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Frank Langdon returns to the Pitt on the Fourth of July.
Trinity Santos tries to do something with her face that does not give the impression that his wife almost sat on it.
Ex-wife! she nearly screeches in her own head when the crass thought crosses her mind, unbidden but insistent at the sight of him slinking through the bay doors, a sparse few moments before 7:00. Almost ex-wife! Basically ex-wife!
“Oh, god,” she says aloud, dropping her gaze quickly, and Mohan shoots her a sharp look.
Fuck. Now Mohan thinks she’s gonna be weird about Langdon coming back, and probably she’ll think that Trinity’s being judgy about the drug thing, which is fair, given that Trinity is the one who caught and reported him, and sure, Mohan doesn’t know that for a fact, technically, but lowkey everyone knows because the nurses are major fucking gossips, as are the doctors, but it’s totally not even about the drug thing; Langdon was a dick but Trinity is a doctor, she can be empathetic about the struggles of addiction, the problem is after he left Trinity picked up his wife in a bar and got to third base with her!!!
But she can’t exactly tell Mohan all that.
Instead she coughs, loud and artificial. “Sorry,” she says, to Mohan. “Something in my throat. Dibs on the shin puncture in South 15.”
She scurries away before Mohan can answer. Or worse, tell her not to cherry pick.
She sees him at rounds, of course.
Robby reintroduces him to the group with a tone like he’s chewing glass and Langdon looks like he’d like the Pitt to operate more like a pit and swallow him whole.
Trinity’s sure it’s a bummer that his old mentor is so obviously upset about the scheduling mishap that landed Langdon here a day before he left for his sabbatical.
(Or maybe it’s not obvious; Trinity heard Princess telling Perlah about hearing Robby arguing with Abbott when the latter wouldn’t agree to cover the shift so Robby could leave a day earlier. But Langdon wasn’t here and doesn’t understand Tagalog, so.)
Trinity thinks he’d feel better if he caught Mel’s eye across the circle. She’s beaming at him like he’s the slowly waking earth and she’s the sun itself. Like he’s ice cream and rollercoasters and a new episode of her favorite medical podcast. Like he’s solving all her problems just by being here.
But he’s staring at his shoes, so he probably doesn’t notice.
Useless, Trinity thinks.
But it actually takes longer than Trinity expected for everything to go to shit.
The two of them—her and Langdon, not Mel and Langdon—seem to mutually avoid each other.
Robby sticks Langdon on chairs, defends it as easing him back into things when Dana gives him a disapproving look.
“We’re well-staffed up here,” he says, and it’s true enough until the last few stragglers from the night shift finish turning over their cases and leave, and Mateo drops a massive box on his foot and Dana sends him home, limping, and the new med students get pulled upstairs by Garcia to observe a surgery, and it’s one thing after another until next thing you know a gunshot victim comes stumbling into triage and Langdon ends up trailing the newcomer into a trauma room, diving in with a confidence like he never left, barking orders and doing compressions and maneuvering flesh and playing God and, ultimately, getting the patient stable.
“Sorry,” he says, deflated, after, as dust settles and adrenaline fades and heartbeats steady, ostensibly to Robby, the only person likely to be irritated that Langdon just saved the man’s life.
Langdon keeps avoiding Trinity’s eyes, though. Probably he thinks she would be on that list, too.
But from what she saw, from the hall outside, for once not daring to barge in, he did the procedure well, and without screaming at anyone. And, so far as she can tell, without diverting any controlled substances.
And, well. Trinity can hold a grudge like a motherfucker, on an average day, but the one she had against Langdon is a little dampened by the twinge of guilt she feels about the whole. You know. Wife fucking thing.
But really, he doesn’t need to know that.
As he yanks his bloodstained gloves off and bins them, Trinity’s eye catches on Langdon’s hand. On the fuckass, too-big wedding ring still slipping down his finger.
She feels, abruptly, like she’s going to be sick.
Langdon turns back to the board, where Dana is smiling reassuringly at him, but Trinity bolts in the opposite direction, grabbing Mel by the arm from where she’s exiting a patient room and pulling her along.
“Ow, Trinity, what’s wrong? What are you doing?”
But Trinity can’t answer her until they’re out of Langdon’s earshot, safely in the breakroom. And even then she finds herself choking, a little, on the words.
“Mellybelly,” she says, her voice shaking slightly. She’s probably freaking Mel out; she’s never been quite this unhinged around her. Hell, she’s kind of freaking herself out. “Is Langdon still married?”
There’s a long, long, painful silence as Mel processes this question.
Then it’s like a lightning bolt goes off in Dr. Mel King’s big beautiful brain. She jolts up, ramrod straight, her eyes going huge and her mouth dropping open as she stares at Trinity in what might be abject horror or might be plain astonishment.
“Trinity,” she says. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t!” Trinity echoes immediately, uselessly, guilt soaking her tone.
“So at the grocery store—oh my god!”
“Meeeeeeeel,” Trinity whines, burying her face in her hands.
“You had sex with Langdon’s wife?”
“She did what?” Mohan’s voice is as incredulous as Trinity has ever heard it. She’s sitting at the table behind them, so silent as to be unobtrusive and unnoticed until now. A clearly forgotten spoonful of yogurt is halfway to her mouth, dripping onto her scrub pants.
“Fuck!” Trinity says, too loud, and she doesn’t mean it as an answer to the question, but, well…it is one.
Mohan starts blinking a little too fast, like she’s trying to purge the information being placed in front of her.
“That’s…oh, my,” she says, and the careful way she says it, the way she settles into this awful attempt at a gentle bedside manner, makes it all the worse.
“I didn’t mean to!” Trinity half-shrieks, too flustered to actually care that Mohan’s wrapped up in this now. She needs all the support she can get. “I met her in a bar, I didn’t look at her goddamn marriage certificate! She said she was separated! It was really only hand stuff! I left as soon as I saw the picture of fucking Langdon and their freakin’ children on her fridge!”
“Oh, that’s so much worse than me accidentally spitting iced coffee on Dr. Shen,” Javadi says from the doorway, that typical shocked baby deer look on her face.
Okay, maybe Trinity doesn’t want all the support she can get. And maybe she shouldn’t be having this meltdown in the break room. Loudly.
“Fuck you, Crash,” she says, reaching spitefully for the old nickname even though, honestly, there have been another half dozen in the rotation since then, not least of which was Spittoria.
But Javadi just laughs, wide-eyed, a little manic. “You got him kicked out of his job and sent to rehab! You totally blew up his life, and you fucked his—”
“Victoria!” Mel cuts in, hands flying up placatingly like she can physically stop this spiral. “Not helping.”
This intervention is interrupted by Dennis’s arrival to the breakroom. It’s getting to be a real party.
“There you all are,” he says. “What are you doing in here? It’s nuts out there and Robby’s already on edge.”
“Okay, we’re coming,” Mohan says, moving to stand up.
“Santos slept with Langdon’s wife!” Javadi blurts out, and Mel cuts her a look with her lips pressed together and Mohan sighs, dropping back into her seat.
Dennis’s mouth falls open and he looks around at all the girls like he’s not sure if he’s being punked but he really, really hopes so.
“Oh, god,” Trinity says.
Dennis scrubs his hands over his eyes. “Trinity, oh my god,” he says.
“It was an accident,” she says.
“Oh. My god.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!”
Dennis’s look of longstanding suffering really is unfair. It’s not like she puts him through that much. God, he really is starting to look like Robby, if you squint.
“Was it in our apartment?” he asks, and six months ago she’d begrudge his claim to the pronoun, if he weaponized it against her like this, but now that he actually pays rent and they added him to the lease, she doesn’t really have a leg to stand on.
Trinity groans and and returns to hiding her face in her hands. “No, it was her house. Their house, I guess.”
“Good,” Dennis says. “Then I’m not complicit when Langdon finds out.”
“God, Huckleberry, can you be on my side a little? She said she was separated! And I didn’t know he was her husband!”
“Maybe they are separated,” Mohan says, in her let’s calm down and figure this out slowly voice.
“He still has his wedding ring on,” Trinity and Javadi say at the same time.
Everyone looks at Javadi, who flushes under the scrutiny. “What?” she says. “He’s hot! Sorry if I tend to look at hot guys’ left hands. It’s not a crime.”
Now everyone looks at Mel.
“What?” she echoes.
At Trinity’s huff, she blinks.
“Oh, that. We never really talked about…his wife. Just work stuff.”
“You talked to Langdon while he was gone?” Javadi looks spooked again. “In…in rehab?”
“Victoria,” Mohan says, chastening. “Let’s try not to approach addiction recovery as something to be ashamed of.”
Javadi shakes her head. “Right,” she says. “No, yeah, totally. But, Mel…you just like…reached out to him?”
Now Mel is getting twitchy, and Trinity is about to combust, and Dennis is looking particularly exhausted, and Mohan still has yogurt spilled on her.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Dana calls from the hallway, sticking her head into the breakroom with an energy of healthy exasperation. “We have traumas out here, people.”
Mel and Javadi scurry out, and Mohan dumps what’s left of her yogurt in the trash can as she follows them.
Trinity turns to Dennis.
“Do you think if I ask really, really nicely, Robby will run me over with his motorcycle?” she asks.
Dennis gives her a sympathetic grimace and claps her on the shoulder. “First, do no harm,” he says, and Trinity groans again.
A little late for that.
Even when she was married to Frank Langdon, Abby tried not to be that sort of overbearing helicopter wife.
She knows women who love to drop by their husbands’ places of work, who are all about coming to company parties or employee picnics, or even just dropping by with cookies or the hubby’s left-behind lunch or whatever. That’s just never been her and Frank’s dynamic. It’s not that they didn’t like each other, or like spending time together. They just…they each had their own lives, separately, in addition to the one they had together.
This was Frank’s world, all bright lights and the smell of antiseptic and the AC turned too cold for her tastes. Babies crying, which she’s used to, and middle aged men holding blood soaked towels to wounds on their own bodies, which she isn’t.
She knows Frank has always thrived on chaos, on mess, on being the hotshot hero to sweep in, to be the calm and ruthless center of a storm trying to destroy him. He always wanted to be in the the thick of things—to make one more save, stitch one more suture, take one more shift. Fix one more person, one more problem, one more prayer. Anything to stop his brain from turning inward and cannibalizing his own destruction.
He needed it. She knew that. She just never wanted to witness it.
Which means this is actually her first time in the place her husband oh-so-affectionately called the Pitt.
This job—this place—was not the first thing that ever drove a wedge into their marriage. Nor the last. But it’s a strong contender for the most significant.
This morning, Millie had spiked a fever that was probably nothing, Abby knows it’s almost definitely nothing. Kids get sick. She probably picked it up at the public pool.
But knowing that, unlike in their married days, Frank won’t automatically be coming home tonight to check up on her himself has Abby feeling a little antsy, so she decided it would be worth it to swing by PTMC.
This is, Abby knows from years of being married to an emergency medicine doctor, really the sort of thing that she should just go to urgent care for, but what’s the point of having been married to an ED resident if she can’t skip a line every now and then?
And, okay, she doesn’t really intend to cut the line, honest, but when they ask for her name she says Langdon, because that is still her name, she hasn’t decided yet if she’s keeping it, and when the nurse realizes who she is they’re hustled back to a room without her even asking for special treatment.
Frank almost breaks something bursting through the door a moment after they’ve settled in, white as a sheet.
“Abs? What’s wrong, are the kids—are you—Jesse said—”
“Daddy!” Tanner exclaims, running over to jump into Frank’s arms and effectively cutting off his spiral. “We came to your job!”
Frank holds him close, clearly breathing a little easier. “I see that, buddy. What brings you here?”
This is ostensibly to Tanner, but he locks eyes with Abby as he asks, his gaze quickly darting away towards Millie, who is uncharacteristically subdued on the paper-covered cot but also reaching out to be held at the sight of her dad.
He scoops her up, too, holding both kids gently and pressing a kiss to Millie’s head.
“We’re okay,” Abby says. “We didn’t mean to freak you out, she just had a temperature. You know my mom is out of town, and I got in my head, and—”
“It’s okay,” Frank says, and he seems to settle into what he must be like at work, this hyper-competent doctor she almost doesn’t recognize. “You don’t need to defend yourself. You know I panic at every sniffle. It’s our kid.”
He sets about examining Millie, and even if he seems different here in the Pitt, he and Abby fall into the kind of light, good-natured bickering they used to sprinkle throughout their relationship. It’s been a long time since it felt this easy with Frank. Since she felt like they were on the same team, reaching for the same goals.
If it takes their daughter getting sick for her to feel that way, it’s probably a good thing they split. Healthy, or whatever.
Frank eventually declares Millie fit to be released and produces a pair of lollipops from somewhere. The kids grab and unwrap them faster than a blink, while Abby rolls her eyes, mostly good-naturedly. “Sugar them up for the ride home, thanks, Frank,” she says.
He puts a dramatic hand to his chest, faux-offended. “It’s a vital part of the healing process. Trust me, I’m a doctor.”
She might have laughed or might have smacked him, but the movement draws her eye to his left hand.
“Wait, why the fuck are you wearing your ring?” Abby demands. “It still doesn’t even fit! It’s a miracle it hasn’t fallen off into some chest cavity, god.”
Frank lets out a huffing breath, his grin and amusement evaporating, but he sounds more exhausted than irritated. “It’s my first day back after ten months of leave due to substance abuse, Abs,” he says. “I thought maybe the one thing I could avoid was questions about my tragic, star-crossed divorce.” He quirks a brow, smile recovering slightly. “The plan was going great until said divorce partner showed up.”
She laughs. She can’t help it; for all his faults, Frank Langdon has always been funny, whether he means to be or not. She may not be in love with him anymore, but she can admit that.
So she’s laughing, when she turns away from him, but the laugh freezes in her chest.
For a wild second, she wonders if she’s contracted Millie’s fever. Fire licks its way up her neck, into her cheeks. Into her brain.
Everything goes fuzzy and staticky for a second, and her fingers and toes go very numb.
Because when she looks out into the emergency department, she locks eyes with Trinity.
And the world drops out from beneath her.
