Chapter Text
The hotel bar had been done up for the season, and whoever did it had not been subtle about it.
There were small orange gourds along the length of the bar; bundles of wheat had been tied to the ends of the booths with twine. Fairy lights had been woven through a garland of fake autumn leaves above the bottles, and the leaves were the wrong colour for anything that had ever been alive, a hard varnished red that caught the light and threw it back.
Jack Abbot had been looking at those leaves for the past ten minutes.
He had a drink in front of him. He had asked for a neat whisky, but the enthusiastic bartender had talked him into some seasonal thing with maple syrup in it and bitters that were supposed to taste of apple. "My autumn old fashioned," the kid had said with pride. It was much too sweet. Jack had been nursing it for over an hour, afraid to go back and ask for another drink in case he hurt the kid's feelings, or worse, got saddled with another of the same thing. So now he sat at the bar with his too warm sweet drink in the glass.
There were three days of the conference left and he'd already given his talk, the only reason he'd been persuaded (forced, with threats that they would find a way to terminate his tenure) to attend.
Jack couldn't pretend he'd been enthusiastic for this conference. While he didn't mind public speaking, he'd been doing it in some capacity for years now. He usually chose the time, the topic and the venue, not just gone along with what Gloria and the other admins had forced upon him. But now it was done, and a new task to dread had replaced it: networking, and just how many people wanted to talk about and pick apart one of the worst days of his, and many people's, lives. The whole PittFest presentation, a slide deck he had rewritten four times on the plane, broken down into medical procedures and decisions, sounding so organised, so clinical under the bright conference room lights in front of a large crowd of his peers. All of them now wanting to talk about it with excitement. Jack just wanted to bury it all and go back to his room.
He had done the rounds already. Several hours of it, maybe more, working his way around the dining room before coming to the bar, then through the little standing clusters near the booths, shaking hands and saying the right things and being told his talk was important. He had come out the other end of it with several business cards he would never use and a corner stool with his back half to the room, which was the closest thing to hiding a man his size could manage in a hotel bar.
Three women had hit on him. None of them had been subtle about it. The last one had stood close enough that he had started turning his wedding ring with his thumb, partly because it gave his hands something to do while he waited for her to run out of things to say, and partly because he had hoped she might look down and take the hint. She either had never looked, or, Jack suspected, had not cared.
His leg ached. He had been on it since six that morning. The socket rubbed in a particular spot when he stood for too long, and now there was a hot line of it running up from where his knee used to be.
He should go to bed. He had said that to himself three times.
"Abbot."
Jack knew the voice before he turned around. Mostly everybody in this end of the business knew that voice, or had heard it across a lecture hall, or on a panel.
Michael Robinavitch was already sitting down on the stool beside him, glass in hand, jacket over one arm, doing the thing he always did where he arrived somewhere as if he had been invited.
"Robby."
"Good talk." Robby set his glass down. "Genuinely. The bit about the second triage point, the parking structure. That was smart."
"That was Lena Handzo's call, not mine. She's our charge nurse."
"Sure." Robby waved it off. "But you told it well. Half the guys here couldn't hold a room for ten minutes if they set fire to it."
They had known each other a long time. Not well, exactly, but long, which in this line of work was very nearly the same thing. They were, more or less, the same age, and the same rank, and had the same complaints about administrators, and every eighteen months or so they ended up at a similar bar in a different city. They were probably the closest thing to a friend either man had.
Jack liked him fine. That was the honest answer, if anybody had asked.
"How's Pittsburgh," Robby said.
"Standing."
"That's all you're giving me?"
"That's all there is. We're down an attending from last year and we still haven't backfilled the post." Jack turned the glass its quarter turn. "And Al-Hashimi's going in January."
"Baran Al-Hashimi?"
"Yeah. Heading to Seattle. Some excuse about her son and family, but really, she's tired."
Robby made a noise. "So you're hiring."
"We will be."
"Anybody in mind?"
"Not yet." Jack shrugged. "It's a hard sell. The money's fine, the hours aren't, and while you'd think everybody wants to work somewhere that's been on the national news, turns out a mass shooting puts great candidates off a job, not on."
"That'll pass."
"It hasn't so far."
Robby drank. He was a fast drinker and a slow talker and he was already onto whatever the next thing was, which with Robby was usually a complaint with a story attached to it. Tonight it was about a locum agency, and then it was about a new chief financial officer who had opinions about door-to-doctor times, and Jack let it go over him and made the noises in the right places.
"I bought a house," Robby said.
"Congratulations."
"Not like that. A second place. Vermont, up near the Green Mountains, middle of nowhere, absolutely nothing there." Jack could hear the boast in the voice. That came off him the way it always did, unmissable. "Around eighteen months ago, give or take. Best thing I ever did. Five bedrooms, porch, the whole postcard. You can hear the river from the back of it."
"Sounds nice."
"It's ridiculous. I'm up there maybe four days a month and the rest of the time it's sitting empty." He turned his glass. "You should see it in the fall. Everybody says that about Vermont and everybody's right about it."
"I'll take your word."
"No, seriously. Come up sometime." He said it the way people said it, meaning nothing. "Bring somebody."
Jack did not answer that.
"Funny thing, actually," Robby went on. "Small world thing. The doctor they've got out there, the town practice, she's one of yours."
Jack put the glass down.
"One of mine."
"One of your old residents. Out of the Pitt. Been out there, oh, about three years now she said, maybe a bit more, she's the whole show, there's nothing else for thirty miles." Robby rubbed the side of his jaw. "What is it. Mohan? Samira Mohan."
There was a sound in the bar that Jack had not noticed before, a low hum from somewhere behind the bottles, a fridge motor or an extractor. It was suddenly ear-shatteringly loud, and it seemed for a second to be the only thing happening in the room.
"Right," he said.
"You remember her?"
"I remember her."
"Nice enough. Bright, I suppose, in a way." Robby lifted a shoulder. "Bit slow though. You know the type. Takes forty minutes on something that wants ten. I've watched her do it. Sat with a woman for the best part of an hour who needed a script and a follow-up appointment, and the whole time there's three more in the waiting room, and it's a Tuesday." He shook his head. "I can see why she washed out of real medicine, honestly. Some people just aren't built for the pace of it. No shame in it. Better she found her level."
Jack heard himself repeat, "Right."
"Small town suits her. She's good with the old dears. They love her out there, I'll give her that, they think she hung the moon." Robby's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "Which tells you more about the town than the doctor, but."
Somebody said Robby's name. A man Jack half recognised from a panel that afternoon, Buffalo or Rochester, one of the two, and he came over with his hand already out and two other people behind him, and then there were five of them at the bar and the conversation went somewhere else entirely.
Jack's mind stayed where it was. His army days allowed him to go to autopilot, his body and mouth easing into the social necessities of introductions, something about a hotel that had double-booked one of them, and he laughed in the right place twice. All of it came out of him smoothly and from very far away, like a recording of himself.
Three years she had been up there, and she had not once picked up the phone or fired off an email. That was the thing he kept coming back to, underneath all the rest of it. She had finished, and there had been a card in the doctors' lounge that everybody signed, he'd signed it, and then she had gone, and that had been the end of it. He had thought at the time that she might call. Not for anything. Just to say where she had landed, the way people did.
She hadn't called. When he'd thought about her, which was too often for him to even admit to himself, he'd assumed that she was somewhere large. Boston or Philadelphia or one of the coastal academic places, doing research, running her study on disparities in emergency care. He'd even looked out for a paper from her in the medical journals, sure it would appear one day. Working herself into the ground and being brilliant at it and never once mentioning her successes to anybody who might be impressed.
He had thought about her more than was reasonable, for a man who had just signed a card.
Jack had never said anything. That was the shape of it, and had been for three years, and there had never been a way to say it that would not have cost her something. He had been her attending. She had been a resident with a ladder still to climb and a reputation that half the department already treated as a joke, and if he had opened his mouth even once it would have followed her for the rest of her career, and it would not have followed him at all. That was how it worked. He knew exactly how it worked. So he had kept it to himself, had tried to get as close to her as he could without raising suspicion, had done such a good job that even Samira had suspected nothing.
Then everything had happened, all at once, in one afternoon in July, and afterwards there had not been a right moment for anything. There had only been the getting through it. She had stayed on for a while after PittFest, but almost inevitably there had been an announcement she was working her two weeks. She hadn't been the only one.
For three years he'd thought and wondered about her. And she had been six hundred miles north the whole time, in the type of town overpaid attendings like Robby bought their holiday homes in. Small. Slow. It wasn't what he expected at all. And he definitely hadn't expected to be told so casually in a conference bar, in a way that clearly showed Robby did not see in Samira what Jack had seen all those times he worked alongside her on traumas. The future of medicine. The only reason he knew was that a man he saw twice a year had bought a holiday home and wanted to tell somebody about it.
"Jack."
"Sorry. What."
"I said are you in for the Thursday session." One of the men asked, waiting.
"Probably not. I fly back Thursday."
"Shame. It's the good one."
"They're all the good one."
That got a laugh out of two of them, and Jack smiled the smile and took a final pull of his terrible drink and thought about Baran Al-Hashimi leaving in January.
An attending post. Coming open, already signed off, already in the budget. Days, which she had always preferred, or nights, which he could have made a case for. A department that would be lucky to have her. It was a real job at a real hospital and it was his to fill, and he could put it in front of her in a way that would sound, out loud, entirely professional.
Jack had the whole thing worked out before he got as far as asking himself why he wanted it.
The group thinned out around half eleven. Buffalo went first, then the other two, and then it was the pair of them again with the fake leaves overhead and the bartender wiping down the far end and not looking like he wanted anybody to stay.
Robby drained his glass and stood up and started the business of finding his jacket.
"This town of yours," Jack said.
"Mm?"
"The Vermont place. You've sold it to me." He fidgeted with his empty drink glass and did not look up. "I've got leave I'm going to lose if I don't take it. Might drive up, see what all the fuss is about."
"You'd like it. Genuinely. It's quiet as anything."
"That's the idea." He let a beat go past. "And I could look in on an old resident while I'm there. Say hello. I never did find out where any of them ended up."
"Ha. Well." Robby got the jacket on. "Sure. Why not."
"What's the town called?"
Robby told him.
Jack repeated it once, in his head, in the flat way he had learned to hold onto a drug name or a dose or a set of coordinates, and then he let his face do nothing at all.
"If I'm up there, we should get a drink."
"Yeah, absolutely." Robby was already turning. "Text me. Seriously, text me, I'm up there most of the month around Thanksgiving."
"Will do."
"Night, Abbot. Good talk."
"Night."
Jack watched him go out through the lobby doors, and he sat for a minute or two longer with the glass in front of him and his leg burning and his heart going like he had run up a flight of stairs.
He turned the ring on his finger, once, the way he had been doing all night without noticing, and stopped.
Six hundred miles.
He signalled for the bill.