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Whitaker is twenty-six.
The boy on the gurney is sixteen.
His old pastor would’ve said God had a plan for both of them, but watching the kid exsanguinate in front of him, Whitaker finds the notion far removed from his current circumstances.
The overhead lights in the trauma bay hum. It's oppressively bright, and teenagers aren’t supposed to look like this, he thinks: grey, ashen around the mouth, lashes wet from oxygen blowing into their eyes. A nurse, a girl just a little older than Whitaker with a tight blonde ponytail, is calling vitals. Someone else is pushing another amp of epi, and Whitaker is trying to get another line in. He does his best not to think about how small the boy's forearm feels in his hand.
“Another?” someone asks. The voice is distant through the ringing in his ears. He feels lightheaded.
“Yeah. Go.”
They all know it’s pointless, Whitaker thinks. The kid's been circling the drain for the last five minutes. They do it anyway.
Whitaker watches the ECG monitor with the same single-minded focus he used to muster during prayer in Sunday service. Almighty God, he thinks, we praise you for your mercy. There's a cross not unlike the one Whitaker wears suspended on a chain in the hollow of the boy's throat, and it stuns him. Takes the breath right out of him for a reason he doesn't have the time to identify as he locks his fingers to start chest compressions. Please don't take him, Whitaker pleads – to whom, he can't say. God feels distant, if he was ever close to Whitaker to begin with – I can bring him back. He's only sixteen. He's a kid. The boy’s heart stutters once, twice, enough to give Whitaker hope, before slipping decisively back into the flat, merciless line that makes his gut seize. Whitaker's shoulders drop.
Whitaker thinks of church as he stares listlessly at the body on the gurney, still warm. A suction canister powers down on the wall to his right. He begins to help clean up. His hands feel numb. A dead teenager stares at the ceiling, a modestly sized crucifix glinting in the pale light of the trauma bay. Whitaker has one just like it suspended above his bed. God didn't save this boy. He feels ill.
It’s harder for Whitaker to remember the sermons themselves after years of doing his best to forget, but the feeling of church comes back easily enough—the smell of wood polish, dusty sunlight through narrow windows, and the warm, stale air that made sweat crawl down the back of his neck. His father’s hand would sit heavily on his shoulder, keeping him still. He’d been eight then, feet not reaching the floor, but old enough to wonder why the miracles he heard about in Bible study never reached their small Nebraska town.
Collins calls TOD at 10:25 PM. Whitaker can't breathe right.
He steps back, half-heartedly wrestling the gloves off his hands. Sweat drips from them, and his mouth fills with saliva. His hands shake when he lets himself really look at them. The kid had had a bracelet on—handmade, cheap, tacky—something a friend must’ve given him. WWJD, with little coloured beads. Something Whitaker would've made at Bible camp, once upon a time. It’s still tied around his wrist, traffic-cone orange, while a nurse pulls the sheet up to his chin.
Whitaker stares, unmoored. He tries to summon happy memories as he scrubs at his hands over the sink. Church potlucks. Bible study. Youth group. He knows better than to think like this. It's the type of disillusionment his parents would've warned him against, and the idea turns his stomach.
“Huckleberry,” someone says behind him – Santos, he thinks. His shoulder's prodded, gentler this time. “Take ten, man.”
He nods blankly and distantly remembers leaving the room. His hands feel raw.
The hallway is colder, cooler and less frenetic. Fluorescents buzz lowly in his ears. A cart squeals in the distance. He walks until he finds the quiet room, footfalls apprehensive and tense—the door is left ajar, the contents of the room obscured by the dark—and ducks inside.
Whitaker sits, hands folded in his lap, and manages two breaths before his body catches up. His shoulders ache as he trembles, breath stuttering wetly as he sniffles. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, trying to clear the image of the kid’s face. How young he was. He was so pale.
He tells himself to breathe. Get it together. There are patients who need you.
He hiccups, eyes squeezed shut, thinking of that little kid's bracelet.
Whitaker's bent over. Bile rises in his throat. He thinks of Sunday service and the pastor’s voice rising as he talked about suffering—purposeful, purifying, divinely appointed, predestined—whilst Whitaker had sat as still as he could, afraid. So, so desperately afraid. His pastor had continued, explaining that Christ's suffering was the ultimate vindication. The sacrifice which erased original sin- washed in the righteous blood of the Lamb. Dennis gagged, producing a wet rasping sound as he sobbed. That hadn't been a reward. There was no reward for suffering in trauma medicine, he thinks.
Somebody just didn’t see the truck coming. Somebody stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. It didn't seem very predestined. He thinks of the teenager on the gurney.
Benevolent God, indeed.
Whitaker drags in a shaky breath as someone pushes the quiet-room door open farther before latching it carefully. He doesn't look up.
He knows it’s Robby, really, from the awkward movement of his feet, the half-hearted step back he takes when he realises he's walked in on something personal. It feels like a cosmic joke at Whitaker’s expense. Robby clears his throat, shifting his weight awkwardly from foot to foot before nudging a chair closer to the one Dennis collapsed in. He coughs.
Whitaker feels exhausted, hollowed out. His lecturers told him he was cut out for this. He doesn't understand what's happening to him. Why now, of all times.
Robby sits with him, and the silence is almost companionable, save for the miserable sniffles Whitaker emits every few seconds. A beat of silence elapses, then:
“Rough one?”
Whitaker swallows hard. 'Rough' feels like an understatement. His throat feels raw.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”
Robby nods quietly, eyebrows creased as he drags a hand over his face. Whitaker's eyes sting.
###
Whitaker keeps his eyes on the floor as he sniffs, breathing heavily.
The linoleum's scuffed, with the same semicircle from where the chair legs have scraped back and forth, night after night, grief carving little arcs into the hospital floor. Whitaker finds it easier to focus on than the fact that his chest feels like it’s been stepped on. He hasn't had a panic attack since he was twelve.
“Take your time,” Robby manages quietly, which makes Dennis feel worse.
He forces a breath past the tightness in his throat and tries to steady himself, his hands braced against his knees. It works for half a second before the calm collapses like a house of cards. The silence in the quiet room feels like too much, too much space- and Whitaker buries his face in his hands again.
###
Whitaker was seven when he was taught that his father was his model for God—Old Testament severity. Like Jesus on the cross, a parent's love hurts sometimes.
Their house had a long hall with oatmeal-colored walls. A framed cross hung at the far end, directly opposite the stairs, positioned so the first thing you saw each morning was Jesus looking pained and disappointed in you. Whitaker used to avoid making eye contact with it. The disinfectant from the mop his mother used on Sundays made his eyes water.
The belt hung on a hook by the laundry room door, level with Whitaker’s eyes. He remembers staring at the brass buckle and thinking it looked like a mouth. Angry.
“You know why this is happening,” his father would say while lining him up to face the wall. The wallpaper was a beige print – William Morris. His father never looked at Whitaker. In these memories, his father is faceless and bored.
Whitaker nodded. His throat had felt tight and hot, not from guilt. Guilt, he understood. The waiting was what had terrified him: the pause between the belt leaving the hook and the first strike. The way time seemed to stretch. Seconds became minutes.
He had spoken without permission during Sunday school. Something harmless. Small. An innocent question. The teacher had gone stiff, lips thin in a way that told him he’d broken a rule he didn’t know existed. She’d pulled him aside after study, fingers clamping tightly around his forearm, and said she’d be having a word with his parents. Her nails had left half-moon marks that Whitaker had shamefully covered with his sleeve.
She didn’t say what he’d done wrong, but Dennis supposes she didn’t have to. It was the principle of the thing, as his father had said.
That evening, his mother had cried when the belt came off the hook. Not loud. Not enough to sway his father. Just high and keening. Like a kettle boiling over on the stove.
His father had quoted scripture before he began. The verse became intimately familiar to Whitaker.
For whom the Lord loves, He chastens.
Raise up a child in the way he should go.
Better the rod now than Hell later, he'd told Whitaker's mother.
After the first time, Whitaker learnt to hold still, not to cry until afterwards, when he could sniffle into his duvet and nurse the welts on his back.
His mother had wiped his face with a cold cloth that smelt faintly of lavender soap the first time it happened, murmuring as she wiped his face with practised hands, “It’s only because he loves you. You understand that, don’t you?” And even then, Whitaker nodded. He wasn't stupid. He didn't want to get hit again.
Even then, he wanted to say that if this was God's love, it wasn't love worth having.
By nine, he’d stopped expecting any answer except punishment.
Dennis didn’t ask questions after that.
###
The quiet room feels too warm now. Whitaker rubs his thumb into the seam of his scrub pants as he exhales, grounding himself in the texture of the fabric, the faint roughness where the stitching is starting to fray. He needs new scrubs.
Robby has shifted in his seat, leaning forward slightly. His elbows rest on his knees, hands loose between them. If his back were bowed, Whitaker thinks he'd look as if he were praying.
“You don’t have to talk,” Robby says. “Just sit. We can just sit, right?”
Whitaker swallows. His tongue feels thick. His mouth tastes metallic. He's trembling faintly, and he wants to say something—anything—, but the words stick. The space Robby's giving him is too much; it lets his feelings get too big with nothing to rein them in. He hasn't had this before, without explaining it, or justifying it, or repenting for it.
He manages, “Sorry.” A thick, wet rasp in the back of his throat.
Robby’s eyebrows draw together. “For?”
The question is confusing, like a hand being offered instead of raised. Hesitant, gentle. Whitaker has no idea how to answer it. Sorry. Sorry for taking up space. Sorry for needing. Sorry for being here at all.
“I don’t know,” he says. It comes out hoarse. He cringes.
Robby nods once, slowly, like he understands. Maybe he does. It isn't pity on his face, Whitaker notes with relief.
“Then don’t apologise.”
Whitaker leans back in the chair, exhausted, temples throbbing. He can feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and lets out a long exhale, his body bent over itself.
The hospital breathes on the other side of the closed door – phones, distant footsteps. Somebody pushes a cart past the door, the loose wheel squeaking every second rotation. Lives continue. Inside the quiet room, Whitaker gathers himself, feeling like he weighs twice what he should.
He thinks of his father and God, and he tries, really tries, to imagine love that doesn’t hurt first. He thinks of Jesus healing lepers in Galilee, the laying on of hands. Lord Jesus, make me clean. I am willing.
Whitaker doesn't feel willing.
###
The quiet room is dim except for a thin strip of fluorescent light leaking in from the hallway. It cuts a swathe of pale across the floor, bright, sterile, indifferent. It makes the room look sharper than it feels.
Whitaker drags a hand over his face, eyes squeezed shut. His skin is hot and clammy, still flushed from adrenaline, with eyes burning in that way that warns of tears he really doesn't want to shed in front of his attending.
Robby hasn’t moved. He sits the way people sit with frightened animals, and Whitaker would resent the hesitancy if he didn't feel so fragile. Robby's offering warmth without making Whitaker reach for it, and for that, Whitaker's grateful.
“You should drink something,” Robby says eventually, jerking his head toward the paper cup dispenser on the wall.
Whitaker shakes his head. He doesn’t trust his hands not to shake.
Robby doesn’t argue – he settles back in his chair with the exhale people make when they’ve been running empty for hours.
They both have, Whitaker supposes.
Silence yawns over the room, and Whitaker picks at a hangnail on his thumb, fidgeting nervously. He isn’t used to stillness that isn’t followed by punishment or correction.
After a minute, Robby speaks, voice softer than before. “You’ve been on three codes this week.”
Whitaker swallows, running a tired hand through his hair, damp with sweat. “Yeah.”
“That’s a lot.”
He lets out something between a laugh and a cough. “Part of the job, I guess.”
“That doesn’t make it easy.”
It hits him harder than he expects, the lack of blame that comes with Robby's careful sentence. Whitaker swallows thickly. Even his mother—soft as she was—would’ve told him to pray harder, trust more, and endure. God doesn't give you more than you can carry. Sympathy was a scarce commodity back home.
Robby looks at him, dark eyes framed by eyelids at half-mast, and offers a lopsided smile.
Whitaker shifts in his chair. The stiffness in his shoulders has started to turn into a throbbing ache. He presses a thumb into the muscle near his collarbone to loosen it and grant some relief.
Robby watches the movement for a moment, then says quietly,
“You grew up religious, right?”
Whitaker’s breath stalls. His spine goes straight in an old, automatic gesture—bracing for evaluation, for judgement. He feels like asking Robby what gave it away.
Instead, he forces a shrug, clearing his throat. “I don’t know. Kind of.”
Robby tilts his head curiously, his hangdog expression wide open. “Kind of how?”
Whitaker tries to answer. Guilt. His mother would pinch his leg whenever he fidgeted, making him sit still until his legs went numb. Guilt. The smells of starch, wood polish. The scent of patent shoe blackener. Shame. His throat closes in on the words, and his brow furrows as he frowns.
He bites the inside of his cheek. “Just… church. Every week.”
Robby’s voice is quiet. “Same here.”
Whitaker glances up at that, expression momentarily surprised. The thumbnail-sized Star of David suspended on a silver chain under his scrubs had often escaped Dennis's notice. A flash of it would sometimes catch the light when they’d turn patients, or lean over charts.
Whitaker feels his chest clench. There’s a difference between knowing something about someone and being let into the reality of it, he knows.
Robby gives him a small smile. “We went to temple. Every Saturday. My mom insisted.”
He tries to picture it—rows of people sitting without fear of punishment, without two-hour sermons. Socialising. Coming together. It feels foreign.
Robby’s voice cuts through Whitaker's train of thought, gentle but direct.
“Did you ever go to temple?”
Whitaker shakes his head before he thinks about it. “No.”
He doesn’t add that he’s spent his whole life trying to get out of God’s house.
He doesn’t add that he still thinks of those pews sometimes, the weight of expectation pressing down harder than his father’s hand had. He doesn’t add that even now—as an adult, in a different city far from the small town he was raised in, in a hospital where he isn't measured by faith but by skill—he still feels watched.
Robby leans back, thoughtful. “I dunno," He starts, scratching the scruff on his jaw idly. “At risk of sounding, uh, philosophical—I think faith's something you gotta hash out with the man upstairs on your own terms.”
Whitaker looks at him sideways. Robby isn’t trying to correct him or make fun of him.
His jaw loosens, a weary breath leaving him as his shoulders drop from around his ears.
It occurs to him that Robby's understanding is the first Whitaker has been afforded in years. He rubs a hand over the back of his neck, the realisation uncomfortable.
Whitaker doesn't enjoy feeling like a charity case.
He can feel the heat under his skin, that tight, crawly, uncomfortable awareness he gets when a conversation veers too close to the parts of his childhood that don’t fit into the definition of normal. Or acceptable.
He’d rather talk about the dead kid. He’d rather talk about anything else.
Robby stares, waiting. Patient. Like he's trying to coax a patient down from a ledge. It makes Whitaker's stomach turn a little, thinking of how he looks right now.
“My parents were big on church,” Whitaker says finally, picking each word with hesitance, methodical and slow. He grimaces. “Like… really big.”
Robby nods like that’s the most natural thing in the world. “Yeah. Same. Every Saturday. And holidays. My mom used to make this rugelach, and we'd have neighbours over for the whole day after, too.”
There’s a small smile in his voice – a fondness Whitaker doesn't think he can mirror. He can’t imagine feeling fond of his church. Nostalgic about the people inside it.
He takes a slow breath, lips thin. “It wasn’t… like that. For us.”
Robby tilts his head, curious. “Different how?”
Whitaker shrugs one shoulder with just enough manufactured ease for it to look natural. The motion feels stiff. “I don’t know. Just… strict. Everything was strict.”
He waits for Robby's face to change—braces himself against the possibility of judgment or disbelief—for the familiar tightening in someone’s jaw when they realise they’re listening to him recount something uncomfortable and ugly.
Robby meets him halfway, sighing as he eyes the toes of his orthopaedic shoes, “Strict how?”
Whitaker stares at a spot on the wall where the paint’s chipped, pale, yellowish off-white under cream. He focuses on it while speaking, so the words come out level.
“We had services on Wednesdays and Sundays. Twice on Sundays, actually. Morning and evening – if you could make it to both, you were expected to, right? And youth group. And Scripture memorisation. Bible study. And if you missed anything, people noticed, y'know?” He tries for a laugh, but it dies in his throat. “Our pastor kept track, usually.”
Robby’s brows lift a little, the closest he comes to surprise. “Seriously?”
Whitaker nods, feeling a familiar lump in his throat that he tries to swallow.
“And my parents—they were the type who wanted everything done right. No excuses. Church wasn’t really optional; it didn't matter if you were sick or—” His pulse spikes, but he keeps going. Stopping now, half-committed to telling his attending all about his shitty home life, feels like the final nail in the coffin. “It was just… strict.”
He uses that word again and cringes. It’s safer than the truth. He never fit in and never felt like a believer, even though he prayed more than half of the congregation put together.
Robby hesitates, but just for a beat. “Mine was strict too, I guess, but not—” He stops, searching for the line between honesty and tact. “Not in a scary way. More like… I dunno, expectations. Rituals. Y'know? Passover, shit like that. My mom cared about doing things by the book, but she cared because she liked it. It made her happy.”
That word—happy—feels like it sucks the air out of Whitaker's lungs. He can’t imagine religion and happiness touching in the same sentence. The worship he knew was austere. That was the point.
“That sounds nice,” Whitaker says quietly, eyes trained on the hangnail on his thumb as he fidgets with his hands in his lap.
Robby gives him a small, apologetic smile. “Yeah. I mean, it had its downsides—" He sucks in a breath, sighing wearily, "But it wasn’t…” He gestures vaguely in the air, squeezing his eyes shut as he sighs. “It wasn’t a punishment.”
Whitaker looks down at his hands again, shifts and listens to the cross around his neck tinkle on the chain beneath his scrubs. His knuckles are blanched red from the code. His shoulders and arms ache from the compressions, fighting to keep a sixteen-year-old alive. Distantly, he feels fourteen again, sitting in the back pew, hands folded just like this. Waiting for something bigger than himself to take notice of him.
He clears his throat. “Our pastor preached a lot about sin, most of the time. And punishment. And the world being dangerous. Temptation-.. I dunno.”
Dennis doesn’t mention the belt. Or his mother crying in the kitchen after Wednesday service because she couldn’t explain why God made children so difficult.
“That sounds exhausting,” Robby says, voice rough, so cautious it makes a part of Whitaker shrink back. He doesn't want pity, he thinks.
Whitaker lets out a slow breath, shrugging. “It was just normal.”
Robby’s expression softens. "It was still hard though, right?"
Whitaker looks away, gnawing on his bottom lip.
There is no way to explain that he went straight from that world to seminary because his parents insisted it was God’s plan. That he was sheltered – that Santos had pitied him when he told her he didn't have his first drink until twenty-four, or that he had only recently begun to question things without anticipating the death of someone he loved as consequence.
He doesn’t say he only got out by accident—that medicine had felt so much like the mission his parents had shepherded him towards, the operating theatre a better house of worship than any church. Medicine made sense without needing divine permission. The only intervention Whitaker was capable of was what he could deliver with his own two hands, and that certainty was comforting.
He doesn’t say any of that. Not right now.
He just says, “I left. Eventually.”
Robby nods. “Yeah?”
“Seminary wasn’t…” Whitaker’s tongue catches, and he sighs. Looks pointedly at the ceiling, leaning back in the flimsy chair his body had collapsed in. “It wasn’t what I thought it’d be.”
“Because of your family?”
Because of the sermons. And the shame, not for the sinning, although Whitaker knew that was part of it—the shame of existing. Taking up space. Because of the boys in his theology cohort who discussed damnation and reckoning with a fervour he wasn't capable of mustering up. Because Whitaker realised that rather than convince people to make themselves right with God in case of an untimely death, he could attempt to prevent those untimely deaths altogether.
“Because of a lot of things,” Whitaker says, finally, his breath slow and uneven.
After a moment, Robby says, almost casually, “If it helps… I’m not great with religion either – not anymore. I haven’t been properly observant in years, y'know? My mom still guilt-trips me on holidays.”
Whitaker huffs a sound that’s almost a laugh, the tension in his shoulders easing by degrees, finally dropping from around his ears.
Robby sits back a little, sighing tiredly, toes of his shoes scuffing gently against the linoleum floor. He thinks of what Whitaker said about “leaving”. How he put it.
“I gotta admit…” Robby says slowly, as if trying not to scare a spooked animal, “I kinda thought you always wanted to do medicine.”
Whitaker blinks, eyebrows raised. “Really?”
Robby shrugs sheepishly. “You just… fit. You’ve got that ... thing.”
Whitaker huffs a quiet laugh through his nose. It makes his chest clench a little, just how wrong that assumption is.
"Thing?"
"I dunno, Whitaker. Good bedside manner. You want to help people. You can just ask if you want a compliment." Robby manages, a lopsided smile tugging at a corner of his mouth. Whitaker laughs quietly, shaking his head.
“No,” he says. “Medicine wasn’t even on the map.”
Robby tilts forward, elbows balanced on his knees again, hands folded in a way Dennis recognises. “Then what was? What'd you want?”
Whitaker stares at the floor. Wants to pick at a thread in his scrub pants. Wants to vanish under the tiles. “Seminary.”
Robby’s eyebrows go up, voice tight. “Huh. Really?”
Whitaker gives a tight nod, cringing internally.
Robby lets out a soft, breathy laugh. “Never would’ve guessed.”
“Yeah,” Whitaker mutters. “Most people wouldn’t.”
Silence again. Whitaker fidgets with his hands awkwardly. Kid from small-town Nebraska wanting to join the church – shocker.
Robby’s voice is casual and quiet. “So… you were gonna be a priest?”
“Pastor,” Whitaker corrects automatically, knee-jerk. “Different thing.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Whitaker shakes his head, sighing as he waves his hand. “It’s fine.”
Robby looks at him for a moment, searching his face carefully. “Did you… want that? Or was it more of a—you know—" Robby makes a vague hand gesture, pulling a face, "Like...family expectation thing?"
Whitaker opens his mouth to answer, but nothing comes out.
He isn’t used to talking about this – most people don’t ask. Most people don’t even know. 'Seminary' is a word he avoids using; it feels too close.
“I dunno,” he says finally. “I think I wanted to. Or I thought I should. It’s what my parents wanted, what my church wanted. It felt like the next right step, I guess. Logically.”
Robby nods, encouraging.
Whitaker drags a hand over his mouth, thumb pressing into the corner of his jaw, pressing at the hinge.
“It's stupid." He starts, laughing quietly, avoiding eye contact. "I kept telling myself I still believed,” he says quietly. "Kept trying to make it feel real, 'cause what else do you do, y'know? Hoped I'd wake up feeling different some day, that I'd feel… -called. But it never—”
He breaks off, swallowing. “It never sat right. I guess.”
Robby’s expression softens further, frown deepening. “Whitaker," He begins, emphatically, "That sounds miserable.”
“It wasn’t… bad.” Whitaker lies automatically, and then, because he wants to be more honest than that: “It didn't click. Didn't matter how much I prayed, or studied, or—” He shakes his head, exasperated. “Eventually, I realised I believed in people a whole lot more than I did in God.” He pauses, “Don't tell my parents that.”
Robby chuckles, nodding. “Y'sure that wasn't the start of a different kinda calling?”
Whitaker looks up, startled by how simply Robby reframes it.
Robby leans back again, posture loosening, one ankle crossing over his knee. “I mean, not everyone's set up for religious life." He shrugs, crossing his arms across his chest. "You get raised with all this tradition, rules, shit like that. Then you grow up and… life doesn’t always match the textbook.”
Whitaker frowns slightly. “You still practise?”
Robby gives a wry, lopsided smile. “Barely. And don’t tell my mother.”
Whitaker manages a small, genuine smile in return.
“I’m serious,” Robby says, hand pressed to his chest. “If she asks, I’m the most observant, devoted Jew in the entire county. I light candles. I call my rabbi. I fast properly. I definitely do not eat bacon on Wednesday nights after shift.”
Whitaker snorts, shaking his head. Robby continues, softer.
“I feel connected to it, I guess. The culture. The stories. The… people part of it. But the religious part? I dunno. Life gets busy. You've seen how crazy work gets. It’s hard to observe properly when you’re working fifteen-hour shifts.”
Whitaker glances at him, head bowed, elbows resting on his knees as he sits forward, breathing lowly. “Doesn't that bother you?”
Robby thinks for a second. “Sometimes. Not in a guilty way. I miss the feeling of knowing where I fit in, I guess. Y'know, when you’re a kid, it’s all laid out for you, the rules are all pre-written. You're so sure. 'N then you grow up, and there's..-” He gestures vaguely, struggling for words. “No handbook for being an adult.”
Whitaker’s breath catches.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I get it.”
Robby looks at him, eyebrows furrowed.
Whitaker forces himself to breathe evenly, hands clenching and unclenching.
“So seminary wasn’t the plan after a while?” Robby asks. His tone isn’t demanding. Whitaker's body feels... heavy.
Whitaker shakes his head. “I think the plan was not disappointing anyone.”
Robby lets out a soft sigh through his nose. “Yeah. I get that.”
“You do?”
“Sure,” Robby says. “Everyone wants their parents to be proud. I'm fifty-four, and I still want my mom's approval.”
Whitaker doesn’t look at him, so he focuses on his hands instead—long fingers, fading calluses along his palms from farmwork. They tremor faintly.
“I didn’t really get away from any of it until med school,” he says quietly. “Until I moved out.”
“Guessing you didn’t look back?”
Whitaker swallows. He thinks of Nebraska and the smell of corn on the wind and the billboard opposite his house that demanded he 'PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD' and feels a familiar ache in his chest that he tries to stomp out.
“I tried not to.”
Robby nods. Slow.
There’s a long, quiet pause between them. The clock above the door ticks over quietly. Whitaker doesn't know how long it's been. Robby breaks the quiet first, voice low, warm:
“For what it’s worth? I’m glad you ended up here, kid.”
Whitaker looks at him. Robby doesn’t smile. He doesn’t need to, really.
“Yeah,” Whitaker says, barely above a whisper. “Me too.”
###
Someone down the hall laughs, loudly enough that it's audible through the door. A nurse, probably one of the night-shifters. It's how most of them cope. It drifts faintly into the quiet room, a reminder that death doesn't stop the world from moving on.
Whitaker isn’t sure if that makes him feel better or worse. It feels unfair. It reminds him of when his grandma died. The hours he spent in the interfaith prayer room.
Robby shifts in his chair, stretching one leg out until his knee pops.
“Can I say something without sounding rude?”
Whitaker blinks. “Sure.”
Robby hesitates. Then:
“D'you know that you talk about your upbringing like everything was your fault?”
Whitaker’s fingers curl slightly. “I don’t.”
“You kinda do,” Robby says, voice quiet. "You're saying that if you were good enough, it would keep all the bad shit from happening, right?"
Whitaker opens his mouth to argue, but when he closes his eyes, the dead boy’s face is there, behind his eyelids—the slack skin, the cheap plastic bracelet, the way his chest didn’t rise no matter how hard Whitaker pushed air into him.
He shuts his mouth again, tense.
Robby watches him for a second, then continues, cautiously, “We get kids in here who die because someone was texting while driving. Or because a neighbour didn’t lock up their gun right. Or because the universe flipped a coin and it landed wrong. That’s not your fault. You'll kill yourself thinking that way, Whitaker.”
Whitaker’s throat works. “I know.”
“Do you?” Robby asks. Whitaker looks up, but Robby's face isn't accusatory. His expression is open. Honest. Whitaker doesn't know what to do with that. “Because I think when you grow up in a place where everything is punishment, you start seeing the world like a ledger. You figure something bad must’ve been earned, somewhere, right?”
Whitaker looks down at his hands, palms still faintly trembling. Every tragedy had a cause, a lesson, a divine reason. That death meant something; it had to, if everything was predestined. God didn't deal in senseless death, Whitaker had thought. Had been told.
He doesn’t know how to explain the guilt he feels then. This is the price. This is what sin costs.
Instead, he says, “That kid tonight didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” Robby says. That much was obvious.
“It feels like—” Whitaker breaks off, jaw tight. “I spent my whole childhood being told how dangerous sin is, y'know? How it leads to death. Then I come here, and half the people who die haven’t done anything wrong.”
Robby’s expression softens. He sighs, dragging a hand over his face.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s bullshit.”
Whitaker exhales heavily, groaning quietly.
Robby fidgets with his hands for a quiet moment. “My rabbi growing up used to say the world isn’t fair because fairness isn’t the point."
Whitaker raises his eyebrows. Robby continues, "Compassion is. Responsibility is. What we owe each other—that’s what matters. Not who deserves what.”
Whitaker swallows. “That’s not what I learnt.”
“I figured,” Robby says, quiet and non-accusatory.
Whitaker’s gaze drifts toward the floor again.
“You ever think,” Whitaker says slowly, “that maybe… maybe nothing means anything? That there’s no reason any of this happens?”
Robby tilts his head. “Fifteen-hour shifts are hardly the place to wrestle with the concept of providence, Whitaker,” he chuckles, before sighing, shrugging hesitantly. “..-I mean, on bad days, yeah. Y'know, a kid gets shot, and they die, and you figure, 'What's the point?', but I don’t think that's a reason to give up. You're a trauma resident, kid. There's no reason for half the shit we treat.”
Whitaker's mouth twists into a grimace that resembles a smile. “I guess.”
Robby huffs a quiet laugh. Whitaker thins his lips, thinking.
The wages of sin is death. He exhales slowly. Predestination was one of the first concepts they covered in seminary.
Here he is in hospital ten years later, watching kids die for no reason at all.
Robby stretches again, the chair creaking softly. “Y'know, if the universe were fair, we wouldn’t have jobs, Whitaker.”
Whitaker looks up at him.
“That kid wouldn’t have been here,” Robby says simply.
Whitaker’s chest tightens- not painfully. He sighs.
Robby’s voice is quiet and even. “None of that is on you.”
Whitaker exhales, long and shaky, nodding.
“Yeah,” he says, barely audible. “I know.”
In the quiet room with the door half-closed and the world going on without them, he almost makes himself believe it.