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In fairness, Jack really only hides one small thing from his therapist. Everything else is fair game. It hadn’t started that way, but Jack had drunk the therapy kool-aid hard almost immediately. Out of pure existential necessity, if nothing else.
At their first appointment four years ago, he’d spent an entire hour talking Rick’s ear off about his previous shift at the Pitt, where he’d dealt with stupid anti-vaxxers, impatient assholes, and altogether way too much idiocy for a Tuesday night. At minute fifty-five, he was still railing on about how he’d almost come to blows with this old white guy who had spit at Princess and screamed a slur in Shen’s face while still expecting to get prompt medical attention for his dislocated elbow. Jack had wanted to kick the bastard out onto the street and let him fend for himself, but Robby miraculously showed up for day shift a whole hour early and took over so things didn’t get uglier than they already were.
Rick had snapped his notebook shut right before Jack’s tirade reached its next crescendo, and Jack knew enough about the social cues of the exacerbated medical professional to know that he had basically failed therapy. He said as much to Rick, who rolled his eyes. “There is no such thing as failing therapy, Jack.”
“Well, I’ve always been an innovator,” he’d ground out with a chuckle.
Rick had not laughed; instead he’d eyed the watch on his desk and then started rummaging around his desk, presumably getting ready for his next unwilling and unyielding client. Packing up his own shit, Jack had decided to count this appointment as an easy win. Not only did he get to talk shit about his patients without any fear of a HIPPA violation, he could tell Dana he’d tried her little therapy idea and it hadn’t been helpful so he’d appreciate her getting off his ass, thank you very much. He had been rehearsing his victory speech and confidently striding towards the door when Rick knocked him off his feet with just one sentence.
“In her letter, she said—and I’m quoting—‘Make sure his first appointment is a double, but let him bullshit about the Pitt for the first hour and then spring the trap at halftime when he’s about to leave.’” When Jack had slowly turned away from the door to face him, Rick was leaned back in his chair, holding a piece of pink paper marked so hard with scrawling script that it had bled through to the back.
Jack had known immediately that the “she” Rick was referring to was not Dana. In fact, “she” had probably been responsible for Dana’s incessant prods about therapy in the first place, probably handed Dana the crumpled up sticky note with Rick's number that she'd thrust at him last week.
“How long-” he’d choked out, shocked by how quickly and gently his knees gave out and deposited him on the floor.
“Zoe called me in February to make an appointment, said she’d gotten my information from an old Army buddy and knew that I specialized in treating grief and PTSD in vets. She explained what was going on and told me she wasn’t sure when you’d come by, but she’d make damn sure that you would—definitely within the year. And then, I got this letter in the mail a few weeks before…” At that Rick’s voice had faded away, but Jack knew all too well where that sentence was going, even though he wished it wouldn’t.
A few weeks before she died. Zoe. His wife. Dead at forty-three from a glioblastoma.
Jack had stared at Rick for an unbroken five minutes from his spot on the floor before Rick cleared his throat and went back to scrutinizing the pink paper. “She left you a letter. Told me not to give it to you until you had cried at least twice, told me y’all’s love story, and come to at least five weekly sessions,” he’d said, checking off the list on his fingers.
And at that, a laugh had burst out of Jack’s throat, unbidden and manically unbridled, because whatever doubts he’d had about Rick’s confession vanished at the sheer ridiculousness and audacity of that ultimatum. He knew the voice that letter had been written in, had known it for a decade and planned on knowing it for the rest of his life. Jack had been thrown around, shot at, and exploded for the better part of his 20s, but Zoe Price— Zoe Abbot goddammit— had been responsible for the majority of the whiplash he’d experienced in his life. It was fitting that she’d keep that tradition going, even beyond the grave.
Eventually his laughter had faded, replaced quickly with the emptiness he had been getting used to for the past three months. He had stared at Rick from his spot by the door, trying to figure out what the hell he was going to say to meet his dead wife’s posthumous demands, how he could even begin to explain to a complete stranger the vastness of his grief, the fucking ocean of it.
Luckily Rick was a better therapist than Jack was a patient. (Obviously. Zoe wouldn’t have trusted his care to some amateur.) Sliding down from his chair and bracing his back against the side panel of the desk, Rick had joined Jack on the floor—still separated by a few feet, but on the same level. “Tell me about the first time you saw her,” he said and the question, the simplicity of it, cracked something open in Jack’s chest and everything poured out. The way she’d insisted the medics use their last bit of morphine on a soldier who was bleeding out and instead bit down on his glove to muffle her screams while he rinsed out and patched up her leg wound. The way she’d looked up at him afterwards, sleepy and bashful, saying, “Sorry I called you a cunt and destroyed your gloves.” The way he had stroked the bloody locks of brown hair out of her eyes and promised to forgive her if she would let him buy her a drink when they were both off-duty. The delighted smile she’d answered with, which crinkled her eyes and nose adorably enough to make him dizzy. Whiplash.
He waded through the ocean for forty-five minutes. By the end of it—the actual end of the appointment—Jack had salt on his lips and it was clear that Rick did too.
After that, he went to Rick’s dutifully every week, like clockwork. He didn’t hold anything back, not his stories, not his tears, nothing. The good --- the way the wedding planner had frantically gestured for her to slow down and match the damn tempo of the string quartet and the way she hadn’t even noticed because while everyone had been staring at her, resplendent and shining in her ivory silk, she had been racing home to him --- and the bad --- the way her voice and fingers had trembled while she signed the DNR order and forced Ahmad, Robby, and Dana to swear they would physically hold Jack back if he tried to hook her up to a respirator when the time came . The good --- the spicy, warm scent of her in their bed when he crawled into her arms following a particularly rough shift --- and the bad --- the sharp smell of his vomit in the trashcan of the oncologists’ office after the diagnosis . The good --- her crinkly brown eyes and wide grin --- and the bad --- her grotesquely pale and papery hand in the casket.
Even though the earnestness and radical honesty he brought to his therapy appointments were entirely motivated by the promise of reading her letter—new words in a voice he had never expected to hear again—he grudgingly had to admit that it helped to talk about everything. Besides the four days it had taken him to sell their house and move into a tiny one-bedroom with a suitcase full of his clothes and some of her books and journals, he hadn’t taken any real time off work in the aftermath of Zoe’s death. In Rick’s scrutinizing but mostly silent presence, he admitted that he felt like could not physically stop moving for fear that it would all catch up to him— his ocean— and drown him. Voicing the feeling helped some, but he was still wading through knee-deep waters and some waves were stronger than others. So, after Rick slid the pink envelope across his desk into Jack’s fingers at the end of their fifth appointment, Jack didn’t just say, “Thanks doc.” He also asked, “Same time next week?”
And sure enough, when he got home and tore open the envelope greedily, the letter read:
Dear Jack,
I wish I could say something in this letter that would make it worth the time you spent with Rick to be able to read it. I know you’ll force yourself to get through at least the five sessions, but I hope you’ll keep talking to him. If things were the other way around, I think I’d need a lifetime of therapy. It’s selfish, but I’m glad it’s me that’s going.
I’m not scared of what’s next for me, but I do fear what's next for you. Yesterday, while you thought I was sleeping, you said you hope that I haunt you after I’m gone. And I can, if that’s what you want. But I hope I’m not always something you’re sad about.
There’s nothing I can say here that I haven’t already told you. I wish we had more time. You made me so, so happy. I want you to try to be happy again, however long it takes.
All my love (all of it, every last bit I have is yours),
Zoe
He hadn’t expected that the shards of his broken heart could shatter into even smaller pieces, so out of physical necessity, he spends the next month of therapy appointments unpacking all of that. Well, most of it, but not all of it.
Which brings him, finally, to the small thing that Jack keeps from his therapist and everyone else: his ghost.
Obviously, Jack doesn’t really believe in ghosts. However, as an emergency medicine physician who is terrified of head wounds, he has always had a healthy respect for the human brain and, through his recent experiences with therapy, he has developed a newfound respect for the way the human psyche (which is definitely in the brain) copes with grief. Realistically, he knows Zoe is dead and she will never come back, but he was serious about wanting her to haunt him, and he knows now that she promised she would.
And so, Jack Abbot has been haunted by his wife’s ghost for four years now.
It’s not something scary or even unsettling. Often, she’s the only thing in his field of vision that can calm him down when his blood is pumping and his pulse is rising. For example, eight months after Zoe’s death, there’s a twelve car pile up within the Pitt’s catchment zone. It’s not the worst mass casualty incident they’ve ever experienced, but enough to make for a tense day at the office. Patients are brought in continuously for over an hour. Med students are dropping like flies. Residents snap viciously at each other, more bark in their bites than usual. There’s a hurricane moving through the Pitt, but Jack is the calm at the center of the storm. He stabilizes patients, passes them along to surgery, and moves on more efficiently than any of his colleagues, including Robby. Afterwards, when he’s about to walk into the feeble December morning, Robby claps his shoulder and says, “You rocked that shit down here tonight.”
Jack just laughs and calls it a group effort. He doesn’t clarify that he means a group effort between him and Zoe, whose apparition had stood in the corner of his vision and verbalized every thought process he’d had about each patient and their plan of care. He certainly doesn’t admit that he’d almost screamed at Walsh to shut the fuck up once because she was speaking over Zoe. He has everything under control, he reasons. If he tells Robby, he might be persuaded to “step back” and “take medications” and “let her go.”
He’s not in a rush to let Zoe go again.
And it’s not like she is always there. He goes whole shifts without seeing her once, only seeing her brown eyes crinkle at him in his rearview mirror when he surrenders to the silence of his car after clocking out. She joins him on the couch in his rare idle moments, and he puts his head in her lap and lets her lull him to sleep with the same story he’s heard a million times about how she nearly shoved him off the cliff at Acadia in her excitement after he proposed. He refuses to take off his black silicone wedding band and rebukes any and all of Dana’s attempts to set him up with women she knows; but sometimes, when he stumbles into the apartment after one too many drinks with Robby or Shen or Ellis, she’s there in his bed waiting for him to take off his clothes and join her. And if he feels a bit sick in the morning after nights like those, he reasons that he still, for the most part, has everything under control.
Four years pass just like that, but who’s counting? Certainly not him. He goes to work, saves who he can, and tries to forget who he can't when he comes home. He regularly talks to Rick, who eventually suggests moving to a biweekly schedule since he’s made so much progress. When he’s driving home from that appointment, Zoe chirps from the passenger seat, “Guess you won therapy, babe,” and he gets a genuine laugh out of that. Most days, he keeps it together better than Robby, sometimes even better than Dana, although that is rarer because Dana is a beast.
Things are going fine until Pittfest, which is so similar to the car pile up years ago it gives him a sick sense of deja vu. Still, he makes it through the shift okay, even manages to talk Robby off the roof and eventually texts him Rick’s phone number. The scale of the tragedy, the wails of people crying out for their loved ones, the blood and gore of it all— that’s all part of the job. And yet, the few times his pulse spikes and he feels his composure slipping, he doesn’t see Zoe. Instead, he sees Samira.
It’s not like he seeks her out deliberately. Prior to that day, he only vaguely knew Mohan as Robby’s pain-in-the-ass R3 who everyone calls “Slo-Mo.” He thinks that’s a little unfair. There are worse reputations to have than being methodical and thorough, but then again, she’s not his resident and ultimately, not his problem. But there’s something about the way she looks at him in awe after he crikes the cop, the quiet devastation with which she asks Robby if there’s anything she can do when he’s coding Leah, the gratitude in her eyes when he tells to help Shen and Ellis with triage outside. Later on, in the trauma bay, even before his brain fully makes the connection about the air bubble in the patient’s heart, he’s pressing the pigtail into Mohan’s hands. He doesn’t fully know why. It should be a big gamble, trusting a resident to do such a risky procedure, especially one who is not known for being quick on her feet. And yet, he knows she can do it, sees something in her brown eyes that is all the proof he needs. And when she’s done, he can’t help but tease her a bit, for no other reason but to see that sweet smile dimple her cheeks. When it doesn't, he thinks, “Damn I’m rusty.”
He blames it on the insanity of the day that the alarm bells don’t actually start ringing until they’re all drinking on the benches outside and he catches himself staring at Mohan shaking her hair out of the clip that’s been holding it up. If he’s being really honest, he kind of ignores the alarm bells until she sits in the spot that Robby vacated and says, “Thanks for trusting me in there.” For a moment, he dumbly wonders what it would feel like to run his fingers over the dimples in her shy smile. He feels dizzy.
“Whiplash,” he thinks idly.
Suddenly, the noise breaks through whatever warm haze he’s wandered into and the thought strikes him: he can’t remember the last time he heard Zoe’s voice. In the corner of his eye, she appears, looking the same as always, crinkly brown eyes and all, but when she opens her mouth to speak, it’s Samira’s voice that comes out. “Dr. Abbot, are you okay?” she asks, but it’s not Zoe. It’s Samira, the real Samira, and she is regarding him with concern through furrowed brows and her dimple has disappeared.
And now Jack is thinking that, maybe, he doesn’t actually have anything under control. He barely manages to choke out a goodbye and stumbles away from them all, pointedly ignoring their questioning looks. He thinks he blacks out at some point, because in what feels like the next logical moment, he is parking his car in the lot in front of his apartment and walking through the door on shaky legs.
He barely makes it to his coach before he’s hyperventilating and clawing at the pocket of his jeans for his phone. He’s forgetting what Zoe’s voice sounds like, and his chest feels the way it did when he heard her take her last breath. Finally, he manages to pull his phone free and brings up a video he’d surreptitiously taken of Zoe on the phone with one of her college friends, her voice conspiratorially low as she helped her friend dissect her last date’s Facebook profile. “He’s definitely a Libertarian,” she is saying as her eyes catch Jack’s through his phone and then she is squealing, throwing a pillow at him. The video ends, and he feels more normal, his breath evening out and his head lolling back to rest on the couch cushions.
“That guy was totally a Libertarian.” He manages not to flinch because he knows she isn’t real. He’s always known that.
When he opens his eyes, she’s perched on the couch above him. Normally, she’d be closer and stroking his hair. But Jack has come to some realizations tonight, and he figures he needs to be a little braver than he has been for awhile. But when he opens his mouth to speak, nothing comes out.
“I’m not exaggerating, Samira is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.” Zoe was always the braver one. All he has to do is play along.
“She’s not as beautiful as you,” he whispers, and he hopes she will take the compliment and this will end before it goes where he thinks it is going.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jack,” Zoe says, snorting. “That girl looks like if a deer made a wish to be human princess.” A girl’s girl, through and through, in life as well as in death. He knows her so well, and it’s enough to make him laugh wetly. She giggles with him for a few seconds, but quickly quiets and regards him silently. It’s his turn to speak.
“I married you ,” he says, reaching out. “I’m your husband.” She’s sitting right next to him, but somehow out of his reach. “ You’re my wife,” he tries again.
“I know, honey,” she says. “I was there, remember?” They’re supposed to laugh here, but neither can manage it. The space between them stretches. The ocean roils.
“How long are you going to haunt me?” she asks, and he’s confused for a second. “That’s what you’re supposed to ask me,” she clarifies, and it bites him so hard he loses his breath.
“I asked you to haunt me,” he says. “I asked and you said you would. As long as I want.”
“I think you might not want this anymore,” she says gently, and now he swears he feels her hand on his shoulder. He shoves it away and gets to his feet, running his hands through his hair and gulping deep, but ultimately inconsequential, breaths. When he looks up again, she’s in the same spot on the couch, but there are tears running down her face. He’s made her cry. The ocean rises.
Falling to his knees, he cages her on the couch with his arms and tries to rest his face on hers. “You’re right,” he whispers. “Please, Zoe, I don’t want any more of this. I want it to go away, and I want to go with you.”
They’re both sobbing now, and it feels like his chest is cracking, but maybe he’ll get what he wants. Maybe she’ll give him what he’s wanted all along. Instead, she pulls away from him and looks into his eyes, searching and so, so sad. She puts her hands on his face and breathes, “I think it’s more life you need, honey, not less.”
And he feels warm for a second, but then she’s disappearing and he can’t keep her. He has always known that, but this is the first time he really, truly believes it. Not because he wants to, but because he has to.
Gasping, he clambers for his phone and calls Robby, who somehow, miraculously, picks up on the fourth ring. “Jack, why are you still up?” he asks groggily, as if he’d been sleeping fitfully. When he doesn’t answer right away, Robby’s tone hardens. “Jack, are you okay?”
He only manages a sob, a choked up breath, and then Robby is fully on, no trace of sleep in his voice at all. “Stay where you are, brother, I’m on my way.”
Ten minutes later, Robby barges through his door to find him on the couch, staring catatonically at the floor. When he kneels down, Robby’s eyes are bloodshot and tired and so, so sad.
“I keep seeing her, Robby,” he says dumbly and Robby just nods, gingerly hugging him into his chest. They sit in silence like that for what feels like an hour before Robby finally pulls away and flops onto his couch. He rolls his neck, working out the cramps, and Jack wonders briefly, meanly, when the hell they both got so old .
“Tell me,” Robby says finally. “And start from when she died. Don’t leave anything out.”
The next morning, Robby drives him to Rick’s office. If Rick is surprised to see either of them, he doesn’t show it, just ushers them both in and listens while Robby explains what happened the night before. They aim concerned glances in his direction from time to time, but Jack is frankly talked the fuck out. He knows where he’s headed and there’s no point delaying the inevitable; he’s packed pajamas and clean underwear into his backpack already.
Rick pulls some strings and gets him into an in-patient psychiatric facility. Jack tries to muster up some energy to be concerned about the optics of it all, but—somewhat reassuringly?— he absolutely cannot bring himself to care. Robby reassures him that they can handle a few weeks without him, and, besides, he’s probably racked up well over a month’s worth of PTO anyways.
“Thank you,” Jack says, but his voice feels empty. From the look on his face, it’s clear Robby hears it too—the lack—but he doesn’t push. Rather he gives Jack an encouraging smile and claps him on the shoulder. “You talked a big game about us bees yesterday,” he says. “Come back whenever, the hive will be waiting.” Jack manages a weak grin at that.
The facility is really not as overwhelming as he’d expected and he mostly doesn’t see anyone else, except at mealtimes, where he politely introduces himself to the other patients— Jesus fucking Christ he’s a patient now what the fuck— but mostly keeps to himself. What he lacks in socializing, he makes up for with his honesty during the evaluations and therapy appointments. He tells them everything, even and especially about Zoe and the way he’d come to depend on her without realizing it for the past four years. He’s a little sheepish about admitting to making up a ghost to deal with the grief of losing his wife, but he’s met with nothing but understanding and compassion from the providers as well as his fellow patients, when he does start opening up to them a little more. He doesn’t know much about them, except that most of them are vets too, and they’re all dealing with loss and grief and anger. He listens to them swap stories and therapy notes and it feels weirdly like med school or basic training: him and his classmates studying together to ace therapy—really get it right this time.
He hears Zoe’s voice in his head, laughing at that, but he has since learned to reframe the thoughts so he feels more responsibility for them. He knows she would find that funny, and he knows that if she was here with him, she’d probably make fun of him. He’s allowed to find comfort in that thought, as long as he acknowledges that he’s the one thinking it, not her.
That’s supposed to be obvious, but he forgives himself for having to re-learn the basics.
He leaves about 10 days later with some more insight, a clearer head, and a couple diagnoses that he thinks sound a lot worse than what has actually happened to him. He manages to stave Rick off of starting him on medication, promising that he would let Rick know right away if the hallucinations started again and that he would take some more time off work. When he hesitantly asks for another week off, he swears can hear Robby’s eye-roll through the phone. “Yes, obviously, you can have all the time you need as long as you don’t see your dead wife in the corner of every room when you come back.” He wants to argue and say that it wasn’t every room, just most of them, but he decides to take the win and move on.
During his week off, he goes to Acadia, drives around the terrain he and Zoe had trekked together. He even manages to make it to the cliff where he’d proposed, and, more impressively, he doesn’t once think about hurling himself off of it. In fact, the crisp air and sun on his face make him feel more alive than he remembers feeling in a long time. Dully, he remembers Zoe saying “I think it’s more life you need, baby, not less.” Or, well, that’s what he remembers thinking Zoe would say when he admitted he didn’t want to live without her anymore. It’s all very confusing, but the wind is blowing his hair and his nose is red from the cold and his eyes can barely focus on the ocean because of how brightly the sun is shining off of it.
He thinks maybe he understands what it all means. And maybe he’s ready to try to be okay again.
He expects that his first shift back will be a disaster and steels himself to the possibility of finding the ED completely in shambles, but really nothing consequential has changed. Shen has been an attending for a while at this point, and Robby tells him he really rose to the occasion throughout Jack’s absence. The only development he’s surprised by is Santos’ quick and thorough integration into the night shift crew. He likes Santos—he maintains that her move with the REBOA during Pittfest had been badass—and he likes even more that Ellis and Shen have managed to smooth out her harsh edges without fundamentally altering her personality or her spirit. Plus, he speculates with no small sense of accomplishment that Santos, with all her prickliness around male authority figures (See: Robby), does not mind him and even, dare he say, respects him?
He should say, he thinks Santos’ addition is his only surprise, until halfway through his first week back when he collides with a slight dark-haired figure groggily exiting the locker room just as he’s entering. He throws out an arm and manages to stabilize them both, but his breath catches roughly in his throat when he realizes it’s Mohan. Samira . With glasses on and her hair down, looking for all the world, like a deer who had made a wish to be human princess.
As she registers his presence, her face lights up and she beams at him. “Welcome back, Dr. Abbot! We missed you!” she says, patting him warmly on the shoulder and then, just as quickly, ducking past him out to her workstation. He’s left frozen in the doorway, feeling oddly disappointed about the perfunctory way she’d greeted him and then defensive about feeling odd or disappointed. Before things spiral further, he decides he’s not going to overthink it; instead, he’ll splash some water on his face, finish out his shift, and go home to rest and recharge before his day off tomorrow. He’s decided that he’ll try to go hiking at least once a week, which is probably lame and stupid, but he likes the way his lungs burn and his body feels pleasantly tired, but alive by the end.
He’s packing up and getting ready to leave, confident that Shen can handle the day shift handover to Robby, when he realizes that Mohan is still in her hoodie and leggings, hunched over her monitor and muttering something under her breath while worrying at her thumb. She’s lovely, as usual, but he notices that the hollows under her eyes are darker and deeper than he remembers them being at Pittfest. He’s standing over before he can tell himself to walk away. She looks up when he approaches and gives him a wan smile; he figures he should feel lucky that she looks too tired to see how uncomfortable he is about the prospect of talking to her when there isn’t a dying patient in between them.
“You’re not clocking in?” he asks, feeling a little out of the loop, as if it’s a question he should already know the answer to.
She shakes her head no. “Today’s technically my day off, but I’ve been coming in to work on some papers. I’m almost done with my analysis of racial disparities in ED outcomes, but it just takes me forever to write anything at home.”
“Oh, I see. And that’s going-?” He barely finishes his question before she’s nodding vigorously. “It’s going well, the results look good and I think the discussion will be really interesting. Heather told me I should submit to NEJM, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but then Robby heard about it and now he thinks we’ll have an NEJM submission, so he’s excited about it and he wants it on his desk by the end of the month. And that’s great and everything, but now actually have to write it,” she says, her voice taking on a slightly breathless and desperate tone.
“Ah, well, you know-”
“Also Dr. Walsh found me after Pittfest and told me to write up the procedure for that intracardiac air embolism we resolved with the pigtail catheter. She said it could be a big development and that would definitely get some high impact-factor interest, which would be great for my career. But then again, I actually have to write that up,” she says, again in a hurry, biting her thumb and looking up at him with an odd look in her eye.
“Oh, that’s nice of her, but do you-”
“Actually, now that you’re back, I was wondering if maybe you’d be willing to help me with that paper? I’m really grateful that you let me do it and helped me, but I have no idea how to write up the background or even a preliminary draft of the methods, and technically it was your idea so you should definitely have authorship on it.” She’s barely breathing at this point, and he feels like he should intervene.
“Dr. Mohan-”
“But I don’t need you to write anything, I mean you can if you want, but really, what I need is a little bit of help getting started because I’m just not 100% sure where to begin but Dr. Walsh wants that done soon too so I’m a little-”
“ Samira ,” he says, and it is a full sentence. She looks stunned for a minute, like she didn’t expect that he knew her name, but then she smiles self-consciously.
“Sorry, sorry, I know you just got back and I’m being very…” She sighs and flails her hands about, muttering, “Overwhelming.”
“It’s okay, we’ve all been there,” he reassures her, even though he has most certainly never been here before. He doesn’t remember striving this hard when he was a resident. He wonders if maybe he missed out.
“I’m happy to help, Dr. Mohan, but it’ll have to wait until next week, if that’s okay?” he asks. He toys with the idea of canceling his hike and taking over the paper so Samira can get some sleep, but he figures a) she wouldn’t let him and b) he’d be more useful to her and everyone if he was better rested instead of just pretending to be.
He evidently figures correctly because she brightens and smiles that sweet smile at him, her dimples flashing and, on second thought, maybe he should cancel that hike and keep talking to her just so he can see those dimples for the rest of the day. Just then Robby walks up behind him, clapping him on the back and yanking him away to talk about his first week back and how is he doing and does he feel confident in his abilities to keep the demons at bay and all he can do is shrug at Mohan, who grins and shakes her head before ducking back into her workstation.
He goes on his hike and it’s great, but he’s already panting halfway through and it’s especially embarrassing because an elderly couple walking hand in hand lap him and say, “Keep going son, the view’s breathtaking at the top.” And that’s just a lot in and of itself, but he feels his heart twinge a bit as he takes in the way the women hold each other steady on their way down, their wedding bands flashing twin sparks into his eyes. His heart twinges again when he finally makes it to the trailhead, a beautiful sunny day stretching out in front of him. “I miss you, Zoe,” he says out loud, but he doesn’t wait to hear if she responds. He feels her there, in the sunshine and the birdsong and the ladies’ laughter further down the trail, and that is enough.
When he finally gets back to his car, panting and sweating like he hasn’t done cardio in decades (which is true, he hasn’t), he lets himself wonder whether Samira would ever like to join him.
He figures she wouldn’t, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to ask.
That night, he sits in bed and toys with his ring for a long time. He’s been working up to this for awhile, even talked through his plan with his psychiatrist at the in-patient facility. He decides to take it off for a few minutes and see if he’s going to be sick. He doesn’t have to let go all at once, but this could be a good step. He grits his teeth and pulls off the band, grimacing at how pale the skin underneath is. That’ll be noticeable for awhile.
He does feel a bit sick, but it’s not unbearable, so he goes to the next step of his plan, which is to open the small box of Zoe’s mementos he keeps on the top shelf of his closet. In it, there is the letter she’d given him through Rick—the paper soft and leathery from the number of times he's brushed his hands over it—a sample of the lemony perfume she’d worn on their wedding day, and a small locket with one of her eyelashes captured in the divot. He’d brushed it off her cheek towards the end, and normally she’d tell him to blow it away and make a wish, but she had been sleeping so deeply she hadn’t even stirred when he touched her face. Looking down at her in that moment—the purple shadows under her eyes stark against her pale skin, which stretched tight across her bones—he knew there was no eyelash in the world that could bring her back to him. So instead, he’d opened the locket she wore around her neck—the one she complained was too small for a picture or anything important—and gently tucked the eyelash inside. Four, almost five years later, it is still there, a gentle reminder of the presence she’d always have in his life. He places the wedding band in the box, and shuts it, monitoring his heart rate, his thoughts, his anxiety. It’s unpleasant, and he wants to vomit at first, but eventually he does get past the physical symptoms. He keeps rubbing his fingers over the space on his finger where his ring used to sit.
“I love you, Zoe,” he says into the silence, but she doesn’t respond and that’s okay because that’s how it should be.
Next week, everyone does a very brave job of pointedly not mentioning the absence of his wedding ring. Well, Robby, Shen, and Dana don’t. He figures he’ll make it into Perlah and Princess’ debrief at some point—briefly considers looking up “ring” in Tagalog—but he knows they mean no harm; he still has their Tupperware in his kitchen from when they left pancit at his workstation for weeks after Zoe died.
Unfortunately, the one person whose scrutiny he actually wouldn’t mind looks like she wouldn’t even notice if he walked into the Pitt with his hair dyed green. If Mohan was in rough shape the week prior, she has absolutely burned her candle further down on both ends. Jack has the wild, unbidden urge to tuck her into one of the on-call bunks and watch her sleep for at least 10 hours. But that seems illegal, or at the very least, incredibly weird. He shakes his head to rid it of the thought before walking over to her workspace after his shift. She’s completely engrossed in her computer and Jack has to shake his hand in her face to break her out of her reverie. Once she looks at him though, he’s greeted with that lovely grin, although it's simultaneously more manic and subdued than usual.
“Dr. Mohan,” he says, before she can start rambling, “Why don’t we go to this cafe I know that’s about a block away? I’d like a change in scenery and I think that would benefit you too.”
She looks like she’s about to argue, but clams up when he quirks an eyebrow at her. She unplugs her laptop from the monitor and shoves it into her backpack, walking slightly in front as they leave ED together. Robby catches his eye quizzically, but Jack shakes his head and he can hear the resulting snort from the opposite side of the ED.
He lets Mohan chatter on about the racial disparities paper, which is actually very interesting and very clearly a good fit for NEJM even if she doesn’t think so anymore. He’ll have to convince her, and he’s thinking about the best approach to go about that when she comes to a dead stop in the sidewalk and turns back to look at him suddenly. He barely manages to stop himself from barreling into her but she doesn’t seem to notice or care. Instead, she tilts her head and eyes him intently, searching his face for whatever she’s looking for. He’s just about figured out how to verbalize how viscerally uncomfortable he is when she blurts out, “There’s something different about you, Dr. Abbot.”
A laugh punches its way out of him, surprised and incredulous, and it seems to set her off too because she giggles uncertainly while he starts to tear up. Eventually he’s able to stop himself, his breaths coming out in puffs in the cold fall air, mingling with hers as she keeps staring at him.
“You look…happier, I think,” she says, nodding resolutely. With that she flashes him the brightest smile he’s ever seen from her, and he realizes that he is just a man, an old one at that, and her dimples could probably bring entire regimes crumbling to the ground, so what chance does he have? She turns back around on her heel and resumes walking and talking, her curly hair bouncing and he feels a little strength returning to his knees and a lot of blood rushing to his face.
“Whiplash,” he thinks, a little dizzily. It makes him smile, and as he catches up to her, he’s already planning out in his head how he’s going to start being brave again.