NICK

I woke up at 5:47 AM.

It was not a slow drift back into the world. It was a sudden, jagged snap, the kind that happens when your body refuses to trust the sleep it’s getting.

I had thirteen minutes left before my alarm would ring, but I was already staring at the ceiling.

My neck was locked in a dull, throbbing knot.

I had fallen asleep on the couch again, slumped at an angle that ignored every rule of human anatomy.

Beside me, on the cushions, the files for the review board were scattered like fallen leaves.

The lamp was still on, its yellow light looking sickly and weak against the grey dawn bleeding through the window.

On the table, a cup of coffee sat with a thick, cold skin on the surface... a monument to a night spent trying to work myself into a stupor.

Before I was even fully awake, before the thinking part of my brain could put up its walls, my eyes moved. They drifted across the small gap of the living room to the other couch.

It was empty.

The cushions were flat and undisturbed. They looked exactly the way they were supposed to look.

For two days, that space had held a shape, a presence that didn’t belong in my apartment.

Now, it had been a week since that shape vanished, leaving nothing behind but the silence I usually preferred.

A sharp, hot spike of irritation flared in my chest. It was easier to be angry at the couch than to ask why I had looked for someone I didn’t even like.

I sat up too quickly, my neck screaming in protest. I reached over, clicked off the lamp with a sharp snap, and began gathering the files into a neat, clinical stack.

I didn’t let myself think. Thinking was for people who had the luxury of being messy.

I had two advanced degrees and years of discipline holding my spine straight. I wasn’t the kind of man who sat in the dark and felt things.

I was a surgeon. I fixed things, or I cut them out.

The kitchen was cold. I moved through the motions of making coffee with the usual ease of a machine.

Kettle on. Grains measured. Water poured. My mind wasn’t in the room; it was hovering somewhere else, a place I refused to name.

I lifted the mug to my lips, but halfway through the first sip, my gaze landed on the counter.

There was another cup. It was already full. It was already cold. I must have made it ten minutes ago and completely forgotten the act of doing so.

I stood there, holding one warm mug and staring at the cold one. It was a small error.

A nothing error. But to a man like me, it was a crack in the foundation.

I didn’t feel alarmed. I felt a thin, freezing anger. I walked to the sink and poured the second cup down the drain with a force that sent dark splashes up the porcelain.

The shower was just as hollow. The water was the correct temperature. The soap was the same one I had used for years. But the pressure didn’t touch the heavy, grey weight sitting behind my eyes.

I went back to the files. I reviewed the notes I had made in the margins, my handwriting precise and sharp.

I was present enough to function, but there was a dangerous lag in my reactions, a sense that I was watching myself from a distance.

When it was time to leave, I grabbed my jacket and my bag. I was three steps down the hallway, the door already locked behind me, before I realized my hand was empty.

My keys were still inside. They were hanging on the hook where I had left them the night before. I had never done that. Not once in four years.

I went back, retrieved them, and closed the door again. The silence of the hallway felt like it was mocking me.

Fascinating, I told myself, my inner voice dripping with the kind of condescension I usually reserved for incompetent residents or people in general.

I have apparently decided to become a bumbling idiot. A truly inspired development for someone of my standing. Perhaps next I’ll forget how to tie my own shoes.

I walked to the car, the irritation sitting in my chest like a jagged stone.

I arrived early. The hospital smelled of floor wax and old fear. I put on my white coat, adjusted my lanyard, and stepped into the persona the world expected of me. To my colleagues, I looked composed. I looked solid. In reality, I was just closed.

I watched them as I walked the halls I saw one of my coworkers laughing too loudly at a joke that wasn’t funny.

Another was scribbling notes in green ink, as if the color made her thoughts more important.

And then there was the new resident. He had recently discovered the concept of confidence and had mistaken it for actual skill. It was an error I found both predictable and exhausting.

Morning rounds were a blur of charts and vital signs. My voice was polite, the version I used to keep people at a distance without making them complain to HR. But my mind was a traitor. Without any instruction from me, it was scanning.

Every corridor. Every corner. Every flash of color.

A nurse walked by wearing a pink scrub cap. My head snapped toward her before I could stop it. My heart gave a stupid, heavy thud against my ribs.

It wasn’t him. Of course it wasn’t him. He didn’t work here. He didn’t belong here. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

I adjusted my notes, my grip on the pen so tight my knuckles turned white. The irritation was back, sharper now, a frantic buzzing under my skin.

We went into surgery an hour later. A routine procedure. The new resident was assisting.

The operating room was the one place where I was supposed to be king. The lights, the masks, the steady beep of the monitors, it was all supposed to be under my control.

The new resident made a comment about the dosage timing for the patient’s meds. He said it with that smug, unearned certainty.

He was wrong. Not enough to kill the patient, but wrong enough to show he hadn’t read the latest literature.

Usually, I would have corrected him with a quiet, pointed sentence and moved on. That was the Nick people knew.

But today, the last multiple nights of bad sleep and cold coffee arrived in my chest all at once. The neck pain, the double coffee, the forgotten keys, and the empty couch... they all piled up and pushed against my throat.

"Harlow," I said. My voice was very quiet. It was quieter than a scream, which made the room go deathly still. "You’re a fucking idiot."