Chapter Text
It’s like it’s driving me closer to you
Every step back pulls me right back to you
Time stands still and it’s only us
July 4, 2025
You got a heart that I know I can miss
The urge to pick up his phone and call Abby overwhelms him.
Frank understands no good can come of it. Not right now, at least. Not fresh off of being served the divorce papers. His wife will not respond well to the what the fuck that he’d like to shout at her. Beneath that simmers a pained, how can you throw away six years of marriage. The sting of rejection smarts. The sting of public rejection at the ED hurts even worse.
And it needles him, prodding at his shoddy impulse control. He could guilt trip her. Use the kids. Use his sobriety—no big changes in the first year—but that’s not the man he wants to be. No one is responsible for his sobriety but him. If Abby stays in this marriage—and she will; she’ll come to her senses—it will be because she chose to be with him, free from his manipulative tactics.
Pocketing his phone, he exits the breakroom and heads to the board out of habit. Frank scans it for anything interesting, anything that might serve as a distraction from his life falling apart around him. Surely Robby would throw him one fucking bone before banishing him back to triage.
“You better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking,” Dana says, coming around the other side of the desk from Central 08.
He deflates. In the months leading up to today, Frank promised himself he would do things differently if given the chance to come back. Yeah, there are all the official hoops to jump through—and he deserves to be put through his paces—and his 12 Steps. But some things don’t fall into either category, and putting Dana in the crossfire between him and Robby again is one of them.
Still, he will lose his mind if something doesn’t give. If there’s not something else to occupy his mind. Another five hours in triage will crush his fucking soul.
“Hey, where’s Mel?” he asks. “She’s not on the schedule.”
Dana peers over her glasses. “Not that it’s any of your business, but she’s on leave.”
On leave? Frank frowns, hoping nothing serious happened to her or her sister. Not for the first time today does he feel like a shitty person for not keeping up with everyone, having found out about Donnie’s grandfather’s death and Kim’s fiancé’s heart attack after conversational missteps. Even positive developments, like Cassie’s brother’s wedding, catch him off balance.
But Mel, Mel’s different. He hadn’t known her for more than a shift, yet he’d felt connected to her beyond what was rational. For that reason alone, the disappointment in himself claws at his insides. That doesn’t account for what came after—the conversation that led to their hook-up in his backseat. Without even trying, Mel had known exactly what he’d needed to hear from someone. The benzos he’d swallowed after his argument with Robby had eased his conscience, the tunnel vision allowing him to focus just on Mel—beautiful, smart, vulnerable Mel.
He shouldn’t have done that; it hadn’t been fair to Mel or Abby. With the exception of Robby and Dana, Frank owes Mel an apology more than any of his coworkers. For mentoring her while abusing prescription drugs. For having sex with her. For lying about returning to work the following shift. The thought of delaying that apology or laying it on her while she has something serious going on makes him sick.
“Is everything okay?” he asks.
Princess slips past him to hand her tablet over to Dana. “Depends on whether you define pushing a nine-pound-seven-ounce baby out of your vagina as okay.”
A… what?
Frank stands there, stunned. As Princess and Dana start discussing the patient in South 18, he tries to wrap his head around the idea of Mel—his Mel—with a baby.
“Mel King?” he interjects.
Both look at him like he’s an idiot. Worse—that he’s an idiot and taking up their precious time. It’s par for the course today; he almost expects it. Still, the friction in his every interaction makes it difficult to step back into his role. Maybe he can’t. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to. Maybe Javadi’s welcome back this morning—the best greeting he’s managed so far today—is all he deserves.
“Sorry, when did this…?”
“The baby? End of May.” Princess leans in. “She was already pregnant when she started here. No wonder she cried so much and needed those breaks. And get this, her deadbeat baby daddy is some ex from the VA. He doesn’t want to be involved. Rumor has it that he wasn’t there for the birth. Perlah is bringing in lumpia next week for Dr. Al to see if she can soften her up for details on the guy.”
Frank stares at Princess, holding his breath until his lungs burn for fear he’ll say or ask something stupid. Mel was pregnant the night they…? Jesus fucking Christ. He thought she was sensitive, maybe neurodivergent like her sister, not suffering from first trimester pregnancy hormones. Had she known? While he felt guilty before, this makes it worse; he feels like a creep. And she never mentioned a boyfriend, but it’s not like they had much time for small talk. Were they still together that night? Had she had an affair too? Fuck, did she break up with him because she felt guilty about cheating on the guy, her baby’s father? Or had the break-up already happened? Her repeated take care of me still plays in his mind sometimes, usually not in his finest moments. On top of the first day's stress, the separation from her sister, the MCI, had Mel also just broken up with her boyfriend?
Perlah slips up next to him, leaning against the desk.
“I’m doing what?” she asks.
“The lumpia.”
Perlah’s brows raise, and she nods in Frank’s direction. “Did you tell him Baby Daddy was a no show? Mel gave birth at Magee’s all by herself?”
Princess and Perlah turn as if to gauge his reaction. And look, he isn’t proud of the anger sparking inside of him. Of his desire to find out who this guy is and punch him in the face. Frank has no reason to be this upset over some guy not being there for Mel’s baby’s birth. Mel, who he hardly knows.
It’s just that he remembers his own children’s births—Abby’s fear, the pre-epidural pain, the exhaustion that hit her in the middle of pushing that he had to coach her through. How close he felt to Abby in those golden hours, the weight of his babies in his arms, the way he knew he would never love anyone like he loved Tanner and Carleigh—deeply, dangerously, selflessly.
Mel should never have had to experience all that alone.
At the twitch of his fist, Princess smirks.
“Alright, that’s enough,” Dana says. “You two have patients to see. And you need to get back to triage before Robby catches you loitering.”
Princess and Perlah head in the direction of the north nurses station, whispering in Tagalog, but Frank lingers.
“Have you talked to her?” he asks quietly, the image of Mel crying in his backseat lodged in the forefront of his mind. “Is she doing alright?”
“She’s got a five-week-old at home and no support system. Things with her sister are strained. That’s all I know.”
“What, no one is bringing her food or offering to help clean? She’s getting to her OB appointments, right? PPD screenings? Dana, c’mon.”
He hears the distress in his voice, but Frank has no idea where it’s coming from—this terrible helpless feeling, somehow worse than most of what he’s been through these past ten months. For whatever reason, he flashes back to the last shift, a similar desperation in his voice as he confessed his fears to Dana.
“I don’t know,” she says, giving him one of those looks that tells him he’s pushed as far as he can.
“Then give me her address. I’ll take her dinner and make sure she’s okay.”
Dana sighs. “Your heart is in the right place, I’ll give you that. But right now? You have enough to worry about, and by the sounds of it, things have only gotten worse since 7 a.m.”
“I—”
“You gotta put on your oxygen mask before you can help anyone around you, kid.” She looks down at the computer, pointedly dismissing him. “Now go before I call Robby.”
August 30, 2025
What we feel started way before we ever touched
Frank says his hellos to his colleagues in passing, making his way up the sidewalk to Abbot’s house. The place bursts at the seams with ED staff and those in other departments lucky enough to get an invite to Abbot’s infamous Labor Day cookout.
In the two months since he returned to the pit, life at work has taken on a new normal. He still receives judgmental glances—like he’s just another statistic, a weak-willed doctor who couldn’t stand up to temptation—but they’ve gotten easier to bear. Frank can move through his shift without feeling like he needs to tread carefully, and based on the smiles and warm greetings today, his co-workers feel similarly. The embarrassment every time he has a piss cup shoved in his direction hasn’t eased, nor has the memory of getting served at work, but he supposes that will come in time.
Letting himself in through the front door, Frank navigates through the house as he’s done for years at these events, the only difference being that, once, Abby and the kids had been at his side.
Before he makes it three steps into the kitchen, Dana hands him a Red Bull, brow raised.
“Mel’s here,” she tells him, apropos of nothing.
Mel. His heart still aches for her. He’s carried his worries for her around like stone over these past two months, heavy but growing in familiarity. A burden he could bear, one that he sometimes forgot to acknowledge for long stretches until something would remind him. And yes, it is still there alongside the guilt.
Dana continues, “She went around to the side of the house. You should go say hi, kid.”
Despite waiting for this moment since July, his feet refuse to move. As much as he wants to see her, where does he even begin? When he first anticipated this conversation in the lead-up to his return to work, Frank carefully referenced his Step 8 list to be certain he wouldn’t forget all that he had to apologize to Mel for. The notes beside her name went on for two lines, and Frank rehearsed his apology. He knew he couldn’t get away with saying what needed to be said in the moment. Frank had been all too aware he could fuck up it in an instant.
Words matter too much to Mel to risk it. Or rather, directness and precision are important. She has to leave their conversation with an understanding of just how deeply Frank failed her, how he saw for himself the damage he’d wrecked, how he plans on changing if she can ever accept his apology.
That had been before July though. Maybe the points on his list haven’t changed much, but the context certainly has. It shouldn’t matter that his wife continues to insist they are getting a divorce despite long conversations over the phone and in public places. That Abby has restricted his access to his children, his visitations dwindling to every other weekend and dinner Wednesday nights when he doesn’t work. And it shouldn’t matter that Mel’s ex-boyfriend abandoned her before their child was born. That she has a baby now.
It shouldn't matter, all the baggage between them—not for his apology—but it does.
(And he’s scared too. He doesn’t know Mel well enough to guess at whether or not she will forgive him for his many sins against her. His list holds many names. People who have known him for years, who have loved him—people who should matter more to him than Mel King. Yet, her absolution means as much as Abby’s or his parents’ or Robby’s. It’s not right; it doesn’t make sense. It just is. The thought that Mel might never look at him again—her eyes as warm and wide and bright as they’d been when he’d asked her to pick gravel out of that guy’s leg—terrifies him.)
“Well?” Dana prompts.
“Yeah, okay,” he says, hoarse. “I’ll…yeah.”
When he finds her, Mel is swinging on the porch swing that Abbot has chained up to a tree branch in the side yard, the spot shady and quiet despite all the guests milling about just around the corner. Sure enough, she cradles a baby in her arms, holding him to her breast to nurse.
Frank stops for a moment, wondering whether he should intrude while she’s busy breastfeeding. He soon recognizes the hesitation for what it is, though—a stalling tactic because he’s not half as brave as he thought now that their conversation is imminent. Despite himself, he puts one foot in front of the other.
The only indication that Mel knows he’s approaching is her mid-swing pause, the seat steady long enough for him to sit down beside her. The second he settles, she resumes. His long legs soon take over the work.
Mel doesn’t look at him, her head bent as she watches her baby feed. But that’s fine, really. Swallowing a lump, Frank stares at her, tracing the curve of her ear and line of her jaw. Around her neck hangs a tiny gold necklace, a bubble-letter B clinging to her right collarbone and half-hidden by the collar of her oversized button-up. Her golden hair is a mess, tied off in a bun on top of her head—not the kind Abby does, the one that says she’s carefree and her beauty effortless. Frank nearly reaches out to touch it. To smooth back her hair and cup the back of her head like she does to her baby. The offer to braid her hair, so that the loose strands aren’t touching so much of her skin, lives and dies on the tip of his tongue, a life no longer than a breath.
(Watching her now, Frank briefly wonders if what he’d felt for Mel that day wasn’t just lust but something bigger than either of them.)
He should say something—tell her hello, that it’s good to see her, that he missed her. All true things, and yet where does he go after? Sorry slash congrats on the unexpected baby, heard your ex from the VA isn’t in the picture? Even he’s not that stupid. Or maybe, all the rumors about me being an addict are completely true; yes, I’ll be on work probation until I’m like fucking forty, and yes, Abby served me papers at the pit. Too much, too soon. And it’s not as if he can go into his apology from the jump, not least because the carefully memorized words are getting jumbled in his head the longer he looks at the small bumblebee earrings in her perfect ears.
So instead, his gaze drops to the baby, all of twelve weeks. Frank lingers on his chubby thighs. Princess said the baby weighed over nine pounds, but he’s so tiny when Frank thinks of his own children. Had Tanner and Carleigh really been this small? Maybe a lifetime ago, though it still strikes him as impossible.
Frank lifts his hand to touch the baby. The pad of his thumb is nearly the same size as Mel’s baby’s foot, his little toes flexing and curling against Frank’s touch. The baby grunts at Mel’s breast and then kicks out. Frank smiles.
They sit in silence for a few moments, easing into being together again without really acknowledging each other. Frank rests his arm along the back of the swing and crosses a leg over his knee, his eyes never straying far from Mel. She doesn’t shy away from him, seemingly unbothered by the way he watches her breastfeed. And why would she? It’s natural, and he’s seen her bare before.
(Through the heaviness of the benzos, the pall of shock and grief covering them both, Frank still found Mel so beautiful that night. He’s not proud of it—not when he has a wife who he loves—but Frank has made peace with the fact that Mel’s beauty was something his drug-addled mind had allowed to surface and take residency in his brain back then. He doesn’t have an excuse for the very same thought emerging now except to say that it’s different. Not sexual, just… aesthetic. Mel is a beautiful woman doing a beautiful thing; anyone else would be just as taken with the sight.)
When the baby starts fussing, Mel brings him to her shoulder and rubs his back, his face pressed against her neck. She gets him to burp, and then he lifts his wobbly head for a moment before it drops back down to her shoulder on his other cheek.
It’s the first Frank’s really getting a look at him without her breast obscuring most of his face. What he sees there is what he sees every day in the mirror, only miniature, give or take a couple minor features. Not even Tanner looked this much like him.
Her deadbeat baby daddy is some ex from the VA.
His lips part, and brow pulls.
He doesn’t want to be involved.
The air he inhales feels shallow, like it will never fill his aching lungs.
Mel gave birth at Magee’s all by herself.
Blood pounds in his ears.
She’s got a five-week-old at home and no support system.
His stomach churns; he might be sick.
Mel’s here. You should go say hi, kid.
Mel settles the baby—his son—against her other breast. They… he and Mel have a… Jesus Christ. The night in the car… the only time… fuck. He didn’t use a condom, high after swallowing more pills than he needed to take the edge off. And Mel never… maybe he’d assumed that she was on birth control because she didn’t say anything about protection. Frank doesn’t know what he thought that night; there are parts he barely remembers.
He’d gotten her pregnant.
Whatever else happened, that’s all that matters right now. He put a baby in her, crawled into bed with his wife, and went to rehab a week later. He didn’t call or text or write. He fucking ghosted the woman who was carrying his child. The woman who was his colleague, who he mentored, for a single shift on the worst day of his life. Who went through an entire pregnancy without him. Who gave birth to their baby without his support. Who has been struggling with single parenthood for the last three months because he’d been so absorbed in his own life that he hadn’t spared a thought for her.
(Not strictly true, but true enough. He isn’t about to give himself any grace, not when he deserves someplace worse than Hell for this.)
He rubs a hand over his face, blinking back the tears blurring his vision.
Mel glances up at him—the first look they’ve shared since their goodbye at his car twelve months ago—and it’s enough for Frank to break his silence.
“You could have said something.”
Not accusatory. Heartbroken.
God, Mel. Why?
“I didn’t have your number,” she reminds him gently. “And when I finally realized I needed it, you were already in rehab.”
She didn’t have his number?
…She didn’t…?
Of course she didn’t.
Between the MCI, his own bullshit, and the way they fit together so naturally, it must have slipped his mind that first day that she hadn’t always been there. That there hadn’t always been someone at his side, eager to learn. To follow him into the trenches. That he hadn’t always had this brilliant woman next to him, holding her battered heart in the palm of her hands for him to see. An invitation to be vulnerable together. Showing him that even broken things can be so beautiful they take your breath away.
They hadn’t always been Mel and Frank. It doesn’t feel right, the very idea of it. Their connection feels older than fifteen hours.
And yet that’s all it is—no numbers exchanged or inside jokes, no running lists of likes and dislikes. She had his baby, and he doesn’t know her favorite color. Her coffee order. Her worst takes. Whether she cheats at board games or sings in the shower. He doesn’t know her birthday or her sister’s name or where she was born.
Everything he knows about the mother of his child could fit on the front side of a post-it note.
The chasm between them nearly engulfs him entirely. Frank isn’t even sure where to begin—what to say, to ask. It’s only when she wiggles her nose and sniffs, a trembling hand adjusting the baby’s bib, that Frank recalls his first day back. His need—teetering toward desperation—to know whether she’s okay.
Mel’s emotional, which is understandable. He’s right there with her. But the dark circles under her eyes, the sharpness of her cheekbones, suggest she’s struggling. And he needs to… it’s just that… that tug between them is there again. His fingers twitch with the desire to reach out and cradle her face between his palms. Even though he has no idea if it’s true, Frank wants to promise her it’s okay. It’ll be okay. He’s here now; she’s not alone. She’ll never be alone again.
“Mel–”
“Please, not at a work party,” she begs, her voice fragile.
Right, no. They don’t need to say anything, not here.
“Anything you want,” he concedes quickly.
Frank means that. Just now, Mel could ask him to plunge a knife in his heart, and he thinks he would. He owes her that much. Whatever it takes to start making this right.
“Later. After this, I mean.” Mel hesitates, diverting her eyes. “You can come over. I-If you want.”
If he…? Nothing could keep him away from her—them—except Mel’s own wishes. Frank searches her face, its profile. Watches her swallow hard, watches a tear slip down the corner of her eye. His throat tightens.
His palm settles on the nape of her neck, his thumb dragging along her hairline with a comforting pressure. Mel turns—fear writ so clearly in her eyes—and Frank fights to steady his voice.
“Of course I want to.”
Her lips quiver, shifting between a smile and a frown. Fuck, she looks like she wants to thank him or something, and he’ll lose it if that happens. With a reassuring squeeze to her neck, he drops his gaze in an effort to spare himself the oncoming breakdown until he gets home.
His son nurses lazily, milk gathering at the corner of his mouth. He never thought he’d have a baby again. What if he’s forgotten everything? So much can change in three years. He’s used to toddlers and small children, resilient and stubbornly independent. Capable of communicating wants and needs as much as they’re able to conceptualize them. Frank hasn’t been the most present father, but when he is, he throws himself into the role. He knows how to soothe his children, could distinguish their hungry cries from their scared or sleepy ones when they were infants. Now, Frank isn’t sure he can even hold a baby so small with anything approaching the confidence befit a seasoned father.
But he wants to, is the thing. Wants to hold his and Mel’s baby and not let him go for hours, no matter how terrifying it might be.
“Can I at least…” he asks, gesturing helplessly.
“Let him finish eating, okay?”
Frank doesn’t want to wait, but he will. He’ll do anything she asks of him. And because he can’t help himself, Frank gently brushes his son’s hair with the pads of his fingers. The baby makes a high pitched little hum, his mouth suddenly sucking in earnest. Frank laughs wetly and leans down to press his lips against the baby’s crown. His nose fills with baby scents—tearless shampoo, chamomile lotion, sour milk. His heart hurts in the most incredible way.
As he sits back up, his eyes meet Mel’s—wide and confused and shining. In the heavy moments that follow, Frank barely resists the urge to shift forward and kiss her with all the tenderness she deserves. He briefly puts an arm around her instead.