Work Text:
If Abby had to put her finger on exactly when she noticed that something strange was happening, she would have liked to say that it was right away, of course, that very first night, when her husband came back home from work on July fourth with an odd, detached look in his eye.
When he walked through the door he seemed both weary and wired all at once, and she turned her head around on the couch to watch him drop his backpack on the floor, greeting him with a, “Hey, how was it?”
He heaved a shrug, passing by her to walk into the kitchen. “About what I expected.”
She made a sympathetic noise in response. “That bad, huh?”
He paused with his hand up on the doorframe, glancing back over his shoulder at her. “Some parts were… better than I had hoped, I guess.” He was looking at her, but not seeing her. His gaze was unfocused, a little far-off, like he was deep in thought.
“That’s good,” she told him encouragingly. “Keep chasing the good parts, then. Like the therapist said.”
“Yeah,” he said, still distant, tapping his hand absentmindedly against the door, the metal of his ring clicking as he did. “Yeah, I think I will.”
Looking back on it, she should have known then.
The first little warning sign that she actually took notice of didn’t happen until a few weeks later, when they were both yawning and speaking in low tones in the early morning light of the kitchen. Abby was pouring herself her first cup of coffee, and Frank was making Tanner a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when he turned to her and said, “I’m thinking of taking the kids to the Fort Pitt museum on my day off tomorrow.”
“Oh?” Abby replied, pulling open the fridge to put away the milk. “Are they even going to like that? They’re a little young, no?”
Frank shrugged. “I went when I was their age. It’s free for kids, anyway. If they hate it, I’ll just take them to the park instead.”
“Alright,” Abby agreed, not really caring that much.
He cleared his throat, then, staring down at the bread in his hand as he carefully smeared peanut butter around with the knife. “A coworker was planning to come, too. With their sister. If that’s okay.”
She paused at that, the mug in her hand halting its journey up to her mouth. Maybe if she had been a bit more awake, she would have clocked the use of the gender-neutral pronouns and called him out on it. But it was barely even six a.m. yet, and her brain was moving slowly, so instead she just said, “Uh, sure. Which coworker?”
Dana, she had been expecting. Robby, she had dared to hope. Even maybe Garcia or Collins, though she knew the latter had managed to escape the obvious dysfunction of the PTMC Emergency Department and since gone off to greener pastures. Smart woman. Abby had always liked her.
“Doctor King,” he said, a name that Abby had never heard before. “One of the R3s. I treated Becca, the sister, a few weeks ago when she came into PTMC. She’s special needs.”
She hummed as she took her first sip of coffee, trying to remember if he had told her about that before, if it was something she had forgotten. “Yeah, that’s fine I guess. Have fun, take pictures.”
The next day, she was eating a late lunch at her desk at work, swiping through the dozen or so photos that Frank had texted her of the kids straddling a cannon like horse, or the three of them sandwiched between two costumed-up reenactors, when she reached a picture that made her pause and set her green juice down on her desk.
She imagined he hadn’t meant to send it, because neither Tanner nor Penny were in the photo, but she could tell that Frank had taken the picture because he had tilted the camera strangely and the tips of his tennis shoes were visible in the frame. She pinched the screen of her phone, zooming in on the two women featured in it – a brunette with sunglasses that looked like transition lenses and a petite blonde with a loose braid tucked over her shoulder. The picture wasn’t great, they were slightly backlit and blurry (another surefire tell that her husband had taken it), but she could see the physical similarities between them regardless, could tell without a doubt that the two were sisters.
Oh, she thought, leaning back in her chair. Doctor King was a woman.
The next time Abby noticed something odd, it was just after Labor Day and she was in the kitchen chopping up lettuce and tomato for their hamburgers. Frank had been off that day, and he had volunteered to fire the grill up for dinner, so he was outside on the deck. Abby had tried to convince him that the kids really preferred hot dogs, but he had made a truly awful grimace at the mere mention of them and insisted on the burgers. His phone had been left on the kitchen counter, and the first time it rang, she ignored it, assuming it was a spam call or something else that could wait. When it began buzzing again, the rapid, quick-succession vibrations of another phone call, she put the knife down and picked it up.
Mel King, the caller ID read, and Abby frowned as she carried it out the back door, thinking back to the blurry photo of the blonde-haired woman who had apparently met her children.
“You’re getting a call,” Abby said, stepping out onto their porch and offering him the phone. “It’s work, I think.”
“Shit,” Frank cursed, handing her the spatula so he could take his phone. “I’ll grab it, thanks. Can you flip the ones in the back? I think they might be burning.”
He brushed past her, shutting the door behind him as he answered the phone with a decidedly-familiar sounding, “Hey, is everything okay?”
Abby looked down at the practically-charred burgers on the grill, unimpressed. There was a reason she did most of the cooking. She managed to salvage at least half of them, enough for a meal at least, and was piling them up on a plate to take back inside when he walked back out.
“Abs, I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta run,” he said, his keys already in his hand, a contrite, puppy-dog look on his face.
She sighed, having already mostly expected it. “Work thing?” She asked, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to tell her much more than that.
“Yeah,” he confirmed, swooping in to give her a quick peck on the cheek. “Work thing. I promise to be home before Penny’s bedtime.”
This wasn’t unusual–him getting called in on his day off due to some emergency, so Abby didn’t really think much of it, at first. It was only until later that evening, when she was tidying up the house a bit and she saw his backpack, still hanging on the hook by the door, that she felt an inkling of discomfort. She unzipped the front pocket, peering inside and feeling her heart start to creep up into her throat a bit when she saw it:
His work badge, right there in his backpack, where he always kept it.
Abby kept her head on a swivel after that for a few weeks, cataloguing her husband’s behavior more closely. At the time, she was more worried that the sneaking around was a sign of a possible relapse rather than anything else, but he was still getting drug tested regularly at work, and his sponsor had assured her that he hadn’t noticed any warning signs.
For the next two months, everything was normal.
Then, one brisk morning in early November, Frank let her know that he’d be home later than usual that evening. There was a post-shift happy hour, he informed her, put together to celebrate Dana’s birthday. Abby had known Dana long enough to know that it was, in fact, near the time of her birthday, so his story held up in that regard.
Still though, in the interest of thoroughness, she texted Dana separately that afternoon.
Hey! Happy Birthday! Frank told me there’s a get together at the bar tn, sorry to miss it. Make sure to send pics <3
She received a response around an hour later.
<3 Thanks Abs. I’ll keep an eye on him for you.
Abby hearted the message, satisfied with her own detective work. She was further soothed by a photo that Frank texted her at seven p.m. that evening, a large group photo of about ten people at the bar, smiling with their arms around each other.
Abby recognized most of them, even though it looked strange to see them all in something other than scrubs. She saw Dana, of course, in the center next to Robby and a few other nurses. Frank, grinning at the camera next to Donnie, the nurse with the newborn. A handful of younger-looking residents or nurses that she didn’t know. The blonde-haired Doctor King, propped up on a stool between McKay and Mohan. And Abbott, in the far back, lurking on the edge like someone had made him join the picture, and he wasn’t happy about it.
Cute. Abby responded. Have fun.
Not staying that long. He sent her after another fifteen minutes or so. Be home soon.
She felt a little guilty for her lack of trust by that evening, when he was home by eight and he seemed genuinely relaxed, walking through the door with an easy smile, not smelling of booze or even cigarettes.
So when she got the notification on her phone the next morning, Dana Evans has added you to a Shared Album, she didn’t bother to look at it right away. It wasn’t like she actually cared enough about her husband’s work happy hour to look at the photos.
It was sheer boredom, ultimately, that drove her to click the link, waiting in the school pickup line that afternoon for Tanner.
The first bunch of photos in the album were similar to the one he had sent her the night before: big group shots, with everyone collected for the camera. A handful of Dana posed with a birthday hat that had no doubt been forced onto her. She swiped through absentmindedly, looking for some with Frank.
She almost swiped past it, the first time. The subjects of the photo were a severe-looking brown-haired girl and a mousey-looking blonde boy. The girl was holding up two shot glasses filled with clear liquor, and the blonde boy was grimacing at her. That wasn’t the part that made Abby stop, though.
What made her stop was the background of the photo, near the bar, where they had incidentally captured her husband, and next to him, Doctor King. Their backs were to the camera, but she recognized his mop of hair and her blonde braid. She couldn’t see their expressions, but she could see the way their heads were tilted together, the way her hand was wrapped around his bicep.
Abby felt her heart beating faster as she continued swiping. She felt suddenly, incredibly grateful to whomever it was that had taken it upon themselves to document the entire evening through photo (primarily Victoria Javadi, it appeared, based on the posted by information tagged under almost every photo in the album). While there was an almost notable, almost suspicious lack of photos of Frank and Doctor King together, Abby managed to identify them in the background of almost half of the nearly two hundred pictures she swiped through.
Some of them were relatively innocuous, just the two of them at a table, sitting side by side. Then a handful were a bit more damning, a few where she was clearly talking, gesturing with her hands a lot, and he was just staring at her with his mouth hanging open, entirely locked in. One or two where he was smiling down at her, and she was ducking her head and visibly blushing like something out of a shitty hallmark movie.
And then finally, maybe her favorite of all, which Abby almost felt like fucking screenshotting and sending to him with the caption “????”
It featured her back to the camera, a playful smirk on her husband’s face as his left hand reached up to tug on her braid. The flash from the phone camera had managed to catch on the metal of his ring, causing it to glint in the light like it was mocking her.
She stared at that one for a long, long while, jolting out of it only when she heard the sound of knuckles rapping on her driver side window. Abby blinked to her left to see a stern-looking teacher standing there, a clipboard in her hands and a whistle around her neck, motioning for her to drive forward.
“Sorry,” Abby apologized as she finally registered the line of cars behind her. “So sorry.”
“You really shouldn’t be on your phone in the pickup line.” The woman chastised.
“Yeah,” she agreed, thinking of all the anxiety she could have spared herself if she had followed that piece of advice. “It won’t happen again.”
It was almost like a sick cliché, the way it all eventually came to a head one day in mid-December, right before the kids got off for their Christmas break. She knew that Frank had had a particularly awful shift at work the day prior. Again, nothing he could really talk about with her in great detail, but he had stayed late–later than he normally did, and crawled into their bed at midnight with his eyes red. She had listened to him toss and turn for several hours after that, unable to fall asleep, haunted by whatever it was he had dealt with that day.
It was a slow afternoon at work for her, and she knew that he was home alone, waiting for when the kids got off school so he could go pick them up.
What the hell, she figured, popping into her supervisor’s office to let him know she’d be ducking out a few hours early that day.
She didn’t have an exact plan, really. They hadn’t been out on a date in–god, years, which was depressing, but he had seemed like he had a more positive attitude, recently. Like he was finally emerging from his haze of shame and self-loathing and was maybe on a path to becoming a real, actual husband again, instead of just a roommate she co-parented with. There had been no further incidents with Doctor King, so Abby had just about managed to convince herself that it was a case of latent paranoia, a hanger-on from the drug-stealing era of their not-too-distant past.
She unlocked the front door to the house and stepped inside, too lost in her own thoughts to notice the women’s black puffer jacket hanging on the coat rack, the extra set of tennis shoes sitting by the door. The house was quiet except for the low noise of the television playing, some sort of nature documentary it sounded like, and Abby turned the corner into the living room, slipping her coat off her shoulders as she walked.
What she saw there made her freeze completely, ice sliding in her veins as her brain tried to make sense of the scene in front of her, too stunned to even speak.
It was her husband, Frank Langdon, stretched across their couch with his eyes closed, and Doctor Mel King, asleep on his fucking chest. His right arm was draped over her shoulder, holding her against him, her hands were curled up in his shirt, her head tucked under his chin, their feet tangled together. They had not awoken to her presence.
Abby’s eye twitched as she stared at them, watching the way his breath fluttered the flyaway hairs on the top of her head, noticing the pair of black-framed glasses he clutched carefully in his left hand.
She felt like she was about to scream, cry, throw up, laugh–she wasn’t quite sure yet.
Her body and mind were still processing, deciding how she felt, so while they worked on that, Abby reached a shaking hand into her jacket pocket and pulled out her cellphone. She opened the camera app, stared at them for a second through the digital lens of her phone screen, and took a picture.
It was a nice one. Well-framed. Not blurry. Properly lit. Abby was always the one that took all their family photos, so. She knew how to take a good one.
Without missing a beat, she texted the photo to her husband. She watched as his phone, resting on the arm of the couch right behind his head, buzzed with a notification from her. Frank’s eyes blinked open at the sensation, disoriented for a moment, not seeing her right away. She heard a low, rumbling hum, a soft shh, and saw him drag a soothing hand down Doctor King’s back as she shifted on top of him, still asleep.
Then, finally, Frank looked up. Abby felt a sick sort of pleasure at the way every muscle in his body seemed to lock up simultaneously at the sight of her, at the sheer shock and terror in his eyes.
“Ab–” He whispered, like he was still worried he might fucking wake her up.
“I want her out of here in the next twenty minutes.” Abby said calmly, full volume, spinning on her heels and walking back out the way she came, just as her husband’s mistress began to stir back awake.
Abby took her sweet fucking time after that.
She got in the car and drove to the nicest salon in town. She got the most expensive pedicure they offered, the one with the hot wax and the mud wrap, said yes to the glass of wine and the sparkling water they offered her, and put it all on Frank’s card, which she had swiped from the counter on her way out.
She turned her phone off after the fifth consecutive phone call and tenth pleading text message from him. She didn’t open any of the messages before she shut it down, but the automatic iPhone AI message summary that she glanced at on the lockscreen read, begging to come home, offering to explain everything.
She let him sit with himself for another two hours before finally returning, walking back through her front door and glaring at the now-empty couch as she passed it. He was in the kitchen, pacing, looking even more stressed-out and deranged than he had the night he had confessed his drug use to her. He was clutching his phone in his hand, like he was still trying to get ahold of her, and Abby wondered how many more missed calls she would have when she finally turned her cell back on. He stopped when he saw her, slumping back against the kitchen counter and huffing out a sigh that sounded like relief.
“Christ, Abby,” he said when she walked in. “Where the fuck have you been? What have you been doing? Why haven’t you been returning my calls?”
“What have I been doing?” She echoed, her brows flying up at the absolute audacity of the question.
“Did you read the messages I sent you?” He asked, surging forward to lean his body against their kitchen island, the vast expanse of stone that separated the two of them. “I told you, I can explain what you saw. I know it looked crazy, but–”
“It didn’t look crazy, Frank. You were cuddling on our couch with your coworker. That is crazy.”
“That’s not–” He stuttered. “We weren’t–we just fell asleep.”
“Uh-huh,” she said skeptically, crossing her arms as she scowled at him.
“Listen to me,” he muttered, bending forward on his forearms, looking up at her. “She came over to talk about the shift yesterday. We both slept like shit last night. I put a show on. We fell asleep. That’s all that happened.”
“That’s all, huh?”
“Yes, Abby, that’s all.” He insisted desperately. “I’m not lying to you about this, I swear.”
“Fine,” she agreed. “Then give me your phone.”
“What?” Frank recoiled, flinching back and cradling his phone to his chest.
“Give me. Your phone, Frank.” She repeated through clenched teeth, holding out her hand expectantly.
“What the fuck, why?”
“Because I want to read your text messages with her.”
He shook his head frantically, his brows pulled together. “That’s so invasive, Abby–”
“That’s invasive? You’re telling me you fell asleep on my couch with another woman and that’s invasive?”
“Fine,” He conceded quickly, rather than respond to that question, looking incredibly flustered as he reached across the island and pressed it into her palm. “There’s fucking nothing there; I have nothing to hide. We’re not having an affair, so–”
She snatched it from him, typing in his four digit passcode, opening it to the message app. She almost snarled as she saw it: the name “Mel King”, pinned at the top of his iPhone messaging app, right next to “Abby” and “PTMC Shift Scheduling” the family group chat with his parents.
“Oh my god,” she muttered, feeling ill as she scrolled through their text history. It was so much worse than she thought.
“Oh my god, what?” He asked, clutching his head with both hands and looking at her like he actually didn’t know what would be in there, like he was about to throw up all over the Taj Mahal quartzite countertops she had installed last summer.
“Hey,” she read out. “Missed you today. Can’t stand this place without you.”
“That’s fine,” he insisted. “It’s fine to like working with some coworkers more than others.”
“Can’t believe Shen convinced you to abandon me for the night shift next week,” she continued. “Who am I supposed to split my mid-shift Diet Coke with now?”
“It’s economical,” he argued. “You know I can never finish a whole can by myself.”
“I can’t stop thinking of that picture you showed me today of you in that dress,” Abby’s voice got a little high and screechy at that one, and her eyes felt like they were bugging out of her head.
“It was a normal picture!” He cut in urgently, his face crimson red. “It was just a ren faire costume, she was fully dressed–”
“Sure,” she choked out sardonically, feeling fucking insane.
“Abs, I swear on my fucking life, just give me my phone back and I’ll show you, I have it saved—”
Abby held up a hand, stopping him. “Alright, Frank. What about this one?”
She cleared her throat, scrolling down in the chain to the most recent series of messages. Frank pressed his palm to his mouth, looking horrified.
“Hi Frank,” She started, reading Mel’s messages first, her voice shaking a bit. “Just checking up to see how you were doing after yesterday. Thinking of you.”
She breathed out a long breath, looking up from the phone to stare directly at her husband, to watch his face as she recited his own response back to him.
“Come over,” she quoted. “I need you.”
He peeled his hand up off his mouth, raising it to his forehead instead. “Oh my god,” he said, looking dazed, like she had just reached over to punch him in the stomach.
“Yeah,” she agreed, tossing his phone down on the island between them with a clatter, half-hoping it shattered. “Oh my fucking god, Frank.”
“It was never romantic,” he whispered, even though it sounded like he barely believed it himself. “I swear to god, Abby. It was never like that.”
“How the fuck,” she hissed. “Is ‘come over, I need you’ not romantic?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he begged. “She knows that. The need isn’t sexual, it’s…” He trailed off, opening and closing his mouth stupidly, searching for the right word.
“What, Frank?” Abby spat, getting impatient. “The need is what?”
His hands were shaking, and he clenched them into two fists as he dropped them to the counter, lifting his chin to stare at the ceiling. “It’s, like… more desperate, or something, I don’t even know. I don’t know how to explain it.”
She almost, almost laughed. He wouldn’t look at her, blinking up at the ceiling like he was trying to hold back tears, and the silence that followed felt more damning than any one of the messages on his phone had.
“Right,” she croaked eventually, after she had let them both really appreciate the absurdity of that statement for a few moments. “Well I hope she’s ready for you to be in desperate need of a few more things, because there’s no way in hell that you’re sleeping in this fucking house tonight.”
This got his attention, his head shooting back down to stare at her like he hadn’t expected that, for some reason, like he still didn’t get it.
“Abby–”
She slipped her ring off her finger, slapping it down onto the counter with a metal clank. “I’m going to pick up Penny and Tanner. This time, I want you gone by the time I get back.”
She ignored his sputtering protest as she spun on her heels and walked back out of the house for the second time that day. She drove around aimlessly for the next twenty minutes, just doing circles around the neighborhood adjacent to theirs, taking deep, steady breaths. She had several months of therapy to thank for the fact that she managed to maintain her composure enough to go collect the kids from their after-school program by five.
By the time that evening rolled around, and she had put Tanner and Penny to bed and started on her second glass of Cabernet–because fuck it, she could finally have alcohol in the house again if he wasn’t going to be there–her rage had died down enough that she could pick out a few more emotions, simmering in the background.
Hurt, obviously. Disbelief, certainly. Jealousy, humiliatingly.
But also, hiding there, smaller and more distant than the rest, but somehow bone-deep and growing with every passing hour: relief.
Abby took another sip of her wine, savoring the taste of it in her mouth. How peaceful her life would be, she thought, when Frank Langdon was some other fucking woman’s problem.
Maybe she would even let him keep the stupid couch.