soon, honey.”

There’s a long, dark birthmark on her arm. Trinity’s drawn to it, not out of disgust, but curiosity. When the woman leaves, she turns back to Langdon and finds him giving her that annoying smirk. “Think she’s had a melanoma screening?”

“With it being that big, I hope she has,” Trinity says brusquely. “But it’s not asymmetrical and the color’s normal, so she’s probably fine.”

“Still. Hard to turn it off.”

Maybe that smirk isn’t meant to be superior. Maybe it’s recognition. Recognizing that Frank Langdon is a human being capable of care has been the crux of Trinity’s issues for months, but thinking of him being able to see the similarities between them as much as she can is one of the most uncomfortable things about this whole damn day.

“I said I didn’t want to be like you, remember?” she blurts out.

He knocks a Splenda packet against the tabletop before ripping the top off and emptying it into his mug. “Which means you’re worried you’re already like me, right?”

Shit.

“Yes,” she says, because there’s no way to effectively back out of this.

“Okay, let’s break it down.” He slurps from the mug, bringing his bracelet to her eye level again. “You’re not a man, not married, and not an addict. So it can’t be those things.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Treat it like a differential diagnosis,” Langdon says. “What are your other options here?”

She doesn’t want to play along. “You didn’t hear what I said at the hospital? About you being an oblivious dick?”

“Those are symptoms, not the cause. Also, that would mean you think that you’re a oblivious dick, which seems unlikely.”

“Just because you’re crap at self-awareness—”

“No one’s that self-aware, Santos.”

That stops Trinity in her tracks. “Huh?”

“No one—okay, very few people—think they’re that far beyond help. You can’t sustain thinking of yourself that way—you’d just give up.”

“Wow. Your sponsor must love you.” Her tone is mocking, but Trinity means it.

“I’m a good student,” Langdon says, with a flash of the old sureness she remembers from that first day. It disappears fast, though. “Doesn’t matter. If being smart had anything to do with it, there’d be a whole lot less drug addicts.”

Like when he pulled out his lunch, Trinity feels a phantom pain. He’s not saying anything she doesn’t already know, but it reminds her of being on the boat with McKay, and how beyond the fear of being honest she found a craving to get all the complicated, bitter things she was feeling out in the open. That, more than anything else, is what makes her decide to be honest with him.

Of course, right then is when the waitress comes back with her ice cream.

“Here you go. Anything else you two need? Can I get you some more coffee?”

Trinity somehow missed that, in addition to chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and vanilla ice cream, this thing came with a whole-ass ice cream bar stuck in it. She pulls it out and takes a bite while the waitress pours coffee for Langdon.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person order one of those,” he says when they’re alone again.

She gives him a fake smile and takes another bite out of spite. This would be a great time to lose the weird thread of emotional intimacy overtaking the conversation. But, after all the agonizing and yelling, it turns out she can be brave. And she wants to be honest. It’s something someone with extraordinary promise would do. She sticks the bar back into the already-melting sundae.

“You acted like you were the only person in the world my first shift,” she says. “Maybe that’s it.”

“What?”

“The differential diagnosis, dickhead.”

“Ah.” He leans into his hand, cupping his chin in his palm. It’s a very Robby move, which throws her off balance. Also, she must really have broken him, because he’s not even reacting to the dickhead part of what she just said. “The only person in the world?”

“You know how in TV shows you’ve got series regulars? And then recurring characters, and guest stars? But in real life, it’s not broken down like that, it’s just people. And they all matter as much as you. You didn’t treat me like a person. I have trouble sometimes—a lot—treating other people like, um, people. That’s what I meant.”

He thinks for a minute. She wants to fish around in the sundae glass to give her hands something to do while the silence stretches, but that would look so douchey.

“Yeah,” Langdon says finally. “That’s fair.”

“Really?” If she had eaten the ice cream, now would be the perfect time for an elaborate spit-take.

“I was really hard on you that day.” It has to be hard to admit that, which is probably why he follows it up with, “You were being really fucking reckless, though. And annoying.”

She wants to roll her eyes again. She doesn’t. “Dude, I know—about the annoying part, I—” Stop. You’ve spent the last hour ripping him a new asshole. Ease up.

“I mean,” she grits out, “that’s fair.”

You didn’t treat me like a person. He is a person.

“I’m not saying I’m Mother Teresa or anything,” Langdon continues. “I was an asshole to you. Trust me, I know that. But I’m not up my own ass all the time, and I don’t think you are either, Santos.”

Trinity blinks. “Sorry. There were a lot of asses in what you just said, I’m going to need you to walk that back for me.”

He groans. “I mean you do treat people like people. Isn’t Whitaker your roommate?”

“It just worked out well,” she says automatically. Unlike Dennis, she’s not a snitch.

“He told me you helped him out during a really tough time.”

Goddamn it, Huckleberry.

“And what about the kid at PittFest? That horrible old guy with the kidney injury?”

“You mean when I’m doing my job?”

“Look, it’s possible to half-ass your job, even if it’s emergency medicine. You don’t.”

This time, Trinity does grab her spoon and go for a big bite of soupy vanilla, because she has no idea how to respond to any of this.

“And,” Langdon says, “you’re—” he searches for the right word. “Listening to me sometimes?”

She swallows. “Cut it out.”

“I know it’s not easy for you.”

“Is it easy for you?” Trinity asks. Her mouth is sticky.

“No, not all the time. You are a lot like me,” he concedes. “That’s hard to deal with.”

“Does it make you feel bad about yourself?”

“Not really. It’s more that you think you know everything , and I know you think you know, but I’ve been at this longer—I know that you don’t.”

“I don’t think I know everything!”

“You act like you do.”

That’s true.

“Anyway,” Langdon says, “I have enough to feel like shit about on my own.”

“I don’t feel bad about reporting you,” Trinity blurts. “Mostly.”

He gives her a flat stare. “Remember what you just said about series regulars?”

“That’s not me making this about me,” she argues. “I need you—”

Langdon lets out a bitter laugh.

“Okay, I think it’s important you know that. You made your life shit. Not me.”

“Jesus, Santos. I know.”

Sometimes I don’t, she thinks, but doesn’t say. That would prove his point even more.

Silence stretches again. She slurps more ice cream, looks out into the dark parking lot. “I’m sorry. For interrupting you.”

He grunts.

Trinity taps her spoon against the rim of her glass. “You have your family. Kids.” She watches the sprinkles she’s knocking loose tumble onto the tabletop. “That’s got to help.”

“It does,” he says, with a depth of feeling she used to think he was incapable of.

She thinks about Grandpa Donnie, who her dad still loves, and thinks she may finally understand, a little, why that is.

“You were a prick on that first shift, but you weren’t always.”

He looks at her, and Trinity, after all this time, maybe understands what they can give to each other.

“When you reset my shoulder, I was really messed up. Um, when I was a kid, I did competitive gymnastics. That was the first time I dislocated it. And some really. . . crummy things happened to me around that time. The accident kind of brought back some of those memories. That’s one of the reasons I was so out of it. And because it was you.” She blows out her exhale. “If you tell anyone this, I’m never talking to you again, but you were. . . way nicer than I was expecting. Which was confusing, but it also helped.” Her throat’s starting to hurt. Langdon’s hands are around his mug and he’s just looking at her. What did she think he was that night? A pillar.

“Langdon? I blew up at you when I got back, but I knew you didn’t hate me. That’s what makes this so confusing.”

“’This?’”

“You said you could teach me to be a better doctor,” Trinity says, and here it is, finally unwrapped and bare, and so small. “I want that. But I don’t know how that works because you scare me and piss me off and it’s really hard to trust you. But you also helped me when I really, really needed it. It’s hard.”

And Dr. Langdon nods. “Yeah,” he says, “It is.”

It’s almost like the light buzz of a contact high. The sensation of not feeling like she’s got a million memories and grudges and fears shoved up against her solar plexus is such a relief, it carries her right out of the nice little brew of anxiety and depression she’s been nursing tonight. All of it’s still there, but farther away.

“So, so hard. And maybe I’m not built to be that kind of person, you know? But I tried, man. I really tried.”

Langdon finally breaks eye contact. Takes a sip of what by now has to be lukewarm, gross coffee before he looks back at her.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re really hard on yourself?”

“I’m driven.”

“You’re beating yourself up for not being perfect. Take it from me, that never ends well.”

How does she respond to that? Trinity wants to put aside the barbed comebacks and angry outbursts, but what comes after?

“It’s okay just to try,” Langdon says.

She shrugs.

“No, Santos it is. Look, remember when you were screaming at me about NA?”

Shit, now Trinity really feels bad about that. “Don’t tell me it drove you to a relapse or something.”

“No. Christ, what’s wrong with you? We were talking about making amends. You know who the first person you’re supposed to put on that list is?”

Like she told McKay, Grandpa Donnie never got that granular. “No.”

“Yourself.”

He stops like this is supposed to be really impactful. Trinity roots around for an appropriate response, but all she can come up with is, “Deep.”

He huffs in frustration. “You can just say if you don’t understand something.”

This resurrects some of her annoyance. “Fine, I don’t get your hippie shit.”

“Your thing can be drugs. Or ambition, or fear—it doesn’t fucking matter. It hurts you just as much as it hurts other people.”

He’s holding eye contact and it’s uncomfortable, but she can tell it’s because what he’s been saying is important to him, so vital it feels like electricity humming through his blood. It’s the bare, vulnerable thing inside him coming up to meet hers, and Trinity doesn’t feel relief, or joy, or anything much at this breakthrough except quiet. Like she is finally, finally, ready to take in something Frank Langdon is about to say.

“So please. Go easy on yourself.”

Everything from the past few months—her accident, Robby’s talk, Cassie’s prodding, her own murky convictions, down to this particular conversation with this particular senior resident—has come together to sock her in the stomach. She stares at him. Neither of them says anything.

The waitress flies into the gap, slapping down the check. They both reach for it, but Langdon, with his stupid long arms, snags it first. Trinity asks the waitress if they can add a pack of cookies to the order.

“You can get those at the front, hon,” she says brightly, rushing to greet another table.

Trinity rolls her eyes, but saunters over to the counter by the host stand and pays almost twelve dollars for a dozen of what are probably some very underwhelming sugar cookies. Back at their table, she drops the bag in front of Langdon, who’s placed the check at a perfect right angle to the table edge. She slides back into the booth as he gives her a confused look.

“Cookies. For your kids,” she adds, raking loose strands of hair back from her face.

“It’s past eight. They’re gonna be in bed when I get back.”

“You don’t have to give them to them today. I don’t know, slip them in their lunch bags or something. Your kids should know you love them,” she says stupidly, like that has anything to do with anything.

He’s got his smirky smile on again—maybe all his smiles just look like that? “My kids know I love them, Santos.”

She looks at his bracelet. “Yeah. I guess they do.”

The check is spirited away. Trinity watches his posture change, wondering if it’s mirrored in hers now that they know this—whatever this was—is nearing its end.

As he signs the receipt, Langdon starts to talk again. “I meant what I said earlier. If it—this—if working through our shit helps, great. But forgiving me doesn’t mean you should feel like you need to . . . put up with my presence.” He’s finished signing, but his fingers are still on the pen, which he drums against the tabletop. “I’m not the only person at PTMC who’s good at their job. If you need us to keep things to a minimum, you should do that. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

Trinity’s skin is crawling; she’s uncomfortable for him. Taking responsibility for your crappy actions? Sucky. Navigating the consequences of those actions? Even worse. She doesn’t use the word “grace” much anymore, even though she grew up Catholic, but she understands that this is what Langdon is offering her, the same grace she’s wanted to have for him and has found herself tripping over again and again. Maybe, somehow, he has started to forgive her from the resentment he held. Her throat clogs over the thought, and fast behind it is another one: that maybe in her own two-steps-forward-one-step-back way, she’s started to forgive him too. All the pain over not being able to forgive him—it could have been a small part of beginning to do just that.

Which is all to say that his offer of shutting up and backing off doesn’t make her as relieved as she thought it would.

The sniff she breathes in to force the knot in her throat down is embarrassingly loud. She looks just to the side of his face, wishing she hadn’t been so fast to hand over the cookies. It would be great to have something to do with her hands right now. “Do you still think you could teach me to be a better doctor?”

“Sure. But only of it’s what you want.”

Maybe she can offer him grace too.

“I think,” Trinity says slowly, “I want to keep trying the new thing. You know, not hating each other.”

“Are you sure?”

She gives up and grabs a handful of napkins to blow her nose on. When she’s done, she shoves them into her half-full sundae glass.

“Dude. I never say shit like that unless I really mean it.”

Yes, his smile definitely always looks smug. “Fair enough.”

On a final impulse, she sticks out her hand. “Come on. Since trying is supposed to be okay.” She puts on her bubblegum smile, works to summon up some of that first-day feeling of nerves and deep possibility. “Trinity Santos, second-year resident. A redo,” she says when he just stares at her, bemused. “We pretend we’re starting over.”

He snorts, but he’s wearing his own polished smile when he puts his arm out and shakes her hand. “Frank Langdon. Senior resident.”

His bracelet knocks against her fingers.

Next shift, Trinity nearly runs into him by the charge station. She pulls up, surprised that the urge to get as far away from him as possible has already started to fade. Instead of going around to the other side, she slides into a free spot a few feet away from him. “What’re you thinking?”

His foot stops tapping and he turns away from the spreadsheets. He smiles. “Dr. Santos. Ready to start the day?”

Trinity smiles back. “Ready.”