Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Here’s what they tell you when you leave rehab:

Congratulations! You’ve made it through the acute withdrawal phase. Now is when the work begins.

Your dopamine values are shot. Your cognitive skills will feel slower; your mood will be unstable; you’ll feel anxious and depressive and probably suicidal, occasionally, as well. You’ll have muscle twitching; you’ll be at a higher risk for seizures; you might get tinnitus or paresthesia. Whatever pain that the pills were masking will be back, worse, compounded with everything else this time.

It’ll be hard. For a long time. But it’ll be worth it. Hang in there. The protracted withdrawal doesn’t last forever. The first few years are the hardest. Focus on your windows of peace. Make it to the next day. Lean on your community when you need to. They’re always there for you.

Here’s what they don’t tell you when you leave rehab:

The community you thought you had before you left–the one that was so strong, the one that got you through med school and a grueling residency and an unplanned pregnancy–they’re not sure how to handle this. The Narcotics Anonymous meetings that you’re supposed to go to three times a week that are filled with the people that do know how to handle this have a strange, high-school-esque hierarchy to them. There’s some goodness in there, once you break through the cliques and meet the right people, but it’s an imperfect process guided by a set of vague, shallow principals that get swaddled up in a lot of god-adjacent “higher power” type of talk.

The trust that you eroded in your relationships isn’t something that can be earned back quickly, if ever. You think you’re lucky because your wife decided not to leave you? You think that means that your marriage survived this whole thing, at least? I mean yeah, she moved your stuff to the guest bedroom, and she turned her face away when you went to kiss her after she picked you up from rehab. But the ring–she’s still wearing that. You think that must mean something, right? 

Sure, pal. Their sympathetic gazes tell you at those barely-helpful NA meetings. Keep dreaming.

Oh, yeah, and remember sleep? You don’t do that anymore.

The day that Frank Langdon received his one year sobriety chip, he came home from a fourteen hour shift at the Pitt to a quiet, empty house with the lights turned off.

Gino’s closes at eight tonight, sorry. Abby had texted him while he was on the way home. Do you want to try to meet us there?

It was seven forty-two by the time he had thrown his keys in the bowl by the door and greeted the dog. 

It’s fine. He texted back. Could use a shower anyway. I’ll see you guys when you get back.

His phone dinged rapidly a few times as she sent him a series of messages: 

k

:( 

Sorry

Send me your order at least, I’ll get something to go

He told her again not to worry about it, to get him a slice of the buffalo chicken pizza, and then he left his phone on the counter and stripped out of his scrubs so he could step into a scalding hot shower and melt the day off of his skin.

It was almost nine by the time Abby walked back through the front door, carrying a passed-out Penny in her arms, Tanner trailing behind her. 

“Daddy!” His son greeted as he caught sight of Frank leaning up against the kitchen counter. Tanner was carrying an ice cream cone that had half-melted down his arm, covering his whole hand in sticky pink gloop. Frank dodged the grabby toddler fingers, swooping down and lifting him up by his knees with a whoa, buddy noise that had Tanner giggling in delight.

“Did you save me any ice cream?” Frank asked as he perched his son on his hip, careful to distribute his weight in a way that didn’t make his back scream at him too badly.

“Penny didn’t finish hers.” Tanner replied, smacking his lips as he went for another bite of his dripping cone. “You can have some of hers.”

“But I want to try yours.”

Tanner looked at him assessingly, thinking about it.

“Tanner, share with your father.” Abby said from across the room as she set Penny down on the couch.

Tanner huffed, tilting his ice cream cone towards Frank’s mouth and letting him have a bite. 

“Thanks.” Frank grinned at him with a mouth full of strawberry ice cream, planting a sticky kiss on his son’s forehead that Tanner squealed at before placing the boy back down on the ground so he could run off.

“Hey,” Abby greeted him with a tired smile as the sound of their son’s pattering feet traveled up the stairs. “How was everything at work today?”

She set a cardboard to-go box down in front of him, and Frank flicked it open to take out his pizza. “Fine,” he shrugged, taking a lukewarm, unsatisfying bite. “Nothing crazy.”

“That’s good,” Abby said.

They lapsed into awkward silence for a few moments. Frank put the pizza down after another cold bite, trying not to wrinkle his nose at it as he closed the box and brushed his hands off on his sweatpants. 

“Steve came by and gave me my chip on his lunch break today.” Steve was Frank’s sponsor. He was the catering manager at a private all-boys school in the suburbs, and he always smelled like cigarette smoke and complained about how much he hated teenagers. Frank thought he was a cool guy.

“Oh yeah?” Abby leaned across the kitchen island. “Lemme see it.”

Frank fished in his pocket, sliding the gold medallion across the granite towards her. She picked it up, reading the inscribed words, flipping it over on both sides.

“It says ‘God’ on it?”

Frank shrugged and let loose a short laugh. “Yeah. I mean, I told you they were sort of like that.”

The side of Abby’s mouth pulled up slightly. “Well. Still cool, I guess. Congrats, Frank.”

She slid the coin back to him and he closed his palm over it. “Thanks, Abs.”

He had half-expected her to wander off after that, to go pick Penny up off the couch and ask him to take the dog out or go wrangle Tanner for bed, but she lingered in the kitchen as he put his pizza in the fridge and poured himself a glass of water.

“I was thinking,” she said, wiping up a droplet of strawberry ice cream off the countertop with her fingertip, not looking at him. “How about after we put Penny and Tanner down you come up to the master room tonight?”

Frank froze, staring at the inside of the refrigerator. “Yeah? Is that what you want?” He asked carefully.

He heard her huff at him. “I mean I’m offering, aren’t I?”

He closed the fridge door and turned to look at her. “Is this, like, a… reward or something?”

She crossed her arms and made a face that Frank couldn’t quite decipher. “No, it’s not a—you don’t need to interrogate this.”

“I want to understand where this is coming from. And what it entails.”

He could clearly see how annoyed and uncomfortable she was from the tense lines of her shoulders, the rigid curve of her spine. “What it entails? Your wife is offering to have sex with you tonight, Frank. Are you interested, or not?”

He stared at her for another long moment before deciding, “Yeah, Abby. Sure. I’m interested.”

“Great.” She turned away from him. “After we put the kids down tonight, then.”

Frank bit back a sarcastic can’t wait, babe as she brushed him off and walked away to pick up Penny from the couch. He stood in the empty kitchen for a few more moments, drinking his glass of water and trying to see if he could pinpoint the exact moment that fucking his wife had become such a disdained chore. Before rehab, certainly, though that had exacerbated it. The bezos had basically murdered his libido, so it wasn’t great during that period either. 

If he was being really being honest with himself, it was probably shortly after Penny was born.  Penny had been a tough pregnancy for a number of reasons. Frank had been in his intern year during most of the really difficult parts, and then by the time she was born he was an exhausted, run-ragged PGY-2. Abby did almost all of it without him – prenatal checkups, first trimester nausea, the horrible newborn months when Penny had colic and cried seemingly nonstop.

Every spare moment he and his wife had together was spent sleeping. It took ten months of that before Frank even realized that they hadn’t shared more than a perfunctory goodbye kiss since the first couple of weeks of pregnancy.

Since then, it had been nothing but quick, dispassionate fucks, once every couple of months or so, just frequently enough to keep pretending like they didn’t have a problem. 

Frank’s melancholic reflection was cut short by the sound of her calling for him, no doubt looking for help wrangling Tanner into beginning his bedtime routine. He sighed and pushed up the counter, already steeling himself for disappointing, lukewarm-pizza-equivalent sex with his wife.

There were still bright spots in Frank’s life. His kids, obviously, were the most notable of those. 

Tanner (who was growing up to be his carbon-copy in ways that frankly disturbed him) was an endless bundle of energy. Both his kindergarten teacher and first grade teacher remarked in the parent-teacher conferences how smart he was, once you managed to capture his attention for long enough. They said he was kind to his classmates, best friends with pretty much everyone, and would do just about anything to try to earn a laugh. 

They also said he had a habit of occasionally being disruptive in the classroom, he had poor organizational skills, and was potentially exhibiting some of the early warning signs of ADHD. That had made both Abby and Frank snort with laughter in the car later. 

Yeah. You think?

Penny was only four, but she was already proving to be somewhat of an enigma. She was quiet, sensitive, and pensive in ways that neither Frank nor Abby had ever really expected as an outcome of their shared DNA. 

She cried frequently, but her tears seemed to be reserved exclusively for other people. She cried when her friend at preschool ripped their stuffed bunny open on the playground; she cried when Tanner got frustrated or upset over something; she cried when Abby didn’t do a good enough job hiding her disappointment over her parents not flying up for Christmas. 

She cried on every phone call that Frank had with her during his ninety days in rehab.

They thought she was just a crier, in general, until one night, confoundingly, Frank was tucking her into bed and noticed the odd way she was cradling her thumb, gripping it with her opposite palm like she was covering something.

“What’s that Penn?” Frank asked, pulling her hand away. He released a sharp hiss through his teeth as she unfurled her fist, revealing a throbbing, red, infected bee sting.

The screaming match that Abby got into with the preschool director the next day on the phone was nothing short of biblical. “Do you know how dangerous that is? To send a four year old home with an untreated bee sting? She could have been allergic! She could have died!”

Frank could hear her all the way upstairs in the master bathroom with the shower running.

“My daughter cries every time someone steps on the dog’s paw. And you’re telling me that no one noticed her swollen red hand for six straight hours?”

They’d later learn that she hadn’t made so much as a peep about it. When her teacher sat her down and talked about it the next day, Penny got teary-eyed and told her she was “worried about the bee.”

Frank still wasn’t sure how he and Abby had come together to make something so gentle. 

The other big bright spot in Frank’s life was work.

The Pitt had an odd way of being both the thing that kept him going and the thing that dragged him under, depending on the day. Working in an ER meant that there were always, inevitably, bad days. Days where nothing seemed to go right, where no one was getting along, where they were losing patients left and right no matter how fast they were to push the epi, how thorough they were in their intake exams. 

Most days weren’t like that, though. Most days, Frank left the Pitt feeling purposeful, feeling fulfilled. It helped that the people there had become somewhat of a second family to him as well.

Dana, of course, the stern matriarch who kept them all in line. Robby, who had slowly stopped icing him out over the last year or so after it became clear that he had done some work in rehab, that the relapse wasn’t foretold or imminent. Cassie, who had opened up to him about her own struggles with sobriety shortly after his return, and who had accompanied him to more than one NA meeting. Garcia, who had taken him out to a bar after his first day back and handed him a Heineken 0.0 and said, “hope you like the taste of NA beer, asshole.” And Mel, who–

Well.

Yeah, there was Mel.

This was all to say that Frank had a lot of things that kept life worth living, so to speak. So when Abby rolled over in the bed after they had checked sex off of their quarterly to-do list that evening and dismissed him from their bedroom with a casual, “turn off the hallway light when you leave,” Frank had enough else going for him that his earth wasn’t totally shattered.

It probably bore some investigating and self-reflection that if anything, he felt a small surge of relief when he eventually closed the door to the now-familiar guest room downstairs and collapsed face-first, alone on the bed. Frank breathed in the scent of the detergent on the freshly-washed pillowcase for a few moments before rolling over and pulling his phone out of the pocket of his sweatpants.

It was just after eleven-thirty p.m. He had a shift the next morning that he had to be up for by six. A normal, sensible person would do the math on that and probably decide to plug their phone into the charger, get under the duvet, and go to sleep. The Frank of just one year ago would have done exactly that. He’d kill to be that Frank again, some days.

They had told him in rehab that the insomnia was usually a temporary thing. They gave him trazodone to knock him out and promised that by the time the acute withdrawal was over and he was released back out into the world as a fresh new man, he’d be back to sleeping like a baby. But that promise never materialized. 

Now, he was now the sort of person who just laid there most nights, staring up at the dark ceiling for seemingly endless stretches of time, waiting for the alarm to finally sound and release him from the purgatory of the bedroom.

A few of the people he had met at NA had lived through similar issues, and they almost all had advice to offer him. Just last week, he had chatted with a woman named Michelle—an older, retired school teacher from Philly with a thick Delco accent, who had informed him crudely, “the bed is for sleepin’ and fuckin’. If you’re not doing one of those two things, go and do it somewhere else.”

With that sage wisdom still ringing in his ears, Frank swung his legs off the mattress and headed out to the living room to begin his nightly phone-scrolling session. 

He put on the television at a low volume for background noise as he clicked through his emails, deleting the spam and chewing on his thumb as he skimmed through an email from the Pittsburgh Marathon reminding him that registrations were due in two weeks. 

He wasn’t sure how long, exactly, he spent scrolling aimlessly through his junk mail before he saw the specific subject line that caught his eye: an article from the Journal of American Medical Association about microplastics, of all things. Frank grinned at his glowing phone screen stupidly as he remembered the lecture that he had gotten that afternoon from Mel in the break room, when she had caught him microwaving his leftovers in the thin, plastic to-go container that the restaurant had sent them home in.

“It’s really a large area of emerging concern for a lot of researchers.” She had told him with wide eyes as she watched him shovel fried rice into his mouth. “There’s just not a lot of conclusive data out there yet on the long-term effects. People are saying that it could be our generation’s cigarettes.”

“Huh,” Frank said, nodding along with her. “But I already smoke cigarettes?”

He heard McKay snort from the other end of the room. 

“Oh,” Mel blinked as if she had just remembered this fact about him. “Oh, well, you probably shouldn’t do that either, Doctor Langdon.”

Without thinking about how late it was, Frank copied the link to the article from his email and pasted it into a text thread, shooting it off to her with a message that read, did you co-author this?

He wasn’t expecting a text back–not tonight, anyway. He realized, shortly after he sent it, that it was actually extremely strange of him to have sent it at all.

They had exchanged no previous messages back and forth. He had gotten her number after he was put back into the shift-coverage group chat upon his return from suspension. It had taken him a few weeks to deduce which of the new numbers in there was hers, but eventually he overheard her commenting to Dana about how she was picking up some weekend nights for Ellis, and he scrolled through the text thread to save the 513 area code number in his contacts under “Mel King.”

So she probably had no clue who was texting her tongue-in-cheek links to JAMA articles at twelve-thirty-one in the morning on a Tuesday.

This is Langdon, btw. He fired off the double-text before tossing his phone across the couch with a cringe. He’d have to workshop how he was going to play this off in the morning when he saw her so that she didn’t think he was a complete freak.

He had just begun to try to actually focus his attention on whatever tedious re-run was playing on the television when he felt the cushions vibrate. Fumbling in the cracks of the couch, he fished out his iPhone, staring at Mel’s name on the screen. His phone buzzed again as he was holding it and a second message from her appeared.

Frank swiped open the lock screen, feeling a little buzz of anticipation as he began to read them.

Hi Dr. Langdon! I have your number already from the coverage group text.

Thank you for sending this over! I haven’t read this before but I will read it now and I will send you my thoughts.

Frank found himself frowning at his screen, at the time blinking up at him in the lefthand corner. Was she working a double tonight? He didn’t think so. He had seen her leave work an hour or two before he did.

But she must be. Twelve-thirty was the night shift lunch hour, which would be the only reason she would be texting him back and reading medical journals that he sent her at this hour.

No rush. He sent. You working a double tonight?

Her texting bubble appeared again. No, I’m home. We’re both on the schedule for tomorrow, remember?

Right. He knew that. What was she doing up so late?

Oh yeah. Forgot.

He hadn’t forgotten, but it felt like the right thing to say. He should probably, almost certainly, leave it at that. Her texting bubble didn’t reappear for a few moments, so she had probably decided that their brief conversation had reached its natural end, but–

What are you still doing awake, then? Frank sent before he could think better of it.

She responded almost instantaneously with a series of rapid messages.

Is this very late? 

I guess it is.

I forget that most people are usually asleep by now, haha.

This is compelling. The cardiovascular impacts have been noted by previous researchers, but I believe the DNA research here is novel.

She was reading the article that he sent her as a joke. She was sending him her thoughts. She was awake at twelve-thirty in the morning and texting him. Frank’s world felt like it was spinning off its axis, just a bit.

He reopened the article on his phone and actually read past the title this time. 

They might be on to something. Think I may have to go out to the store and buy some glass tupperware now. He sent her after he had finished skimming.

Then, he typed out: Not a very good sleeper? And chewed on his lip as his finger hovered over the send button, trying to decide how weird of a question it was.

Another text came through, and this one was an Amazon link to a ten pack of glass food storage containers. These are the ones Becca and I use. They’re very good!

Frank deleted his previous message, and instead sent: Sold. Thanks for the rec, Dr. King.

His phone vibrated. You’re welcome! Thank you for sending over the article. I’ll see you in the morning!

Frank shut the screen at that obvious dismissal, tossing his phone back down on the couch. He pretended to pay attention to the television for another fifteen minutes, just long enough for his brain to feel slightly less buzzy.

It was just after one-fifteen by the time he settled down in the bed, ready to once again attempt the herculean task of sleep. The dark weight of his phone called to him on the nightstand as he laid there with his eyes closed, his mind racing. 

He gave in, eventually, breaking the no-phones-in-bed rule just for a minute. Just for the time it took to re-open the text thread with Mel, click on the Amazon link for the glass tupperware, and hit the “Buy Now” button.

His brain was quieter after that. He got about three and a half hours of sleep that night.

The next time they texted, it was one-twelve in the morning and she sent him an article about ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia and how it was successful in reducing the rates of delirium in older patients who presented with hip fractures. It had been cold out in Pittsburg, and they had treated three different geriatric patients in the last week who had fallen on the black ice and sustained hip injuries. 

You should show this to Robby in the morning.

He sent her after he read through it.

You think so? I wanted your opinion first.

Head rush.

Def. Good find. He decided to risk it this time. Didn’t realize you were such a night owl.

No response for five anxiety-inducing minutes, and then: 

I have poor sleep habits.

But I also find that I don’t need very much sleep. So it’s okay.

Frank stretched his legs out across the couch, laying back as he held the phone above his head, trying to figure out how to keep the conversation from ending.

You ever thought about switching to the night shift?

The next message came back quicker this time.

I’ve tried it before. Doesn’t really work for me. Sleep is even harder during the daytime.

And maybe Frank was reading into those messages too much, projecting his own problems into the words coming through on his screen, but he felt like there was more there. A story that perhaps mirrored his, somehow. 

So he just sent:

Yeah. I get it.

And then, embarrassingly, followed up with:

Well if you ever want someone to chat with, I’m probably also awake.

She didn’t reply to that, but she hearted the message.

Frank slept for almost five full hours that night.

So here was the admission:

Working with Mel was an almost humiliatingly constant bright spot in Frank’s life. She matched his enthusiasm, balanced out his cynicism, and challenged his egoism with such consistency that pretty much all of their colleagues had remarked on it at some point.

Dana called them the “dynamic duo,” Cassie called them “yin and yang,” and Princess and Perlah both called her something in Tagalog that Frank was concerned meant something absurd, like girlfriend or mistress or work wife, so he decided not to look into it. 

Even Santos, who was unlikely friends with Mel but still mostly hated him, had deigned to acknowledge it.

“Jesus. Where the hell is Mel at?” Santos snapped at him late one shift after he had sniped at her one too many times during an intubation. “Can someone fucking go get her, please, so we can have Doctor Jekyll back, instead of this asshole?”

“On it!” The overeager med student chirped back as he backed out of the trauma bay, too green to even recognize it as a mean-spirited jibe and not an actual request.

“Nice,” Frank practically growled at her. “Very good use of your intern’s time.”

“Thanks, I thought so too.” She shot back.

“Cameron said you needed me?” Mel poked her head in a few moments later, and Frank found himself flushing a bit as he fed the tube down the patient’s throat past their cords. 

“No, Mel, sorry it was–”

“Yup.” Trinity interrupted, pulling back from the gurney as she tugged off her gloves. “Swap with me, King. He’s been trying to start a catfight since noon, and I’m about to take him up on it.”

“Oh,” Mel said, fumbling with her paper scrubs as she accepted the suction tube from Santos’ hands. 

“Good luck.” Trinity said in parting to the two of them, sharing a not-so-private eye roll with Princess on her way out. 

“Where, um.” Mel stood there holding the suction, looking a little lost as she watched Frank finish up the intubation. “Where do you need me?”

“Nowhere.” He gritted out, annoyed with the whole spectacle. She flinched, making him immediately regret his tone. 

“Sorry,” he sighed, pulling his hands back as Princess confirmed that the vital signs looked good. “Sorry, Mel. Santos and I have been at each other’s throats all day.”

“Okay. Sorry to hear that.” Mel said diplomatically. “I’m here now though, so can I help?”

He swallowed on nothing, his throat dry. “Yeah. Of course. I can always use your help.”

He didn’t have to speak a lick of Tagalog to be able to guess the contents of the whispered conversation that Princess and Perlah had thirty minutes later, huddled over the charge desk.

The appreciation he felt appeared to be reciprocated, at least. About half of the time he caved into temptation and decided to go looking for her, it was only to find her already peering around patient rooms, on the hunt. 

“There you are!” She would say to him with a wide, earnest grin on her face. 

“Here I am.” He would respond stupidly, smiling back. 

And then she’d sweep him up in whatever case she was working, and they’d dart through the halls of the ER like two excitable puppies until Dana yelled at them both to slow the hell down.

Frank regularly reminded himself that it wasn’t that weird of them to be behaving the way they did.

Cassie and Mateo were particularly close, for example, and he knew they hung out outside of work regularly. Whittaker and Santos lived together, for Christ’s sake. And Lord knows everyone had witnessed one of the intensely charged looks that Abbott liked to subject Mohan to, on those not-so-infrequent occasions where he decided that he was going to communicate a critical piece of medical advice to her using only his eyes. 

They were not the most egregious offenders of workplace favoritism, not by a mile. And it didn’t strike Frank as incredibly inappropriate to be texting a fellow doctor links to medical journals late at night. He had no problem saying, “Oh yeah, Mel sent me this journal article last night, actually,” in front of Robby or Shen or whomever and not thinking twice about it.

It was really when the conversation started to slip away from them, inching into a less academically-centered context, that Frank finally started to feel a little… off.

“I actually cannot believe my mom bought them this shit.” Abby complained under her breath in the passenger seat of the car next to him. “After I specifically told that we were limiting their screen time until Penny started kindergarten.”

It was dark out, and Frank was driving slowly because there was still some ice on the road from a cold snap they’d had last week. It was late at night on the twenty-sixth of December, and they were returning from Abby’s parents’ house in Arlington. The kids were both passed out in the backseat, and had been for the last two and a half hours of the drive. 

A four hour drive through the highways of Appalachia was not exactly how Abby had wanted to spend her evening, but the only way that Frank could negotiate three consecutive days off around Christmas was by picking up six straight shifts beginning the morning of the twenty-seventh. So they had an early dinner and hit the road right after, hoping to beat the holiday traffic.

“Just don’t give it to them.” Frank reasoned with her as she glared at the brand-new, unopened iPad on her lap. “They have a whole trunk full of gifts back there. It’s not like they’re going to inventory them.”

Abby snorted, dropping the box back into the Santa-patterned gift bag at her feet. “That’s what you think. Elle’s son brought his iPad in for show and tell last month and it’s all Tanner’s talked about for weeks.”

Frank glanced back at his son in the rearview mirror, slumped over in the car seat that he was already beginning to outgrow. 

“God.” Abby huffed. “We have like, no food in the house. I have no idea when I’m going to have time to go grocery shopping tomorrow.”

“I can go tonight.” Frank offered as he put his blinker on, merging over so he could take the next exit. 

“Tonight?” She reiterated, somewhat incredulously. “It’ll be eleven-thirty by the time we even get home, much less unload the car and get the kids in bed.”

He shrugged at her. “I mean, I’m probably gonna be pretty wired from the drive no matter what. It’s either that or sit on the couch for another hour after you head off to bed.”

“Alright,” she said, still sounding doubtful. “Thanks, I guess. We need more laundry detergent.”

Which was how Frank found himself at twelve-twenty a.m. inside the only twenty-four hour Giant Eagle in the Pittsburgh area that had survived post-COVID, standing under beaming fluorescent lights and squeezing avocados to try to find a ripe one. It was perhaps telling that when his phone buzzed in his pocket, that his first thought was not, “hm, guess Abby’s still awake.”

Frank opened the message from Mel and immediately barked out a completely involuntary laugh in the otherwise deserted, otherwise silent grocery store.

The article was called “Christmas and Psychopathology: Data from a Psychiatric Emergency Room Population” and the message that accompanied it read, Merry Christmas! I hope you had a good break.

Their nighttime conversations, which had now become a semi-regular ritual, still always started like this. An article link sent by one of them, some cursory discussion about the contents and the findings, which would then drift into more amicable work discussion, which would sometimes, occasionally, creep into more personal territory. But always the article first, as an alibi of sorts, as a way of kicking off with an innocuous-seeming, “oh hey, this work thing made me think of you.”

Where the hell did you even find this? He texted back. Mel this was published in 1981.

Findings still relevant! He received. Shows that there are actually lower instances of psychiatric hospitalizations around Christmastime.

Super relevant. He agreed, grinning at his phone in the produce aisle. Will have to see if the pharmacy will be willing to fill scripts for 800 mg of xmas spirit next year.

Maybe we can convince Robby to decorate? She sent, which had him snorting at his phone again. 

Idk about “we” but he’d probably do anything you asked. 

There was a brief lull in her response time, and Frank took the opportunity to toss a few items in his cart. Feeling a surge of inspiration as he loitered in front of the fruits, he pulled his phone back out, opening up to the camera app.

Which of these grapefruits looks like it would be most appealing to a six and a four year old? He sent, along with a photograph of the overflowing pile of citrus, recently restocked.

Hold on. She replied immediately, and so he waited, feeling a bizarre thrill of anticipation. Over what? Her pending fruit judgment? He needed sleep, probably.

He received the same picture back, but it had been edited with a small, hand-drawn red circle around a grapefruit in the top righthand corner of the pile. This one has the deepest color and a flattened top. It also has imperfections on the skin which usually means it’s sweeter.

Thank god. I knew I had consulted an expert. He sent her a photo of him holding her selected grapefruit in his palm. It did look like a good one. 

Becca is very picky. I’m very good at choosing produce.

I’ll have to bring you with me next time. He fired off unthinkingly as he moved over to the meat aisle.

I didn’t know there were any grocery stores open this late? She sent him as he piled up chicken breast into the cart. 

He pasted the address to the Great Eagle in the chat. Only 24 hour grocery store left in Pitt. She’s a relic of a bygone era.

That’s good to know, actually. I always feel so useless this time of night. 

That message actually made him stop and stare for a second, a container of low fat Greek yogurt in one hand and his cell phone in the other. 

You don’t have to always be useful to someone. He decided after a moment of thought.

Her response took a few minutes, and he was pulling into the self checkout by the time he felt his phone buzz twice, in rapid succession.

Right. Thanks for reminding me :)

You’re allowed to grocery shop at 12:45 in the morning though?

He laughed out loud at his phone for the second time that night. It’s not okay that you’re funnier than me. You don’t get to have everything. It’s greedy.

Okay I’ll stop.

Thank you.

They had been texting consistently for about five or six weeks before he finally caved to temptation and just called her. 

It was one-thirty, and he had been putting away Christmas decorations for what felt like years of his life. Abby had a whole fucking system, apparently—boxes with oddly-shaped cubby holes and styrofoam and packing wrap and vaguely-worded labels that said thing like “Tanner Shoe 3” and “Peanut Jesus.” He felt like he was playing with an advanced version of Penny’s old wooden block puzzle, the one where the kids had to fit shapes into their correct spots on the board. Except instead of feeling intellectually stimulated, he was sitting on the cold concrete floor of their garage with his back aching, surrounded by mountains of Christmas ornaments and garland and strings of lights, thinking, “why the fuck do we even have all this shit?”

The sound of a text receipt pinged through his AirPods, interrupting the background podcast that had been failing to calm him down for the last hour. Glancing down at his phone, he saw, predictably, her name, followed by an article link. Frank thought about it for a few seconds before ultimately deciding to hit the call icon. 

“Doctor Langdon?” Mel’s familiar deep voice registered through his earbuds, sounding a little confused.

“What have you got for me tonight, Mel?” He greeted, putting on a nonchalant tone. “I’ve got my hands full trying to organize and put away about two hundred Christmas ornaments, but I’m ready to learn.”

“Oh—it was, um, an article about which brands of smart watches were most effective at detecting AFib. Well, technically it was about which smart watches are best at differentiating between AFib and SVT, but I heard you talking about smart watch brands to that marathon runner from triage yesterday, so I just figured it was relevant.”

He was immediately glad he called her. It was already so much better than texting. “And? What’s our consensus, Doctor King?”

She released a puff of air on the line that he thought may have been a laugh. “Well. They’re sort of all not great, basically.”

“Figures.” He picked up the ornament that he suspected to be “Fancy Feast 2017,” shoving a white porcelain cat ornament into an absurdly ornate-looking, blue-satin-lined cubby hole.

“The PPG based ones are moderately better, at least. So that would be like, the Garmin, not the Apple.” He released a huff of annoyance as he guessed an ornament incorrectly, trying to insert a wooden sled dog ornament into a slot that was unhelpfully labeled just “Dog.”

“Sorry, we don’t have to talk if you’re busy.” Mel said in response to his disgruntled noise.

“No, it’s not you at all. It’s these damn ornaments. My brain is just… not built to handle a task like this. I feel like I’m going insane.”

“You said there’s two hundred of them?”

Frank looked at the floor around him. “Give or take.”

A pause. “I could help? I mean. My brain sort of is built to handle tasks like that.” She offered, somewhat self-deprecatingly. 

Frank rubbed at his jaw for a second. He had sort of planned to work them up to FaceTiming slowly, maybe—once phone calls got a little more normal. But she was offering, so. “Alright, King, you talk a big game. But no takesies-backsies when you see what we’re up against.”

He picked his phone back up and hit the FaceTime icon, feeling nervous butterflies in his stomach as the camera connected. It was an absurdity, really. He had seen her in person less than eight hours ago.

When her camera finally did blink on, her screen was dark, almost black, and he could only see a faint silhouette of her, like she was in her room with the lights off. It was both a disappointment and a relief. He was just getting used to texting, so the idea of seeing her in her home, potentially in her pajamas, potentially with her hair down…

It was safer this way.

“Is that all of them?” She asked as she inspected his garage floor through the screen. “I don’t think that’s two hundred.”

“I said give or take.”

“So they all have to go in those boxes? And they all have their own spot?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Are those labels on there too?”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that there was a psychological piece to this whole thing as well.”

“I mean that sounds helpful though, right?”

“Sure, yeah, in theory.” His knees cracked as he stood up, lifting the camera so she could see a more complete vision of the entire floor in front of him. “Why don’t you tell me which one of these you think is ‘Long Green Stripe Guy?’”

She made a thoughtful noise on the other end. “Hm, okay yeah. That’s rather nonspecific. And you didn't make any of these labels?”

He almost felt offended by that. “I want you to think about who you’re talking to for a second.” Frank got yelled at by the nurses for shoving gauze in the bandaids drawer approximately four times a shift, on average.

Mel laughed. It was a nice sound. Much nicer than the podcast he had been listening to before.

“Okay. I think we probably need to do some pre-sorting.”

“Pre-sorting?” Frank whined, dismayed.

“It’ll be fun, don’t worry.”

“You’re such a bad liar, Mel.”

Some nights were, naturally, worse than others. 

Nights where he laid in bed for so long staring at the ceiling that it made his heart start to race with anxiety and his back ache and ache and ache no matter how he positioned himself. Nights where he squeezed his eyes shut and counted sheep even though he felt like punching something, like slamming his head into the wall repeatedly. Nights where his thoughts spiraled out into worst-case-scenarios that seemed so vivid and inevitable that he would have to get up and go to the bathroom, just to turn the light on and look at himself in the mirror to remind himself of what was actually real. Nights where he was so desperate that he even sort of tried prayer, feeling weird and humiliated about it the whole time.

That was when he wanted the pills the most. 

Not when he and Abby were fighting, or icing each other out. Not when his kids were screaming and throwing tantrums. Not when everything was going to shit at work, and people were dying and sobbing and bleeding. Not when he handled his patients’ prescriptions fifty times a day, conscious of the fact that his coworkers still sometimes stared at him like he was about to shake the whole bottle out into his mouth in a fit of madness. 

The cravings always came when he was fully, completely alone with his thoughts. Stretched out across his guest bed and trying to wring sleep out of his body like the last few drops of water out of a dirty dishcloth. Remembering the way the pills were able to smooth out the sharp edges of his mind, quiet him down enough so that when the sleep came (and it always came quickly), it was total and complete and obliviating. 

He never even took enough to get high. 

Everyone outside of NA always looked at him like such a fucking liar when he said that, so he stopped telling people. But it didn’t stop him from screaming it in his head at them all the time.

I was never high at work. I was never high with a patient. I was never high with my goddamn kids. I just needed sleep.

He tried not to call Mel on nights like that.

He didn’t always succeed.

“I have an article for you.” It was three a.m., which was way past appropriate, even for them, and he was on his phone in the bed, which was breaking his rule. But it was one of those awful nights where it felt like it was either going to be a pill or his head in the oven, and Mel was the only one who always picked up his call.

“Okay,” she said on a yawn, sounding bleary. “Tell me.” He felt bad for calling her. He felt bad for probably waking her up. Not bad enough to hang up, but still bad. 

“Assessment of Insomnia Among Emergency Department Physicians in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia, 2023.” 

“Oh, no,” Mel said. “What does it say?”

“It says there’s a lot more of us.”

“Geez. Did they have any tips?”

“That was outside the scope of the study, apparently.”

Mel sighed. “I guess they have budget constraints there as well.”

“Typical, right? Billions in oil money and they still can’t figure out how to help us.” He didn’t point out that he had found another article outlining the shocking number of ED physicians that had been prescribed benzodiazepines for consistent, chronic insomnia. He wasn’t sure that she would find it as hilariously ironic as he had.

“Bad night?” Mel asked, her voice soft.

He had only called her like this twice before–in a last-ditch sort of way, knowing he was probably interrupting whatever precious few hours of sleep she was getting that evening. Both times, she had seemed to know right away what was going on.

“Yeah,” he sighed out. “Bad night.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” 

And that was new. They normally danced around it completely, the fucked-up-edness of their joint dilemma, the darker, scarier parts of it all. It took him a beat or two to respond.

“You don’t–we don’t have to–”

“I know.” Mel cut him off, gentle but firm. “I want to. If you want to.”

He could hardly say no to that. He had called her, after all. 

“Alright.” He said, sitting up and clearing his throat, suddenly nervous. “I’m not really sure how to start talking about it with you, honestly.”

She released an anxious-sounding laugh of her own, and it brought him a bit of comfort. “I mean. I sort of figured you’d be the pro at talking about stuff like this by now. How do you, um, normally start?”

“Hi, my name is Frank Langdon, and I’m an addict.” He answered, deadpan. 

The responding laugh he got sounded more genuine this time. “Okay. I see your point. I don’t think we have to do all that.”

“The correct response was actually ‘hi, Frank.’”

“Hi, Frank.” She echoed, warm and still laughing a little, and he realized that it was the first time she had ever actually called him that. He pointed it out to her.

“I mean, no one at work calls you Frank, though.” She mumbled.

“No one calls me Doctor Langdon at three a.m., either.” He noted.

“That’s not true. You pick up night shifts sometimes.”

“Mel, c’mon. You know what I mean.”

“We’re getting off topic.” She said, and her tone had an air of uncomfortableness to it, like maybe he was pushing just a bit too far, so he backed off.

“Okay, fine, you’re right, I was stalling. You really want to hear about my demons, huh?”

She dodged his attempt to turn it into a joke again. “Yes, I do, please.”

Frank shut his eyes at the please, feeling like the room had just racked up ten degrees. It took him a minute or two to think of what he wanted to say to her, but she waited for him on the other end of the line patiently.

“I think it’s just really easy to get caught up in it all. At night. When there’s nothing around to distract me. Nothing else going on.”

“Caught up in all what?” 

He sighed, heavy. “Just like, the reality of how badly I’ve fucked everything up. Broken trust, ruined things, screwed my whole life over.”

“Hm,” she said thoughtfully, non-judgementally. “Is that true, though? Have you?”

“No,” he conceded. “No, it’s not. It just feels like that, you know? When I’m stuck in this stupid bed for hours at a time. And then by the time the morning rolls around I’m already looking back and cringing at how dramatic it all was, laying here and wallowing all night about how hard my life is.”

“I know what you mean, I think.” Mel said. “Things don’t always feel the most logical at night. Sometimes when it’s really late it’s like I can convince myself of anything. Like that Becca hates me, or that I’m a horrible doctor, or that I should have never left Ohio.”

“Yeah,” Frank agreed, thinking of course she gets it. “Does anything help?”

“It depends on how bad it is, I guess. Sometimes if I turn my white noise up loud enough on my headphones it’s like I can drown everything out, but that’s not the best thing either, because then I just sort of feel like I’m not even in my body anymore, like I’m just gone completely.”

Frank felt a twinge of worry, thinking about her alone in her room at night, dissassociating. “Yeah that sounds sort of scary.”

“Talking helps, too.” She admitted. There was an unsaid portion of that sentence that hung in the air for a second, a “to you” at the end that she didn’t voice but they both heard.

“Talking does help.” He said. “It’s helping me right now.”

“Oh, good. I’m glad.”

There was a stretch of silence, and Frank wondered if she was falling asleep again. “Hey, Mel?”

“Yes?” She sounded drowsy.

“Next time it gets like that for you, will you promise to call me? No matter how late it is?”

She hesitated. “I–I wouldn’t want to wake you up, if–”

“I’m asking you to. Please.”

“Okay,” she said after a moment of thought. “Okay, Frank. I’ll call you.”

Frank ended up with two hours of deep, dreamless sleep that night, which was two more than he had been expecting.

“I’d like to have a big birthday party for Tanner this year.” Abby informed him one evening, sitting down at the barstool pushed up to their kitchen island as Frank washed the dishes. He had put the kids to bed thirty minutes before while Abby was watching “The Real Housewives” on the TV downstairs.

“Okay,” Frank agreed offhandedly. “For six though? Not a very major milestone.” Tanner’s birthday was in three weeks.

“Yeah, but five was,” Abby raised an eyebrow at him. “And he didn’t get to have a big one for that.” This time last year Frank was just getting out of in-patient rehab. Things were still feeling very raw, back then.

“Alright, yeah,” He sighed, successfully guilt-tripped. “Whatever you guys want.”

“I’m thinking we can just have it here,” She said, watching him turn off the tap and reach for the dishtowel. “I’ve already talked to some of the other moms at school, and I’m going to invite Colleen and Brian and maybe some other folks from yoga and let them know they can bring their kids. And I reached out to both our parents already and they both said they were free to come up for it that weekend. He’s really into space right now, so I’m thinking that would be good as far as a theme, and then we could do catering from Chick-fil-a, since that’s pretty cheap and all the kids will eat it.”

He had his back turned to her, facing the sink, so he was able to hide his frown. “Sounds like you’ve got the whole thing figured out, then.”

“Sorry, would you rather I not do all the work? And then our son can just never have a birthday party again? Is that what you’d prefer, Frank?”

“Not at all what I said, Abs.”

There was thick, tense silence for a few moments, underscored only by the clinking of the cutlery in Frank’s hands as he dried them. Eventually, he relented, turning around to lean back against the counter and face her.

“I do appreciate you doing all of this. I know it’s a lot. And you’re right, Tanner should get to have a big day; he’ll enjoy it.”

Abby crossed her arms, still on her guard. “You can invite people too, you know. Friends, remember those? What about Robby?”

Frank almost flinched at the name, moving to put the forks away to cover it. “Not Robby.”

“Okay,” she dragged the syllables of the word out dubiously. “Not Robby. What about Dana, then? Yolanda? Or that autistic girl you were training, whatever her name was? Oh, and Cassie, she has a young son too right, she can bring him–”

“What?” He turned his head to look at her, the plate in his hand dripping onto the floor.

“Jesus, don’t you have any male friends? I mean I know that healthcare is a female-dominated industry and all that, but I thought that men were still doctors, at least–”

“What did you just call her?”

Abby stopped at that, tilting her head at him as her mouth slanted down. “Call who?”

“Mel. What did you call her?”

“Oh, right. Mel. What, am I not allowed to call her autistic? You said she was.”

“I said that?” Frank repeated. “When did I say that?”

Abby shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal at all. “Months ago, I don’t know. When we were talking about that special needs kid in Tanner’s class.”

Frank just stared at her. Abby stared back. “You said you had a work friend? Another resident who you thought was probably on the spectrum?” She prompted.

“That’s not the same thing as calling her the fucking ‘autistic girl,’ Abby, Christ.”

“What are you, the woke Twitter mafia? I’d obviously never call someone that to their face, Frank.”

“You shouldn’t fucking call her that at all!” Frank snapped.

Abby held her hands up in surrender. “Oh my god, alright, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had become such a warrior of the downtrodden. Invite her, then, if you don’t think the whole party thing will be too overwhelming for her.”

He blew out a breath, acutely aware that he needed to calm down, that he had overreacted. “She’s an ER doctor.” He reminded her as he put away the dish in his hand. “I doubt that a six year old’s birthday party really registers on the ‘overwhelming’ scale for her.”

He could feel Abby eyeing him suspiciously still, and the feeling made his skin prickle a bit, so he hastened to change the subject. “I’m sure your parents will get a hotel, but when are mine coming? Probably need to move my shit out of the guest room for that, unless you want them to–”

“No.” She cut him off roughly, pressing her fingers into her temples and closing her eyes, the Mel discussion immediately forgotten. “God, no, I didn’t even think of that. I think they’re only staying for a night or two, so. Yeah, you can just–it’ll be fine. We’ll clear out the guest room for them.”

Frank nodded, trying to feel anything other than utterly ambivalent about it.

It didn’t really hit him–what he had agreed to–until it was about two hours before the party started, Abby’s parents had taken the kids out to lunch, Frank was moving the last of his crap out of the guest room to smooth over the evidence of his dying marriage, and all he could think was: Mel’s gonna be here soon.

He knew she was carpooling over with McKay and Harrison because Cassie had found him earlier in the week while he was in triage to inform him of such. 

“Hey,” she had popped her head past the curtain as he was suturing up a head lac. “Mel, Harrison and I will be there on Saturday. We can’t stay long, because Harrison has a soccer game and Mel has plans after too, but just wanted to give you a heads up.”

“Cool. Sounds good.” He muttered, more focused on closing the open wound in front of him than the specifics of the party. Now, with the event in T-minus two hours and counting, he wished that he had asked some follow-up questions. Such as, What time are you coming? How long is “not long?” What kind of plans does Mel have after?

His parents were still on their way, so he didn’t have the stress of dealing with them yet, at least. His mom had called him about an hour ago letting him know they’d gotten caught in some traffic and would be getting into Pittsburgh just in time. 

Oh, god. Was Mel going to meet his mom today?

“Hey,” Abby stood at the entrance to the room, holding a fresh set of towels as her eyes swept around, surveying his work. “Looks good in here. You mind going to pick up the catering now? Tanner’s gonna be bouncing off the walls by the time my parents bring them back from lunch, so it’d be helpful to have you back by then.”

“No problem,” he agreed, squeezing past her in the doorway without touching. 

The “quick trip” to pick up the food ended up taking him an hour and a half when the workers spent twenty minutes looking for his order in the system, only for him to eventually call Abby and figure out that she had ordered it to the wrong Chick-fil-a, on the other side of town. By the time Frank arrived back to the house balancing four trays of chicken nuggets on his forearms, the first of their guests had already started to arrive, and he was mobbed by a collection of small but rowdy toddlers who were flooding around him like he was Santa Clause arriving with a sack full of presents.

“In here, in here,” Abby beckoned, showing him where to set the food down. “Tanner, not yet, okay? We have to wait for everyone to get here first.”

“My parents here yet?” Frank asked her, ruffling Tanner’s hair as he ran off with his friends.

“No, not yet. Just some of the school moms, mostly. Think everyone else will be coming in the next fifteen or so.”

“Alright,” He said, scanning the faces in the kitchen, looking for blonde hair, glasses. “I’ll go say hi to people, then.”

It took him only about five minutes of introducing himself to realize that this event was just as much a party for his wife as it was for his son. More than half of their guests were just Abby’s friends from yoga–young, attractive people in their late twenties with no kids of their own. A few of Abby’s work friends had come, her parents, of course, and then the handful of parents from Tanner’s school. The only people that Frank had personally invited were the four people from work–and of them, only Cass and Mel were actually coming. Dana and Garcia were both scheduled for a shift that Saturday. 

The whole thing made him feel a bit pathetic. Like the set-dressing husband that only got taken out of his box to be a trendy accessory at parties. ER Ken, if you will. 

Three times within the first thirty minutes, Frank found himself getting tugged into a conversation by Abby, introduced to someone as, “Oh, and this is my husband, Doctor Frank Langdon.”

And Frank would smile tightly at some guy he’d never seen before in his life, trying not to look totally uncomfortable as he greeted, “Hey man. Welcome.”

He was hiding away in the kitchen, checking his phone to see if his mom had texted him, when McKay finally snuck up on him. “I knew when I put the address in and I saw that I was headed to Fox Chapel that I was in for a treat, but still. I wasn’t expecting all this, Langdon.”

Frank looked up from his phone to see McKay holding a small, wrapped present and smirking at him. “Abby’s parents covered the downpayment.” He explained, in lieu of a greeting. “And we bought it when rates were low.”

“How generous.” She remarked.

“Where’s Mel?”

Her smirk grew wider on the edges, somehow. “What am I, chopped liver?”

He sighed. “Hello, Cassidy. Thank you for coming. Where is Mel?”

“It’s Cassandra, actually.” He gave her a weary look, and she took mercy on him, tilting her head towards the front room. “She’s outside with your parents. We got here at the same time as them and they needed help unloading the car.”

His eyes widened. “And you left her out there? Alone with them?”

“To come get you. Obviously.”

“‘Scuse me,” He said urgently, slipping past her and beelining towards the door, her snickering laugh at his back.

“Frankie!” His mother greeted, pulling him into a hug as soon as he stepped out onto the front porch. “You would not believe the traffic, honestly–”

“Mom–” Frank tried, returning her hug but peering over her shoulder to look out at the driveway, where he could see his dad gesturing wildly with his hands and Mel lifting a comically large suitcase out of the trunk of his parents’ car.

“We had no idea what it was until we passed State College. Of course, that’s when your father realized it was the Michigan basketball game today, and–”

“Mom, hold on, I need to go help Dad with the bags.”

His mother released him, pulling back to brush invisible dust off his shoulders and give him a fond smile. “Oh, no, honey he’s fine. Mel’s helping him.”

“Mel’s helping him,” Frank repeated back at her deliriously, trying to make the words make sense.

“She’s just a sweetheart, isn’t she? We ran into her and your other friend with the son on the way in, looking lost, like they were trying to read house numbers. Figured they were probably some of yours.”

“Okay,” Frank said, keeping calm. “Okay, that’s great, Mom, and not at all deeply worrying that you’ve somehow managed to already get a bunch of unsupervised one-on-one time with my coworkers without my knowledge. Why don’t you go inside, then, so I can go and make sure that dad isn’t saying anything horrific to her?”

“We’re very polite, Frank.” She insisted loudly at his retreating form. Frank left her, approaching his parents’ old, beat up 2016 Chevy Tahoe at a light jog, in a rush to save Mel from whatever sort of cringe-worthy interaction his father was in the process of cooking up.

“So are you an OSU fan, then? Because then we might have some trouble, I’m afraid.” He heard his dad joking with her as he got closer.

“T-trouble?” Mel echoed, voice high and worried. “No, I—I went there for undergrad, but—”

“He’s just giving you a hard time, Mel. Here, let me get that.” Frank swooped in to save her, reaching for the handle of the last suitcase that she was going for.

“Oh, but your back—” she began to protest.

He smiled reassuringly at her as he went to lift it. “It’s fine, I’m sure I can handle—oh, Jesus Christ, Dad, what the hell did you pack in here? Bricks?”

“Well hello to you too, kiddo,” his dad quipped as Mel grumbled, “please stop trying to lift things,” and hauled the suitcase onto the pavement in one quick movement, leaving him sufficiently humiliated.

“What is all this stuff?” Frank remarked at the driveway full of bags and suitcases and boxes. “Are you guys moving in or something?”

“Well, a lot of it’s birthday presents. And Christmas presents, since we miss out that one now, too.” Frank chose to ignore the loaded way that statement was phrased. “And then your mom packed up some old stuff of yours she found in the basement to see if you wanted any of it—”

“Oh my god.” Frank ran a palm down his face, already exhausted. “How many times do I have to tell her to just throw it all out?”

“And then the rest of it is just whatever your mother packed us for the week.” His dad continued, undeterred.

“The week?” Frank repeated, just to be sure.

“I mean—that’s okay, right? Carol said she talked to Abby, so I figured you two—”

Frank shook his head dismissively, not equipped to deal with this conversation right now, in front of Mel. “Yeah. Yeah, Dad, I’m sure it’s fine, of course, you’re always welcome. Why don’t you go in and get something to eat? You’ve been on the road for a while. Mel and I’ve got the bags handled.”

His dad rolled his shoulders back, clearly tense from sitting so long. “Alright, then. I’ll go find the birthday boy.” He pointed at Mel. “You watch out for my son’s back now, Doctor King. He’s not spry like we are.”

“Yes, of course,” Mel chirped at him. “I always do, Mr. Langdon.” 

“Please just go.” Frank begged quietly as his father winked at her, finally turning away to head up to the house. Frank sighed in relief as he left, leaving the two of them alone on the driveway.

“Well,” He said after a minute, turning back to her. “I guess you’ve met my parents, now.”

“Sorry, was that weird of me?” She shifted her weight between her two feet nervously. “I didn’t know they were your parents when we asked for directions, otherwise I wouldn’t have—”

“No, no, you’re totally fine, Mel. They’re just… a lot. I was worried they might have said something weird to you, is all.”

“No, they were very nice.” Mel said insistently. “Your mom asked a lot of questions about work, and your dad mostly wanted to talk to me about football, I think? But I’m not sure I did a great job with that.”

“My dad will talk to a brick wall about the Penn State football team.” Frank informed her, pulling up the handle on two of the suitcases so he could begin dragging them across the gravel. “I’m sure you handled him more than adequately.”

Mel hooked two reusable grocery bags stuffed full of wrapped presents under her arms, slipping the straps up high on her shoulders so she could pick up the last box of stuff to follow him to the house. 

“You got all that?” He hesitated, watching her almost disappear behind the tall piles of stuff in her arms. “I can always go grab—”

“I’m good! Lead the way.”

“Alright,” he agreed reluctantly. “Let me know if you need a break.”

Frank guided her through the garage instead of the front door, hoping to navigate around some of the chaos and children in the main room. 

“Just here is fine.” He told her, stopping in front of the guest room door, deciding quickly that ushering her in there–into the room where he slept and wallowed and jerked off most nights–was maybe a bit too much for him. She set the box down against the wall and he reached for both the bags, pulling them off her shoulders. 

She made a noise of protest at him, but he cut her off with an exasperated huff. “My biceps aren’t broken, Melissa.”

She chewed on her bottom lip as she watched him set the bags down, peering around at the photos on the wall, the crown molding that Abby had insisted on having installed, even though it cost them three grand. “Nice house.” She complimented.

“Thanks,” he replied. “You’re not allowed to labor in it anymore, though.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, spinning her around so he could steer her down the hall towards the party. Mel let him, her eyes getting a bit wide at the unexpected touch.

“Come on,” he murmured down to her as the noise from the party grew louder and closer. “Let’s go find McKay. I’ll grab you a drink.”

He dropped her off in the corner of the dining room with Cassie, who was holding a plate of chicken nuggets for Harrison as she chatted away with Frank’s mom. Ducking away to the kitchen to pull some water bottles out of the fridge, he returned to find that his father had joined them, creating a small circle of Frank-people in a sea of strangers. 

“Here ya go,” He said quietly, passing Mel a water as he took his place next to her.

“So Ohio,” his dad was already in the process of interrogating. “You guys do that chili on spaghetti thing over there, huh?”

“Oh, Skyline?” Mel’s nose crinkled. “No, that’s not really my thing. Seems sort of texturally… unappetizing. The only really Ohio thing I miss is the ice cream. Graeter’s.”

“Shouldn’t you be going to bother your grandson, Dad? Instead of subjecting my coworkers to your inquisition?” Frank asked.

“We tried that already.” His mom said. “He doesn’t want anything to do with us right now. There’s like fifteen of them all running around the living room playing some sort of game that he made up we’re not allowed to interrupt.” Frank grinned. That sounded like his son.

“Where are you from, Doctor McKay?” His dad redirected his attention over to Cassie. 

“Pittsburgh native, actually. Nothing that exciting—”

“Oh, thank god, there you are.” Abby’s relieved voice cut her off, and Frank turned to find his wife carrying Penny, who was clinging to her neck and crying softly. “Can you deal with this, please? We’re about to do the cake soon, and I need to fix the table for the pictures because the kids made a mess of it already.” She deposited Penny into his arms, zipping right off without even acknowledging his meager collection of guests. 

“Um,” McKay said as they watched her leave the room. “Was that—?”

“Yes, that was my daughter-in-law.” His mom answered, clipped. “Give me Penny, Frank.”

“It’s fine Mom, I’ve got her.” He grumbled, feeling embarrassed for about the fiftieth time that day. 

“Pen?” He asked to the weepy child in his arms, petting her hair. “What’s wrong?” She mumbled something unintelligible into his neck. “Can’t hear you honey, so I’m going to have to put you down, okay? And then you can tell us.”

He set his daughter on the ground carefully. He considered crouching to eye height with her but thought better of it when he registered the general tightness of his back and settled for reaching down to hold her hand instead. Penny wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and looked up at him, attempting stoicism.

“I said that Cooper was crying at the door and I went to go sit with him and give him chicken nuggets so that he wouldn’t be sad. But Mom told me I wasn’t allowed to and that I had to go play. But I could still hear him.” 

“Cooper’s the dog,” he heard his dad explain in a low tone to Cassie and Mel.

“It’s okay,” Frank said, petting her dark hair back off her head. “We can go check on Coop now if you want.”

“Harrison might want to meet Cooper,” Cassie offered, smiling down at the twelve-year-old boy in soccer gear next to her that had yet to speak a word or look up from his video game. 

“Um, sure, whatever.” He grumbled at his mom. Frank tried not to think about what the future soon held for him.

“Why don’t we all go sit with Cooper for a bit, then?” Frank said, watching more of the tears blink out of Penny’s eyes at the offer. “Would that be good, Penny?”

Penny nodded vigorously, and Frank led the whole crew into Abby’s office, where the dog had been locked up a few hours before.

“Ah, you had the right idea, Penny.” His dad complimented, immediately collapsing down into Abby’s expensive ergonomic desk chair and closing his eyes. “It’s much nicer in here.”

They spent forty-five minutes like that, crowded in the too-small office, all seven of them and the dog, chatting and sitting on the floor and listening to the sound of Tanner’s friends laughing and playing outside. Even Harrison brightened up after a bit, putting his video game down to pet Cooper for a while. 

Mel was also unsurprisingly adept at handling his daughter’s mood, speaking to her in a quiet, low tone, asking all the right questions, actually listening to the answers. He could have predicted that the two of them would get along, but it was still another thing to see it in action, right in front of him.

Eventually though, Cassie stood up, reminding Harrison that it was time to get going to his soccer game, and Frank walked the three of them back out to the front.

“Sorry, that was…” Frank began as he strolled with them to Cassie’s car. “Not the party I had in mind when I invited you guys over.”

“Are you kidding?” Mckay joked. “You had Mountain Dew and chicken nuggets and cake pops. That’s about as much party as people like us get to have these days anyway, right?” 

He laughed, stopping at the passenger side door to pull it open for Mel. “Thanks,” she smiled at him shyly, sliding into the seat.

“I’ll see you guys at work.” He said in parting. “Thanks again for coming out to this.”

“Alright,” Abby said that evening, getting up from the couch in the living room and smiling politely at his parents. “It’s early, but, it’s been a long day. I’m headed to bed.” She paused. “Frank?”

Frank turned his head to find her looking at him pointedly, trying to communicate something. “Oh,” he said, checking the time on his phone. It was just after ten. “Yeah. I’ll be up in a minute, Abby.”

He got a tight smile in response. “Don’t take too long.”

He wasn’t so dense that he was unable to read into that obvious summons. He took a few minutes to make sure his parents had everything they needed for the night before climbing the staircase up to the master bedroom, feeling like something of an interloper as he re-entered the room.

She was already propped up in the bed when he arrived.

“So,” she said, watching him linger at the doorway like he had to be invited in. “A whole week, huh?”

Frank kept his face neutral. “Mom said she talked to you about it.”

“She did not.”

He sighed at her tone, could tell she was fishing for a fight. “Okay. Sorry? What do you want me to do about it, kick them out?”

“Your parents need boundaries, Frank. They need to know they can’t just barge in here uninvited.”

He didn’t feel like pointing out that this was the first time they had seen his family in almost six months. “I’m not going to ask them to go to a hotel, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“And why not?” Her voice was getting louder, and he shut the door behind him, worried about the sound traveling. “It’s okay for my parents to stay in a hotel, but not yours?”

“Yours offered,” he reminded her, stalking over to their walk-in closet to fish out a pair of sweatpants from the pile of clothing he had haphazardly shoved onto the floor that morning. The dresser drawers that used to belong to him had long since been filled with Abby’s stuff. “That’s just not how my parents do things. The whole point of them driving over is to spend time with us, with the kids.”

“Oh, sure,” Abby said meanly. “Yeah, that’s definitely the whole point. You’ve nailed it.”

“Just say what you want to say, Abby.”

Her mouth snapped shut as he reemerged from behind the door of the closet wearing the sweatpants he normally wore to bed, a t-shirt in his hand but not on, his arms crossed over his bare chest. She glanced away from him, a look of distaste on her mouth.

“I have a conference all week that I’m presenting at. I’d prefer if you come to bed when I do, so that you don’t wake me up at two a.m. trying to grope around for the bed in the dark.”

“Fine.” He agreed wearily, even though the idea of laying in the bed restlessly for an extra four hours every night made him want to jump out of his skin. 

Abby’s eyes narrowed at him, like she hadn’t expected him to concede that easily. “Fine.” She repeated, reaching over to turn off her bedside light.

“And put that shirt on, please,” she added as she draped the room in darkness. “You sweat.”

Frank did not realize how much his mood had come to rely on the nightly conversations with Mel until they were abruptly taken away from him. When he finally threw in the towel at five a.m. and rolled out of the bed, having slept in nothing but miserable fits and starts all night, the first thing he did was swipe open his phone to see if she had texted him.

He felt captured by a strange sense of remorse to see a new article dropped into their text chain, sent just after midnight along with the caption, Maybe your dad would be interested in this?

It was a 2021 article titled “Predicting Patient Volumes at Collegiate Football Games,” and he opened it to find out that the study had actually been conducted at Penn State. He texted her back while he was waiting for the shower to heat up, smiling to himself. He was too warmed by the idea of her going out and looking for it to even make a joke about it.

He’ll love that you found this. I’m gonna print it out at work and make him read it tonight. 

She was off that day, so he didn’t get a response until much later in the morning, around nine, and it was nothing more than a quick heart of his message. 

The line had become rather clear. They only talked like this at night.

The shift crawled along drearily that day, and it wasn’t only because she wasn’t around. He was also suffering from a lack of sleep, and McKay volunteered to take triage, which meant he spent most of the day saddled with Whittaker and Robby, neither of whom were huge fans of his. And then by the time he got off, Abby had already texted him four times, urging him home so that he could take his parents and the kids out to dinner and give her some alone time. 

When he finally got to bed that night around eleven, he felt confident that his exhaustion levels were enough to actually force some sleep out of his body by a reasonable hour. He tossed and turned in the bed for about forty minutes or so, but could feel himself starting to drift off, his mind beginning to wander to that nebulous half-sleep where things didn’t make total sense and thoughts never quite fully formed. 

It was then, of course, in those last final moments before unconsciousness, that Abby spoke. 

“Why don’t you just go downstairs?” She whispered sharply into the dark room.

“Huh?” He grunted back, not quite fully aware.

“To the couch, Frank. Your parents are already asleep, and you wake up before them anyway.”

Frank blinked his eyes open, sleep racing further away by the second. “Why would I go to the couch? I’m sleeping. Like you told me to.”

“You’re not sleeping. You’re rolling around on the bed every thirty seconds and waking me up.”

The reality of her request began to dawn on him, and he sat up so he could stare at her. “Are you serious? Are you actually fucking serious right now?”

She shushed him urgently. “Stop, you’ll wake–”

“I don’t care who I wake. I want to hear you say it. I want you to actually tell me to go sleep on the fucking couch. Like the dog.”

“Oh my god, could you be more dramatic?” She hissed. “It’s not like you ever actually sleep anyway. One of us should be well-rested.”

He laughed at that–helplessly, deliriously, cruelly. “What the fuck are we doing here, Abs?”

He could see her eyes get wide in the dark, the whites of them stark and surprised. “I don’t know what you–”

“Stop it. Stop pretending this is normal.”

“I’m not talking about this with you right now.”

“When would you like to talk about it then, Mrs. Langdon?” He watched her flinch at the name, and didn’t feel bad about it. 

Her voice was shakier when she spoke again. “I have to be up at six to prep for my presentation–”

“Lord help us, not a presentation, Abby. How will you ever manage that kind of responsibility?”

“Oh, fuck you.” She spat, flipping over so she didn’t have to look at him. “It’s always about you, Frank. Your life, your work, your problems, your fucking back. Nothing I ever do is as significant. Why don’t you go bask in your own importance downstairs, then? On the couch. With the dog.”

“Right,” he stood up, snatching a pillow off the bed, his phone off the bedside table, and a sweatshirt off the floor as he went. “Thanks for your honesty. I’ll make sure not to mention how my fucking back feels after sleeping on the couch for the next week.” He managed to not slam the door behind him as he left, but it was a near thing.

He threw the pillow on the couch downstairs and then proceeded to just stare at it for a minute, his fury bleeding into misery as he took in the sight of Cooper, curled up in a ball at the far end, snuffling in his sleep. He knew that he was wired now, that sleep was hours away again. Weirdly, awfully, he felt like crying.

Normally, he would turn on some lights, put on the TV, maybe do some cleaning, maybe call Mel–but his parents were only a few feet away behind the door to the guest bedroom. Instead of risking waking them up, he slipped his sockless feet into the tennis shoes that sat by the door, grabbed his keys from the dish, and got in the car.

He was quickly becoming a regular late-night visitor at the 24-hour Giant Eagle. There was no real purpose to his visit this time, he was just sort of aimlessly meandering through the aisles with an empty basket in his hand, feeling for once like he really fit the lonely drug addict stereotype. It was actually miraculous that he held off for as long as he did before texting Mel, given that he had been passively thinking about it from the moment the door to the master bedroom closed shut. It should have worried him more, probably, the way he had begun to crave her name on his phone screen like a goddamn pill. He finally caved when he was standing in the frozen section, staring at the selection of ice cream, trying to decide which of the Ben and Jerry’s flavors was going to hit most like an Ativan. 

Graeter’s Ice Cream, Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip. The small pint of it caught his eye, and it took him a few lagging moments to realize why.

Mel.

He had his phone out of his sweatpants pocket in seconds, like he had just been waiting for the universe to finally give him permission. Of course, he didn’t have an article saved to send to her, which sort of felt like cheating, so he huffed and did some quick googling until he found something half-assed and at least quasi-relevant, a 2024 article titled “Longitudinal Changes in Emergency Medical Services Advanced Airway Management.” 

He sent it off with a message that simply read Hi, then proceeded to bounce on his feet as he watched her texting bubble appear, then disappear, then reappear for a moment, like she was thinking.

Hm. She sent eventually. Relevance?

Frank rolled his eyes, no real heat behind it. Idk, Mel, we did like four SGAs last week.

Then, before she could respond again, he sent, I have something to show you.

She replied with a question mark. 

He took a picture of the ice cream fridge. Notice anything?

It took a minute before his phone buzzed again–a call this time.

“Where did you find that?” She asked as soon as he picked up, sounding amazed. 

“You know where I am,” he reminded her. “The only twenty-four hour grocery store in the burg, remember?”

“No,” she argued. “There’s no way. I was there last week and they didn’t have any. I always check, Frank.” He could tell he had frazzled her by how easily his first name slipped out of her mouth.

“Well they have it now.” He said, feeling like he had just saved the day or something.

“Oh, gosh,” Mel whined. “I have Becca with me tonight, I can’t just leave! What if it’s all gone by the time I go tomorrow? What if this is their only inventory?”

“Mel, I’m literally here right now, I’ll buy as much as you want.” He laughed. 

“Really?” She gasped, clearly delighted. “You will?”

“Obviously, yes. Should I just clear them out, or what?”

“Okay hold on one second, let me look at the picture you sent again.”

Ten minutes later, he was swiping his card at the self-check out aisle, purchasing eighty-eight dollars worth of ice cream, practically buzzing with anticipation as he looked, for perhaps the fourth time, down at the address in his phone. Mel’s address.

She lived fifteen minutes away, and Frank found himself doing quite a bit of self-negotiating during those fifteen minutes in the car. It was fine that he was driving over to his single female coworker’s house at midnight to drop her off some ice cream. It was fine because he and Mel had a clearly defined friendship with well-respected boundaries. It was fine because his wife had kicked him out of his fucking bed tonight, actually, so what else was he supposed to get up to? 

It was fine because he was just dropping them off, it wasn’t like he was actually going in.

Until of course, Mel answered the door, smiled at him, and said, “Wow, this is so exciting! Um, do you want to come in?”

“Yeah, for sure.” 

And then there he was, standing just inside the threshold to her small apartment, taking it all in while she rushed off to the kitchen to put the containers of ice cream away before they all melted.

He wasn’t above admitting that he had imagined it before–her place. He had created a bit of a set for her in his mind, that way when they spoke on the phone at night he could picture her more clearly. He had imagined a large purple couch, covered in throw pillows and fuzzy blankets. He imagined walls and shelves full of books and trinkets and Becca’s craft projects. He imagined the place cluttered but still neat, a place for both King sisters to relax and be themselves. He even sort of imagined what it smelled like–whatever that fruity-smelling shampoo was that he sometimes caught whiffs of when he leaned over her in the trauma bay, undercut with a little bit of the hospital antiseptic scent that never quite left them.

Mostly, he had gotten it all wrong.

It was definitely cozy, he would give her that. But it was also a fair bit more chic than he would have ever guessed. Mel, he was realizing, to his ever-increasing wonder, had style.

There were still clear touches of her around the room, but instead of girlish pops of color, he found warm wood tones, furniture that looked well-made and vintage and carefully collected, and a large oriental rug sitting under a couch that could have come straight out of one of the CB2 catalogues that Abby left lying around. And more lamps than he had ever seen in his goddamn life, actually. It felt like the whole room was glowing in a low, orange light.

“How long does it take you to turn all these off every night?” He asked, half-amazed, still standing in the doorway as she reemerged from the kitchen.

“Huh?” She said. “Oh, I use smartbulbs. They’re on an app.”

“Cool,” he remarked weakly, trying to pretend like he didn’t notice how good she looked in the soft lighting, with her hair loose in her braid, wearing sweats and an oversized t-shirt. “Is, uh, Becca…”

“She’s asleep. She has a white noise machine in her room, we won’t bother her. You can just leave your shoes there,” she told him, pointing to a spot by the door. “We’re a no-shoes household.”

Frank looked down at his feet. “I’m, uh. Not wearing socks, so sorry in advance.”

She glanced at his tennis-shoe covered feet in alarm. “Really? Why not?”

Well, Mel, I didn’t have the foresight to look for a pair when my wife was exiling me to the couch. “Forgot.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know how you stand that. Hold on, I’ll grab you some.” She raced off down the hall, returning quickly with a pair of white Nike tube socks in her hand.

“I’m not gonna lie to you,” He said as he bent over to put them on. “This place is sort of blowing my mind right now.”

“In a good way?”

“Are you kidding? Yes, Mel. In a good way. Where did you even get all this stuff from?”

“A lot of it is my mom’s old stuff,” she explained as he finally stepped into the room fully, peering at all the well-watered house plants, wishing he could bend down and figure out how there was light literally seeping out from under the couch. “And Becca’s really good at Facebook Marketplace.”

“You say that like it’s a competitive sport or something.”

Her eyes got wide and serious. “Oh, trust me. It is.”

“Well, you can tell her I’m impressed. I feel like my heart rate lowered the second I walked in here.”

He watched her blush a little. “I’ve actually, um. Done a lot of research about how certain design choices can help lower cortisol levels. Warm lighting, greenery, low contrast colors. It’s supposed to help to encourage sleep. And provide sensory support.”

He laughed. “Of course you have. My senses are definitely feeling very supported right now.”

She ducked her head to hide her smile, and it made him so warmed that he had to look away, worried she might be able to read something in his eyes. “How much do I owe you for the ice cream? I have cash, if that–”

“No way.” He said, waving her off. “Consider it repayment for helping with my parents’ bags the other day.”

“What?” Her brows furrowed. “That’s crazy, it was probably–”

“Should we try some?” He interrupted, hoping he could distract her from the repayment topic.

“Some–some–?”

“Some ice cream, obviously. Unless you don’t want to share with me?”

“No!” She shook her head, already moving towards the kitchen. “No, oh gosh, please have some, there’s plenty.” He followed her in to find her already opening cabinets and pulling out bowls. “The spoons are in there, if you don’t mind just—” She pointed to the drawer that he had leaned up against.

He turned around and opened it, taking out two spoons from her neatly ordered cutlery drawer, passing her one. 

“Oh, um,” she hesitated, looking down at the spoon in his hand. “Not that one. Sorry.”

“Not this one?” Frank raised a brow, amused. “Why not this one?”

“It’s, um. It’s Becca’s favorite. She likes the long handle. She’s the only one that uses that one.”

“Alright, heard.” He chuckled, placing it back in the drawer and holding up another one to her, tilting his head to ask for approval.

“Yes, good.” She said, nodding. “The rest are all fine, it’s just that one.”

“Why not just buy more of them, if they’re her favorite?” He asked as she reached into her now-stuffed freezer and took out one of the ice cream pints.

She looked oddly nervous at the question. “We didn’t, um. We didn’t buy that one.” She looked up at him from under her lashes as she shoveled ice cream out into the bowl, redness spreading across her cheeks. “We took it. From a Korean restaurant.”

“You took it?” He clarified as she avoided his gaze. “Do you mean stole?”

He got only a shrug in response, and he had to cough back a laugh so he could stare at her seriously, reaching into his pocket to take out his phone. “Just stay right there for a second,” he told her, holding up a finger. “I need to go make a call to the police precinct. Let them know that I have the address of two known fugitives.”

He watched the frantic confusion flash across her face for a beat before she figured him out, her eyes narrowing at him before casting back down at her bowl. “Funny,” she said glumly. “Funny joke.”

“Thanks,” He pressed his lips together to hold in a smirk. “I thought so too. What Korean restaurant was this?”

“The one downtown, by the hospital. Right off of First Avenue.” She handed him his bowl. “We left a very large tip.”

“I’m sure you did.” He nodded at her, grinning and trailing her back into the living room.

“It actually was pretty funny” She admitted as she tucked her feet under her and sat down on the couch, facing him. She shot him a small, abashed smile. “It was the only place Becca wanted to go eat for weeks and weeks. I thought she had developed a new hyperfixation to Korean food, maybe. But when I finally asked her about it she told me that the food was good, but she mostly just liked their spoons. I was so tired of bibimbap at that point that I didn’t even think twice about it.”

Frank laughed, flopping down on the couch across from her, leaning back against the arm rest so he could watch her take a bite of the ice cream and immediately close her eyes in rapture. “As good as you remembered?” He teased, unstretching his leg so he could poke her with the toe of his sock-covered foot.

“Yes,” She sighed, opening her eyes and smiling back at him. “Better, maybe.”

Frank took a bite of his, looking away and pulling his foot back to his side of the couch, tingles running up his leg. This was dangerous. Touching was dangerous. She was dangerous.

“My dad liked that article, by the way. I forgot to tell you earlier, at work.”

“Oh, yay. I really liked your parents.”

He couldn’t help his small scoff. “Yeah. Sure.” She shot him a perplexed look and he shrugged at her. “They’re just… parents. You know?”

She hummed, her brows pulling in, looking down at her bowl. “I mean. Not really? But I believe you, I guess.”

Fuck. He realized immediately, setting his bowl down on the coffee table, making sure to grab a coaster so the condensation didn’t ruin her wood.

“Shit, Mel.” He said, kicking himself. “I’m such an idiot, sorry. I obviously didn’t think about—”

“No, it’s fine, really. I’m not that sensitive about my mom anymore.” She reassured him. “It’s been a long time, and Becca and I have—well. It just hurts less, now.” Her eyes flicked up to him once before dropping back down, her fingers tightening around the bowl. 

He watched her carefully, trying to gauge her emotions, the sudden urge to pull her across the couch and into his lap becoming visceral, overwhelming. He settled for stretching his arm out across the back of the couch instead, the tips of his fingers close to her shoulder but not quite touching.

“What was she like?” He asked. “Your mom?”

Mel did the thing where she sighed into a smile as she looked up at him, like she was so excited and relieved to finally be asked the right question, and his heart thudded strangely at the sight. “Oh, she was great. She was really great with both Becca and me. And she did so much for both of us, and she was so excited when I got into Ohio State.”

“Yeah? You guys were born in Ohio?”

“No, we were born in Maine, actually. We lived there for seven years. But my mom was from Ohio. So we mostly grew up there. I mean, that’s where most of my memories are from, at least.”

“What was in Maine, then? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about Maine.”

Her smile drooped. “Oh. That’s—um. That’s where my father is from. Was from.” 

His fingers twitched on the side of the couch, itching to get closer to her. “You never talk about him.” 

“Yeah, that’s, um—” she shifted in her seat, setting her bowl down, clearly growing uncomfortable.

“Hey, it’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” He promised, keeping his voice soft. 

She seemed to steel herself some, looking up at him, her eyes growing more resolute. “I don’t mind. You’ve told me stuff before, so–what do you want to know?”

Frank watched her carefully, holding her eye contact, scooching ever-so-slightly closer to her on the couch. He could see in her eyes that she wanted to be asked, that she wanted to give him this piece of her. She was offering him something, here, on her couch, in the intimate dim lighting of her living room. A piece of her. He’d be an idiot not to take it.

Why are you and Becca all alone? He wanted to say. How do you handle it all by yourself? How do you have it all together? Do you want my help?

“What happened to him?” Frank settled on. 

Mel dug her fingers into the arm of the couch. “He left.”

“He left?” Frank repeated, almost not believing it. 

Mel nodded. “Yeah. When Becca and I were six.”

Tanner’s age. The thought occurred to him, unbidden. “Why would he… Why did he…” His brain felt like it was moving slowly, trying to process this new information about her.

“Well, um. I didn’t know why, really, for a long time. I just knew that he wasn’t there, and we weren’t allowed to ask about him or my mom would get really upset with us. But then in college, when she was in the hospital, I asked again. I made her tell me, which was… hard.” Mel paused and took a shaky breath. Frank felt sort of paralyzed, watching her clasp her hands together and squeeze as she worked up the courage to continue her story.

Weirdly, Frank felt like he knew exactly what was coming.

“He was an addict,” she whispered, not looking at him. “And he lost his job. He was, um, coming to work drunk, or high, maybe, I’m not sure which.”

He felt nauseous. He felt like his chest was caving in. “Mel,” he rasped. “God, Mel.”

“I don’t know all the details,” she admitted. “Or even if any of it’s true, really. Not that I think my mom would lie, but–”

“Fuck, Mel.”

“There was also someone else, maybe? Like, another woman.”

Frank covered his face with his hands as his heart pounded. “Oh my god.” He repeated again, incapable of saying anything else at the moment.

“It’s okay,” She soothed awkwardly. “I really don’t ever even think about him much, anymore. It was a really long time ago.” A soft touch grazed his shoulder and he flinched away from it, standing up from the couch and moving away.

He released a single, hysterical, disbelieving laugh, reaching up to drag his hands through his hair. “Jesus. This is so fucked up.”

“Why are you so upset about this?” She asked, sounding just hurt enough that he forced himself to look back down at her. She had curled up into a tight ball on the couch, looking like she wished she could sink into it entirely and disappear. 

“Why am I?” He repeated. “Mel, why aren’t you? How can you even stand to look at me? Be around me?”

She shook her head vehemently. “You’re nothing like him.”

He picked his hands up as if to say look around. 

“You’re not.” She insisted. “You didn’t leave. You stayed, you fixed things. You have a big, nice house and parents who love you, and your wife and kids who you take care of, and your job that you’re so, so good at.”

I didn’t fucking fix things. He should have admitted to her, right then and there. My marriage is dying; you’re the only one that trusts me; I could still lose my kids or relapse; and I’m standing in the living room of my other woman’s house at this very moment.

But she was watching him with an open earnestness in her face, admiration that he had done nothing to deserve, telling him in not so many words what a good man she thought he was. And he wasn’t brave enough to shatter that illusion for her.

“I need a fucking cigarette.” He muttered, wiping his sweaty, shaking palms on his sweatpants, hating how much saying that made him sound like a goddamn addict.

“I’d prefer if you didn’t smoke in here.” Mel said dejectedly from her spot on the couch.

“Obviously, Mel.” Frank breathed. “Obviously I’m not going to smoke in your house, Christ.”

“Do you want to leave? Or—or go outside? I don’t have a balcony.”

“No,” he huffed, starting to pace across her living room like a caged animal. “No, I’m just—give me a second, or something. I feel fucking insane right now. And also, like, a huge asshole for making this about me. I need to just—” He reached up to tug at his hair again.

“Do you want a hug?” She asked tentatively.

Frank stopped pacing. Looked at her. “Do you want a hug?”

He watched her throat move as she swallowed, staring at him for a second before nodding.

“Fuck,” he cursed under his breath again. “Come here.”

She stood up from the couch, crossing around the coffee table until she was standing in front of him, her arms dangling down by her sides until Frank pulled her in, making the first move, crushing her against his chest. He probably should have checked first, that a full-body squeeze was what she had in mind, especially given that Mel was not famously the biggest fan of touch. But judging by the way she sighed, pressed her cheek firmly against his sternum, and wrapped her arms just as tightly around him back—well, he figured that he had made the right call.

This is it, he couldn’t stop from thinking as he held her there, as he dropped his chin to the top of her head, as he willed her not to pull away from him just yet. This is all you ever get, Frank.

She stayed for longer than he had dared to hope, letting him breathe her in, letting the scent of her shampoo fill his senses, letting him drift his palm up to cover the back of her neck so that the tips of his fingers were just close enough to her carotid artery to feel the edges of her pulse. When she pulled away, he didn’t let her go far, loosening his arms only enough so that she could lean back and meet his eye. 

He was savoring it.

Mel looked at him from behind her glasses, the light from her many lamps casting warm shadows across her face. Frank studied her face, watching for some sort of tell, a shift in micro-expression that might give away her thoughts to him. 

“I’m sorry I’m such a shit listener tonight.” He murmured to her, giving the back of her neck a small squeeze, feeling both more and less in control of himself than before. A strand of hair had loosened from her braid and was dangling in front of her face, blowing up gently with every breath. Frank released the back of her neck so he could tuck it back behind her ear, and Mel’s lips parted when he did it. He tried not to notice.

“Frank,” she whispered.

His hand hadn’t moved from behind her ear, his palm cupped her jaw. “Mel.”

“We’re… we’re friends, right?” 

He dropped his hand back down, holding onto her bicep. “Yeah,” he said, voice a little broken and gravelly. “We’re friends, honey. Of course we’re friends.”

“Okay,” she nodded slowly, pulling back fully this time, looking somewhat dazed. Frank let her go. “Okay, good. I sometimes—I sometimes have a hard time… knowing what… that is—”

“I know,” Frank said, feeling like a goddamn bastard. “I know. I’ll tell you, I’ll always tell you.”

“Thank you,” she sighed, holding her palms up to her cheeks like she was trying to cool herself down. “Thank you, makes me feel better.”

Ironic, Frank thought, that it made him feel quite a good deal worse.

“I should, uh—” he reached up to rub his jaw. “It’s getting late. Well, it’s been late. But you know what I mean.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I do. You can keep the socks, by the way.” He laughed at that, and some of the tension in the room eased. 

“I’m sorry again.” He apologized one more time as he was grabbing his keys off the kitchen counter and heading for the door. “I want you to feel like you can talk to me, about whatever. It wasn’t cool of me to freak out on you like that, over something you were clearly sensitive about.”

“It’s okay,” Mel said, giving him a small smile. “I’m actually not that sensitive about it. I was mostly just worried about telling you because I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Yeah,” he sighed as he lingered in her doorway. “Clearly a good instinct, on your part.”

She shrugged. “It’s been known to happen. I’ll see you at work. Thanks again for the ice cream.”

Honesty and self-reflection, Frank had discovered in his year of sobriety, were not two things that always came naturally to him. That night on the couch, Frank tried really hard to be honest with himself. He came to a few conclusions.

First: Something was broken in his marriage. That part was easy to admit. He had known that for a while. The less-easy part to admit was that the broken thing, whatever it was, was probably broken beyond repair. 

He and Abby had lost too many of the fundamental relationship building blocks along the way: respect, friendship, trust. A lot of that was on him. They had been running on the fumes of what they once had for a while now–before the drugs, even. 

Then came the harder part: did Frank still love his wife?

Alone with himself in the dark, he was able to resist the knee-jerk response that insisted, yes, of course he loved his fucking wife, and fuck you for implying that that he didn’t. 

It took him a whole hour, but eventually, he got there.

Frank loved his wife. But Frank wasn’t in love with his wife. Not anymore. 

He had an inkling that if he and Abby were actually able to sit down and stop passive-aggressively goading one another into arguments, she’d probably agree with him. They owed each other a real conversation, one that he thought was likely to end with a courtroom, a custody agreement, and a bare ring finger for them both. 

The final thing that Frank admitted to himself that night was that he had been lying again. Just like the drugs, he had managed to convince himself that he was doing something harmless. And just like the drugs, he had let it go too far. 

Mel wasn’t just a friend from work. She wasn’t just someone to talk to at night. She was something else. She was something important. 

It wasn’t until tonight, with the revelations about her past dumping over his head like a bucket of freezing water, that Frank realized really, truly what a selfish fucking bastard he was being. 

Mel didn’t deserve this version of him. (Abby didn’t either, for that matter, but it wasn’t the idea of hurting her that made him sick to his stomach and shaky in his hands).

The important thing was this: it wasn’t too late to stop. Nothing had really happened. He hadn’t been caught yet, this time. He could still pump the brakes, take a few months to get the Abby shit figured out, and then revisit the Mel situation when the ink on the divorce papers had dried. 

No one needed to get hurt. 

By the time the sun started streaming in through his living room windows, he was already feeling a bit better. Don’t worry about all that bullshit from last night, by the way. He wished he could have texted her. I’ve got everything figured out.

Frank slept exactly zero hours that night. Still, when he rolled off the couch that morning, his back screaming at him, the dog already nipping at his feet for a morning walk, he felt more awake than he had in months.