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Samira is doubled over on the stone wall in the ambulance bay, her hands on her knees, staring down at her shoes. Her ears are ringing. Her chest is tight. The weight of everything that has happened in the last hour crashing over her and throwing her off balance. Mistake after mistake. Now Austin Green is dead and Orlando Diaz is barely holding on.
It’s her fault. It’s all her fault.
“Dr. Mohan,” says a voice, sharply, like this isn’t the first repetition of her name. Jack Abbot is standing a few feet away, staring at her with his hands shoved in his pockets. Two hours ago she was desperate to find him and now he’s one of the last people she wants to see.
Samira feels like a cornered animal. A stray cat who scratches when someone gets too close. She looks over her shoulder, unable to help the way she glares at him. “Are you also going to tell me I don’t belong here?” she asks.
Abbot doesn’t even blink at her tone, just cranes his neck to look at her closer. His eyebrows furrow. “Did someone say that to you?”
“Forget it.” Maybe he’s not here to yell at her, but Robby is Abbot’s best friend. For all her feelings about Robby today, she’s not going to get in the way of that. It can only go one of two ways, and both end badly. Either Abbot takes Robby’s side and she’s lost the only person in the Pitt who might still believe in her. Or, by some miracle, Abbot takes her side, and she gives Robby another reason to hate her and risks sending him over whatever edge he has been dancing at all day. He was a dick, but she can’t help caring about him in the way a daughter aches for her father or a moth aches for the lamplight. Reaching for him despite how he burns her.
“I came out here to check on you. Ellis said you turned down the chance to do a ventriculostomy on your diabetic patient. That doesn’t sound like the Mohan I know.”
It makes her want to laugh, all bitter irony, but she doesn’t have the energy for it. “Maybe you don’t know me that well.”
Abbot considers this, then shakes his head. “No, I think I do. I know you don’t crack under pressure. I’ve seen what you can do on the tail end of a double or in the middle of an MCI. You’re like me. You do your best work when things are the worst. You show up for your patients and you never miss a chance to learn something new. So what happened?”
“I fucked up,” she says. “I fucked up with Orlando.”
“How? He left AMA. We sent everything he needed to his house.”
“I didn’t listen to him. To what he needed.” That was her superpower, Heather had told her. And she’d failed this time. “My dad died when I was thirteen.”
“Yeah, I know.” She’d told him the story once, on a quiet night shift when he asked her what her why for medicine was. How Suresh Mohan was discharged from an emergency room by doctors who insisted he wasn’t having an MI only to pronounce him dead from that very thing four hours later.
“Orlando’s daughter was the one who brought him in. She’s just a teenager, too. She was so worried about him. She talked about picking up extra shifts to help afford his care. Even though Orlando was telling me he couldn’t afford the care, I wasn’t listening to him because all I could think about was how hard it was to lose my dad and how much I couldn’t let his daughter go through the same thing.
“Fuck, I’ve studied insurance issues in my research, I know this. But it’s like everything I know just went out the window and instead of trying to make it work in the first place with the at-home care, I just kept pushing him to stay because nobody let my dad stay. I let my personal feelings get in the way of patient care.”
She drops her head into her hands. How stupid, how stupid. She was supposed to be smarter than this. She was supposed to be better than this.
“And then I was so distracted that I signed off on a med student’s ultrasound without making sure he’d checked the heart too. It was a triple-a. And the patient died and it’s all my fault.” She can feel the tears building behind her eyes. “All I have ever wanted to do is become an emergency medicine doctor so that I could help people, and save someone else from the same mistakes that cost me my dad. And now two families have lost their fathers because of my mistakes."
Abbot exhales. “That’s a tough shift.” He takes a seat on the bench beside her, dropping down gracelessly as his right leg slides out from under him a bit. “We make mistakes sometimes. We’re human.”
“I know,” she snaps. Immediately she regrets it because it’s not his fault. The blame is her own. “And I know that even when we do everything right someone can still die, and I know being an emergency medicine doctor means I have to accept that but… I don’t know if I can accept this. That working this fast and in this system means I’m going to become the very thing I wanted to fight against.”
“So don’t accept it.” Abbot says it like it’s obvious, like it’s easy.
“But Robby–”
“Robby is a good doctor, but there’s more than one way to be a doctor. You don’t have to do it his way. You do it your way, because you’re a good doctor, too.” He leans in closer, stretching his neck to make eye contact. Though his face is stone-serious, there’s a spark in his eyes. “Keep fighting the system. Keep fighting for your patients. Accept the things you can’t change and change the things you can’t accept.”
That, she realizes, is Abbot’s way. Abbot with his go-bag of emergency medical devices and a head full of hail mary procedures. Who ubers a patient a bag of home health supplies and, if the rumors are to be believed, has at least once fudged the numbers on a fetal measurement to help a patient obtain an abortion.
Changing the things he cannot accept, rules be damned.
The wind rustles the heat-dry leaves. In the distance, a siren wails and distant pops of firecrackers are already beginning to echo through the evening sky.
Then Abbot asks, “Who told you that you didn’t belong here?”
“It’s not important.”
“It’s important to me.” His gaze is so intense, daring her to look away. She can’t. Of course she can’t.
“I’m being too sensitive,” she deflects. “He didn’t even say it outright, it was more implied.”
Abbot sets his jaw and Samira realizes her mistake. “What exactly did Robby say to you?”
She starts to protest, but Abbot raises his eyebrows in challenge. There’s no point in lying to him. “I thought I was having an MI, but it was just a panic attack,” she explains. Reciting it like a patient history. Objective, clinical. Just another way she fucked up today. “Robby was upset with me. He told me to go home because he ‘didn’t need the fucking liability.’ That I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself. And then when the triple-a patient decompensated, I owned up to it, and he said that I was letting my personal problems get in the way of my work, and that was the difference between the best doctors and the ones who don’t make it.”
She sighs, folding into herself so she doesn’t have to look at his face. She can’t bear to see the moment he realizes he was wrong about her. “Maybe I was feeling sorry for myself, because I told him he was right. Maybe I just don’t belong here. And he just sort of… laughed. And that was it. Still think I’m like you?” she asks, her voice shaking as she braces for his inevitable rejection.
“I mean, the only reason I haven’t had a panic attack at work is that I take enough psychotropic medication to sedate a small animal. So yeah. Doesn’t change the fact that Robby’s response was completely inappropriate.”
Abbot shakes his head, like he’s pushing the thought away. “Just because we’re not supposed to let our personal life affect our work doesn’t mean it’s always easy. For me it was Howard Knox, our bigger patient. He wanted to call his sister before the surgery and I knew damn well that every second we delayed increased his mortality risk, but I still took him out to the ambulance bay so he could FaceTime his sister. Just in case it was the last time.” He twists the black wedding ring on his left hand. “I never got to say goodbye to my wife.”
It’s a story he told her too, once. That Caroline Abbot had been hit by a drunk driver and died in surgery before he even made it to the hospital.
“And it probably wouldn’t have changed anything if I had, but at least I wouldn’t have to wonder. I could have told her I loved her one last time. So I gave a patient that instead and it wasn’t smart but it felt right. It was still a mistake. I just got lucky and Howard lived. Feeling something – it doesn’t mean you’re a liability. It means you’re human.”
Samira blinks. She was prepared for a lecture, a dismissal, a tirade. Not this. Not support. It makes her feel guilty because Dr. Abbot has never given her anything but support. Support and encouragement and trust and several journal articles he thought she would like. And a few cups of coffee. And an offer for a ride home that she never accepted.
It’s why she wanted a recommendation letter from him. It’s why she feels safe enough to ask, “But what if it’s true? What if I’m not good enough?”
“You are,” he says, his voice low and firm. Almost reverent. “You’re incredible. You’re the smartest person here.”
“That’s Javadi, not me.” Or maybe Henderson with his research studies, or Joy with her photographic memory.
“It is you.” Abbot reaches out and grabs her shoulders, his face close to hers. Willing her to hear him, to understand. “Javadi knows stuff. Robby knows stuff. We all do. But you’re in a league of your own. You’re brilliant when it comes to the medicine and when it comes to the people. You’re the smartest one here,” he repeats. He drops his hands from her arms and her skin feels every inch of the absence, still warm where he touched her. “I’m not in the habit of saying things I don’t mean. But the way you see things, the way you think about all of this – you’re the future of medicine, Dr. Mohan.”
Samira’s lip quivers with the weight of his kindness. “Why are you telling me this? Why do you care so much?” she asks, because no one ever has before. She spent years clawing her way through college and medical school and residency, with no one to lean on but her father’s ghost. And maybe it’s own fault for not making friends or accepting her coworker’s invitations or dating, but somehow her own social awkwardness has never stopped Abbot from showing up for her again and again.
Abbot’s smile is soft but steady. “You’re important to me,” he says simply. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s easy.
Some long-dormant part of her brain begins to whir. Stitching together tiny moments over the last three years. The pigtail catheter. The journal articles. Stupid jokes on long night shifts and the pigtail catheter and drinks in the park and a few cups of coffee and an offer for a ride home that she never accepted. Solid work. I’ll pay for it. The flush creeping from his face down to his chest as she touched his bare shoulder. It’s important to me. You’re important to me.
Is it obvious? Could it be that easy?
Her mind is working overtime to catch up to the way her heart is racing, because Jack Abbot is looking at her the way he has always looked at her, earnest and open, but she has never stopped to notice that he looks at her like she’s something special. Something precious. It’s electric. It’s terrifying.
“What does that mean?” she asks, because Samira Mohan is nothing if not data-driven. All the evidence she has collected is pointing to a new, impossible hypothesis, one she hasn’t dared to let herself consider because something that good couldn’t be true.
Abbot shrugs. “Whatever you need it to mean. You need a pep talk, I got it. You wanna come work nights again, I’ll put you on my shift. If you need anything, I’m all yours.”
She’s never stopped to ask herself what she needs, what she wants, and the list of things she suddenly wants to ask, just to see what he would say, is dizzying. But for now she says, “What about a letter of rec? For a fellowship program.”
Confusion flickers over his features. “I thought you were headed back to Jersey?”
“I thought so, too. But I was just thinking about what I thought I should do, not what I want to do. I think I want to belong here. If I can.” Belong not just in the ED, but in Pittsburgh. Here, with the people she has been keeping at arm’s length when she could have been getting comfortable in friendship. Here, with a hospital that has pushed her to her limits and still somehow found its way into her heart. Here, with the man who makes her think that if she could belong by his side, if what he’s saying is real, then dreams really can come true.
Samira knows she’s capable of many things, but she never thought it was in her power to make Abbot look so happy. “Yeah,” he says, fighting a grin. “I’ll write you a letter. Consider it done. Do you know what programs you want? We could–”
“Abbot!” Dana pokes her head out of the ambulance doors. “Trauma incoming in two! Fireworks incident!”
“Got it, I’ll meet ‘em here!” he calls back. Then he turns back to Samira. “You should get out of here. But if you’re off tomorrow, meet me after my shift for breakfast? You tell me what you’re thinking and we’ll figure it out. And this time, let me drive you home after?”
For the first time in almost thirteen hours, Samira feels something akin like hope. The way he says home makes her think that maybe Pittsburgh really could be one. Someone sees her. Someone knows her. Someone wants her here.
“Okay,” she says. “Tomorrow. And Dr. Abbot? Thank you.”
“Anytime, Dr. Mohan.” Abbot pushes up off the bench with a grunt. “Like I said. Anything you need, I’m yours.”