Irina’s POV

The first patient was a woman in her thirties. She came in fast, head down, clutching her bag against her chest like she was trying to make herself smaller. She almost walked past the desk without stopping.

"Hi," I said.

She stopped.

"I’m Irina. I’m new here." I kept my voice low. Even. "Can I get your name? I can let Dr. Vasquez know you’re here."

She told me her name. Her voice was tight. Her hands were white-knuckled on the bag strap.

I typed her in. I told her it wouldn’t be long. I asked if she wanted anything from the coffee station.

She said no.

She sat down in the corner chair — the one furthest from the door, back against the wall — and stared at the floor. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

I knew that chair. I knew exactly why someone picked that chair.

I waited until the front desk had a quiet moment, and then I walked over and sat down two chairs away from her. Not next to her. Not close enough to be intrusive. Just — nearby. And I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and let her breathe.

After about three minutes, she exhaled. Long and slow. Her shoulders came down half an inch.

I didn’t say anything about it.

When Dr. Vasquez came out and called her name, the woman stood up and for just a second — just one — she looked at me.

"Thank you," she said.

She was already moving toward the door.

She hadn’t needed anything. I hadn’t done anything.

But she’d said it anyway.

I turned back to the front desk and swallowed something that was trying to come up my throat.

Don’t, I told myself. You’re at work.

Lunchtime.

Patricia heated up something from a container in the back room and pointed me toward a chair at the small table. I sat. I ate. My feet ached. My back ached. My nose had finally — finally — stopped running, and the headache from the cold had backed off to something I could manage.

I’d made exactly four mistakes by noon.

One: I’d typed a patient’s date of birth wrong and Patricia caught it before it got filed.

Two: I’d tried to pull up patient notes in the wrong system and frozen the screen for thirty seconds before Patricia appeared at my shoulder and wordlessly fixed it.

Three: I’d forgotten that the coffee machine needed to be emptied and refilled between the morning rush and lunch, and had been on the verge of handing an elderly gentleman a cup of something that had been sitting for three hours.

Patricia had materialized out of nowhere for that one too.

Four: I’d given a patient the wrong form — the general intake instead of the prenatal one — because I’d reached for the wrong shelf on autopilot.

That one I caught myself. I apologized. The patient said it was fine, she was used to paperwork confusion, and honestly she’d filled out the wrong one so many times she probably knew it by heart anyway.

I still went back and filed it in the right place and felt bad about it for twenty minutes.

Four mistakes. In half a day. At a job I’d never done before, with systems I’d never seen, in a world I’d spent the past year almost completely cut off from.

Four, I thought. That’s fine. Four is fine.

I wasn’t sure I believed it.

The afternoon was quieter.

Three appointments. Two walk-ins. I handled the check-ins on my own by then — Patricia had retreated to the back office with a stack of invoices and left me to the front desk with the instruction to shout if anything went sideways.

Nothing went sideways.

One of the walk-ins was a girl who couldn’t have been much older than Mia. She came in breathing too fast, and I recognized that immediately — recognized it the way you recognize something you’ve felt in your own body a hundred times. She wasn’t sick. She was panicking.

I came around the front of the desk.

"Hey," I said. Quiet. "Come sit down."

She looked at me.

"I’m fine," she said. She absolutely was not fine.

"I know," I said. "Come sit anyway."

She let me walk her to a chair. I sat across from her. I didn’t tell her to breathe. I’d hated that — being told to breathe, like I didn’t know how, like the problem was that simple. I just talked to her. Small things. How far had she walked to get here, was she warm enough, had she eaten.

By the time Dr. Vasquez came out to see her, her breathing had gone back to something normal.

She gave me a look on her way past. Just a brief one. Something in her face that wasn’t quite a smile but was close.

I went back to the desk.

Five o’clock. The last patient left. Patricia locked the front door and immediately made a sound like a deflating balloon and dropped into her chair.

"Good day," she announced, to no one in particular.

I was straightening the forms at the desk. Trying to leave everything exactly the way I’d found it this morning.

"Was it?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

She looked at me. "For a first day? Yeah. Very good." She tilted her head. "You notice things."

I didn’t answer.

"The girl this afternoon," she said. "You handled that right. Some people try to fix the panic — talk them through it, give them something to focus on. You just sat with her." She shrugged. "That’s harder than it sounds."

I finished straightening the stack and squared the edges against the desk.

"I didn’t do anything," I said.

"Irina." Patricia looked at me over her reading glasses. "That is the job."

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

I thought about the woman this morning. The corner chair. The white-knuckled bag strap. The half-inch her shoulders had dropped.

Dr. Vasquez appeared in the hallway doorway. Her coat was on. Her bag was on her shoulder. She looked at the front desk — at the clean station, the sorted files, the coffee machine already emptied and wiped down — and then she looked at me.

"You did well today," she said.

Simple. Clean. No qualification, no for a first day, no considering everything. Just: you did well.

My throat tightened.

I pressed my lips together.

"Thank you," I said. My voice came out steady.

She nodded once, like it was settled.

"Same time tomorrow," she said, and walked to the door.