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A month after Jack Abbot nearly died within its walls, everyone at PTMC had an opinion about how he should leave it.
Walsh wanted him transported by wheelchair because his hemoglobin was still lower than she liked and, as she reminded him in front of 3 different residents, a man who had required more than 40 units of blood did not get to rediscover humility in the hospital lobby. Physical therapy wanted him to use the walker. His sister Francine wanted him in her guest room, where Jack suspected she intended to lock every tactical vest in the county inside a bank vault while she held him hostage. Robby wanted the TEMS journey to be over; Dana wanted him to eat actual food, and Samira wanted approximately 412 things, all entered into a color-coded spreadsheet.
Jack wanted pants.
“You cannot wear jeans over that incision,” Samira said, standing at the foot of his bed with his discharge clothes folded in her arms. “I brought you sweatpants. They’re clean, they’re soft, and they’re two sizes too big because while your abdomen is still swollen, you lost eighteen pounds.”
“They say ‘PROPERTY OF WEST POINT’ across the ass,” Jack scowled.
“They’re yours.”
“They were mine when I was 22.” Jack eyed the faded gray fabric with the same distrust he had once reserved for unmarked roads in Afghanistan. “I’m now 49 years old. I’m not leaving the hospital dressed like I’m going to my shift at Abercrombie.”
Samira set the clothes beside him and gave Jack the look she had perfected sometime during residency, the one that made frightened patients confess how many substances they had actually taken and grown men twice her size apologize for calling a nurse sweetheart. “Your other option is the gown. I’m sure the press gathered downstairs would appreciate the backless view of your birthmark.”
There was no press downstairs, though the story of Jack’s heroic actions during the SWAT run had been local news for weeks, but there were two dozen police officers, half the emergency department, and enough of Jack’s family to constitute a fire-code violation. They had orbited his room all morning under the guise that they had unrelated business upstairs. Jack had already endured Reyes pretending he needed directions, Santos delivering contraband candy, and Robby asking whether getting shot had finally made him less of an asshole.
It had not.
With an eyeroll, Jack reached for the sweatpants, pulling them slowly over the compression sock on his residual limb and trying not to react when the movement tugged along the healing midline incision. Four operations had left an angry seam from his sternum to below his navel, with one stubborn section near the bottom still covered by a dressing because the skin had separated after the final closure. The liver laceration was healing. His bowel was connected again and, according to Walsh, had resumed performing its God-assigned duties with enough enthusiasm to make the nurses regret asking. His kidneys had recovered and he had discontinued dialysis almost two weeks ago. The drain had come out three days earlier. On paper, he had beaten every catastrophe the two bullets he took tried to cause.
His body had apparently not received the notice.
Neither, apparently, had his brain. Since they lightened his sedation post-op, Jack had been having the same dream every night. At least, he thought it was a dream, because the scene wasn’t in focus enough for him to recall it as a memory. It came with the mechanical hush of the ventilator and a hand wrapped around his, as though his injured brain had collected it while the rest of him was busy trying not to die.
There was always a woman beside him, but he could never see her face. The voice had a familiar rhythm without belonging to anyone he could name; no discernable accent or trademark that he could identify. Once, when Jack was stuck in that half-awake state brought by fever, he had been certain it was Beth; his body in a state of trauma so severe it had no choice but to revert to visions of his dead wife. The next time sleep came, he thought it might have been the voice of a girlfriend from the summer before he graduated high school, a young lady so nondescript and unnotable he couldn’t remember her name. Neither made sense, but dreams rarely submitted themselves for peer review.
You are my everything, the woman at his bedside would tell him, her voice breaking somewhere behind the brightness. Sometimes that was all he heard. Other nights, it was only ‘Please Jack. Come back to me,’ repeated until the words tangled with monitor alarms and the sound of his nurse pecking away at her tablet. The longest version came after his third surgery, when the nameless, faceless woman in his dream promised to love him out loud for the rest of their days.
That time, he had woken with Samira asleep in the chair beside him and tears drying on his face he could not explain.
Jack had never told Samira about these dreams. Conversations became less appealing when they began with ‘I think my dead wife or an unidentified ex-girlfriend has been making romantic declarations beside my hospital bed.’ Robby would be called; someone would order a head CT, and Samira would quietly add neurological checks to her spreadsheet.
By the time he got the sweatpants over his hips, sweat had collected in his curls and the muscles in his arms were trembling. Jack sat back against the raised bed, breathing through the deep ache in his abdomen and the brighter, sharper pain that still appeared whenever he twisted too quickly. He detested the weakness more than the pain. Pain was a familiar friend. Weakness felt like waking up inside a stranger who had borrowed his face.
Samira did not make a comment, which was how he knew she had noticed everything. She simply stepped between his knees, tied the drawstring for him, and adjusted his shirt so it would not catch against the dressing. Her fingers were careful and brisk, but when they brushed the edge of his scar, her touch went especially soft.
“You okay?” she asked softly.
Jack looked down at the crown of her head. “Fantastic. I’ve always wanted to be dressed by a tiny dictator.”
“You’re welcome. Also, I’m 5’6.”
“You keep saying that like repetition will make it true.”
Samira smiled as she reached for his prosthetic, and the expression did something painful to him that had nothing to do with the bullet wounds still healing on his stomach. She had spent most of the last month at his bedside, utilizing the large amount of PTO she had banked to stay awake at hours when normal people had the decency to be unconscious. She had advocated through fevers, ileus, delirium, wound drainage, and the three terrifying days when his kidneys stopped producing anything at all. She had bullied Jack through respiratory exercises and physical therapy, washed his hair when he could not lift his arms, and never once got frustrated or snappy with him when the rollercoaster of healing made him an asshole.
“Your leg still isn’t fitting correctly,” Samira murmured as she checked the socket mechanism. “You’ve lost too much muscle mass. I already called the VA and the prosthetist is coming to my place on Monday, so until then, you’re using the walker or the wheelchair. No arguing.”
“I hate both of those,” Jack mumbled.
“That’s unfortunate, because I had dinner with both of them and they both speak very highly of you.”
“Mira.”
“Jack.”
Their eyes met, and for one dangerous second, Jack almost let slip the confession that had been on the tip of his tongue for weeks. Instead, he begrudgingly let Samira help him stand.
Instantly, the room tilted and he felt his legs buckle.
His blood pressure had been doing better for a week, but being upright remained a negotiation his nervous system occasionally declined. Jack locked his arms against the bed rails as the edges of his vision darkened, vaguely aware of Samira’s hand flattening over his chest and the other gripping his waist without touching the incision.
“Sit down,” she ordered.
“It’ll pass.”
“Your face is gray.”
“It’s distinguished,” he argued.
“Jack, if you faint on discharge day, Walsh will keep you another 48 hours just to punish you, and I will help her.”
The prospect of spending even one more hour as a patient of PTMC was enough to coerce Jack to sit back down on the bed. Samira crouched in front of him, two fingers finding his radial pulse despite the monitor having been removed hours ago. “Dizzy? Nauseated? Any increase in abdominal pain?” she fired off, her cadence defaulting to the one she used daily in the ED.
“No, no, and only when you interrogate me or hide the Benefiber you swear you aren’t mixing into my morning apple juice.”
Samira gave him The Look again. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. It makes my tummy hurt.”
She remained unimpressed, but her fingers stayed around his wrist longer than necessary. Jack watched the fear move behind her eyes and understood that discharge did not look like freedom to Samira. It looked like removing the monitors that had spent a month promising her he was still alive and having to trust the process.
Walsh entered without knocking, took in Jack seated on the bed and Samira kneeling in front of him, and sighed. “I leave for five minutes and you go off script, Abbot.”
“He’s orthostatic,” Samira reported. “Briefly symptomatic. No syncope, no new pain.”
“Traitor,” Jack muttered, “I’m gonna remember this when it’s time for me to shop for your Christmas presents.”
Walsh ignored his comments and proceeded to check his abdomen, pressing around the incision while Jack attempted to play it cool. “You are still anemic, deconditioned, and held together by sutures and poor judgment. No lifting more than ten pounds. No driving while you’re taking oxycodone. No alcohol. No work. No tactical medicine, no matter how desperately the city claims it needs your unique gifts.”
“What about—”
“No.”
“I didn’t ask anything.”
“I’m saving time. Whatever it is: no.” Walsh replaced the dressing and looked at Samira. “Fever, persistent vomiting, increasing abdominal pain, redness or drainage from the incision, no bowel function, bloody stool, confusion, syncope—”
“Back here immediately,” Samira finished. “I know.”
“Of course you do.” Walsh’s expression softened. “He is ready. That doesn’t mean he is well.”
Jack saw Samira absorb the distinction and immediately hated it. He was struggling with forgiving himself for putting her and everyone else through the agony of watching him almost die. Again.
The trip downstairs took forty minutes because everyone in the hospital needed proof of life. Nurses hugged him carefully. Henderson cried without shame. Reyes stood at attention until Jack told him to knock it off, at which point the SWAT captain hugged him hard enough to make Samira threaten him with bodily harm. Dana kissed Jack’s cheek, Robby gripped the back of his neck and shook his head in his Robby way, and Francine extracted three separate promises that he would answer his phone before finally allowing Samira to wheel him toward the exit.
Outside, the afternoon sun was offensively bright. Jack closed his eyes and let the warmth settle over his face, trying to remember the last time the world had felt this large. For a month, his existence had been reduced to hospital rooms, corridors, and the measured distance between a bed and a bathroom. The parking lot looked like Babylon.
Samira brought her car around and supervised the transfer with the concentration of an air-traffic controller landing a damaged plane. Once Jack was belted in with a pillow braced against his abdomen, she folded the wheelchair into the back and climbed behind the wheel.
“Your place or mine?” he asked.
“Very funny, Jack. We’ve already discussed this multiple times.You are staying with me until all of us are confident that you’re capable of making it to a bathroom without risk of an MI. Everything is already set up at my place. Besides, when I stopped by your house to grab you some clothing, I peeked inside your refrigerator and saw something in foil that may have developed language.”
“That was meatloaf,” Jack grumbled.
“That was an ecosystem and possibly a tool of chemical warfare.”
Jack smiled and watched Pittsburgh pass beyond the window. Samira filled the drive with practical information because practical information was where she went to hide. The home-health nurse would arrive in the morning. Physical therapy was scheduled three times a week. His medications were organized in labeled containers. She had installed a shower chair, moved furniture to clear a path for the walker, purchased enough gauze to manage a field hospital, and placed bells in every room in case he needed her.
“Bells?” Jack repeated. “What am I, a puppy you’re trying to train to shit outside?”
“You are not yelling across my apartment.”
“I would rather reopen my abdomen than ring a little bell for assistance.”
“Great. I’ll inform Walsh of your preference and let you deal with that reaction.”
At Samira’s apartment, Jack discovered she had converted her home with the same ruthless efficiency she brought to a mass-casualty event. Her guest room had clean sheets, blackout curtains, an elevated wedge pillow, and a bedside table crowded with water, medications, an incentive spirometer, and a framed photograph from their day at Presque Isle. In it, Samira stood beside the structurally unsound sandcastle they had built that morning, one hand raised triumphantly while Jack looked at her instead of the camera.
His hospital discharge instructions sat beside the frame. On top of them, in Samira’s handwriting, was a schedule accounting for every pill, dressing change, meal, walk, and bowel movement through the end of the week. Jack took a look over her annotations, cursing loudly when he got to the end.
“You scheduled my bowel movements?”
“I scheduled times to assess whether you’ve had one,” she shrugged, already pulling the bottles of his afternoon medications.
“Somehow, that is worse.”
Samira helped him onto the bed, rearranging pillows until his abdomen stopped pulling. When she finally sat beside him, the frenetic energy that had carried her through the day disappeared. In the sudden quiet, Jack could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen and the shallow hitch in her breathing.
“You can relax,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Samira stared at the photograph. “You don’t know that.”
He wanted to make a joke, but her face stopped him; the wheels in her head running through their last beach day and how it ended in the fight in her kitchen.
“No,” Jack admitted. “I don’t.”
“Everyone keeps acting like leaving the hospital means it’s over, but your incision is still open in one place, your blood count is terrible, you can barely walk to the bathroom, and every time you close your eyes I have to stop myself from checking whether you’re breathing.” Samira pressed her lips together, visibly regretting the honesty even as it continued leaving her. “I know what recovery looks like. I know you’re improving. I also know exactly how close you came to not being here, and I don’t think my brain has figured out how to live in a world where both things are true.”
Jack reached for her hand. “Come here.”
Samira moved carefully against his good side, resting her head high on his chest where she would not disturb any of his many incisions. He felt the tension in her body, the way she listened to his heartbeat as if it were another monitor she had been assigned to watch.
“For the record,” she said, breaking the silence that had washed over them, “you are never allowed to scare me like that again.”
Jack smiled against her hair, his heart warming. “For the record, I’m done with TEMS.”
“Really?” Samira replied, pulling back in surprise. Though she knew there would be a battalion of people preventing him from doing so, she had prepared for another epic showdown once his injuries had healed.
Jack nodded. “Really. I’m going to try living like I don’t have to earn it. You were right. I need to stop moving around like I don’t have people who love and care about me still waiting for me.”
Samira’s expression softened, and she rested her cheek against his chest again. Outside the window, late sunlight stretched across the room and caught the photograph beside the bed, turning the lake behind them gold. The sandcastle was already leaning in the picture, one side surrendering to the water even as Samira grinned beside it, proud of their creation.
Jack let his fingers move through her hair and tried not to give meaning to the way she fitted herself against him. He had spent the month filing away every soft thing Samira did beneath the tabs of friendship, medical necessity, or guilt. She stayed because he had nearly died and she’d been as much of an asshole as she was capable of being to him right before it. She learned his wound care because she was a doctor and because Samira approached platonic love with the same immeasurable thoroughness she applied to everything else.
It did not mean she wanted him.
The realization arrived during his second week in the ICU. Samira was arguing with dietary services about an aggressively beige tray, threatening to document “food safety violations within the mashed potatoes” in his chart, when Jack understood with the clarity usually reserved for incoming artillery that he was madly, inconveniently in love with her.
He had almost told her a dozen times but each time the words died before transitioning from brain to speech. Her care had the fierce obligation of a best friend who had watched him bleed out and decided her mere presence could prevent the universe from trying again. Telling Samira now would make her reexamine every dressing change and midnight check. Worse, it might make her pull away from him before he was strong enough to pretend that would not destroy him.
So, instead of the profession of love that he held tightly in his chest, Jack kissed the top of her head in the friendly way he did when they were drunk or it was a holiday, and said nothing.
By evening, Samira had fed him half a bowl of soup, supervised his first walk to the bathroom, inspected his dressing, and threatened to call an ambulance when he grimaced while sitting down on her couch.
“It was one grimace,” Jack protested as she rebuilt the pillow fortress around him on the sofa. “People grimace. It’s one of the faces on the feelings chart.”
“Your available faces are currently limited to comfortable, mildly annoyed, and sleeping,” she informed him. “Anything else requires a full set of vitals.”
“This is medical tyranny.”
“You signed the discharge plan,” Samira shrugged
“I was under duress,” Jack countered.
“You were trying to leave the hospital in Levis out of some archaic masochism.”
Jack glanced down at WEST POINT stretched across his thighs. “I still stand by my objection.”
Samira ignored him and reached for the remote. The television opened to Netflix, where a show sat waiting on the screen. Jack recognized it immediately; they were supposed to watch it over a month ago, before he went on the TEMS call, before two bullets and four operations and countless weird dreams had divided their lives into a before and after.
Samira went still for only a second. “We never finished this.”
“We never started it,” Jack corrected.
“That sounds like a criticism.”
“It’s an observation.”
She settled beside him and pressed play. Within ten minutes, Samira was complaining about the medical inaccuracies. Within fifteen, she had shifted closer, her shoulder against his, careful to not knock the Penrose still in his side, and her feet tucked beneath her. Jack watched the show and retained almost none of it.
The woman from his dreams whispered at the edge of his memory.
Come back to me.
Maybe it had been Beth, ordering him back into life. Maybe his brain, starved of blood and drowning in medication, had built a voice out of everyone who had ever loved him because it needed something to follow home.
Samira laughed at something on the television and instinctively reached for his hand. She laced their fingers together as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, then immediately began explaining why the fictional physician onscreen would have lost his license before the next commercial break. Jack just smiled and let her talk, happy for the brief moment of normalcy they’d been robbed of for weeks.
He did not know who had begged him to come back. He did not know whether Samira would ever look at him and see anything beyond the good friend she had nearly lost and now felt responsible for keeping alive. For tonight, he could live with not knowing. He was out of the hospital. She was warm beside him. Their terrible Netflix show was finally playing, and for the first time in a month, nothing in the room was alarming or beeping.
Jack tightened his fingers around hers and willed his eyes to stay on the screen, because looking at Samira would give him away. He was madly, hopelessly in love with her.