Page 92 of Fighting For You

"I'm fine." I clipped my badge back on. "Just thinking."

"About what?"

I couldn't tell Kip that I'd been sitting in the break room thinking about my seventeen-year-old brother who'd been arrested for stealing cars. So I gave him something else.

"The discrepancies," I said. "In the charting. They keep popping up and I can't figure out where they're coming from."

Kip nodded slowly. "It's Liz and Jen, Nora. You know that."

I looked at him.

"A lot of these errors are on charts that went through their hands. Administration has to see the pattern at some point. They need to let them go."

I didn't say anything. He wasn't wrong. The errors tracked to charts Liz and Jen touched. Josie was already looking into it.

But I didn't know how to feel about it. I hated Liz and Jen, hated what they'd done to me, to Lori, to every shift they poisoned just by being on it. But wanting someone to lose their livelihood, even someone who'd spent months making mine miserable, still felt wrong. I couldn't explain it. It just did.

"Maybe," I said.

Kip studied me. Then he smiled. "You're too good a person, Nora."

He squeezed my shoulder and walked back toward his bays.

I went back to the floor. The rest of the shift moved without incident. I discharged a patient, picked up a new admission, ran a set of repeat labs. The worry in my chest didn't go away, but I worked around it. I'd learned a long time ago how to function while the worry sat there, how to keep my hands steady when the rest of me wasn't.

Outside, tires screeched on the ramp.

A car door slammed. By the time I reached the bay doors, the car was already pulling away and someone was on the concrete in a spreading pool of blood.

Gracelyn was at the doors. "Gurney! Now!"

I ran. The kid was curled on his side, both hands pressed against his abdomen, his shirt soaked through. I dropped to my knees on the pavement and reached for his hands to see the wound.

He looked up at me.

Ian.

"Ian." My voice came out wrong. Too high, too thin. "Ian, look at me. Look at me."

His eyes were glassy. His mouth moved but nothing came out. Blood was seeping between his fingers, dark and steady, soaking through his shirt into the concrete underneath him. I pressed my hands over his and pushed down. He made a sound that went through me like a blade.

"I need a gurney! I need help over here!" I was shouting. I didn't recognize my own voice. "Stay with me. Ian, stay with me."

"Nora." Gracelyn's hand was on my shoulder.

"He's bleeding out, Gracelyn, I need to get pressure on this, I need⁠—"

"Nora." Her grip tightened. Her voice dropped low, steady, the voice she used in Trauma Two when everything was falling apart and someone needed to hear the calm through the noise. "You need to step back."

"He's my brother."

"I know. That's why you need to step back." She was already kneeling beside me, her hands reaching for Ian's abdomen. "I've got him. Let me work."

I couldn't let go. My hands were on his stomach, his blood on my skin. Every part of my training was telling me to hold pressure, maintain the airway, assess the wound, do my job. But the rest of me was looking at my little brother's face and seeing the baby I used to carry around the house, the one I promised I would take care of forever.

"Lori." Gracelyn didn't look up. "Take her."

Lori's arms were around me from behind. She pulled me to my feet and held on. I let her pull me back because somewhere underneath the panic I knew Gracelyn was right. I couldn't do this one.