Wes kept himself up most of the night spinning scenarios through his head. Scenarios in which he could somehow stop Tom from closing the hospital.

Were he living in an ideal world, he would have rallied the staff and relied on several perspectives, not just his own. But the rest of the staff barely communicated with him regarding matters of life and death. They weren’t going to cooperate on this. Most likely they’d panic and devote all of their time to looking for new jobs, leaving Hidden Creek completely in the lurch.

Until Tom decided to announce it—which probably wouldn’t be until everything was official, considering how Wes had reacted—he’d just keep all this to himself. He could split his time between working his normal shifts and figuring out how to turn this around. It would require a lot less sleep, but he’d worked on fewer hours during his first year of residency. Getting three consecutive hours a night was a luxury back then. He just needed to readjust. And invest in a coffee press.

So far, though—without the coffee press or time to readjust his sleep cycles—Wes hadn’t come up with anything useful. He’d written down “find and marry a rich lesbian heiress,” but that had mostly been for his own amusement, and part of a longstanding joke he shared with Doris, the woman who’d essentially been like a mother to him after his own passed. While it cheered him up to think of her, it’d been almost four in the morning when he’d written down that particular solution, and he hadn’t thought she’d appreciate the text to let her know he was finally going to take her advice.

The next three hours had only soured his mood, and when he walked into Hidden Creek Memorial at seven, he wasn’t inclined to play the office politics game. He ignored the frantic whispering that stopped the moment he walked by and dropped off his things in his locker. The doctor who’d been on duty overnight—Sharon Silverman—briefed him on the patients that were waiting for morning rounds.

None of those patients included Brenda Carson, which was both a blessing and a curse. After several rounds of inconclusive testing, he’d been forced to discharge her with a prescription and a suggestion to follow up with her primary care doctor for long term care. He’d felt like it wasn’t enough, but there’d been no way to prove there was anything wrong with the woman beyond what just seemed to be a textbook case of rebound headaches. Kyle had digested that news with all the smugness Wes expected. Not outwardly so. He was polite, and he put Ms. Carson’s needs first. But there’d been a moment when Wes was signing the discharge papers that he swore he saw the man give a very obvious “I told you so” look.

That was yesterday, though, and today he had bigger things to worry about than some squabble with a man he’d almost fucked. He’d let Kyle know the director had been notified of their previous relationship, and that was all they needed to talk about on a personal level. Everything else needed to remain firmly grounded in their work, because Wes really didn’t need to devote the extra brainpower to these ridiculous fantasies he had whenever Kyle was near.

Fantasies that didn’t stop just because they were inconvenient. His very first follow-up was also a patient Harris happened to be taking vitals for. Just seeing him—the way his whole demeanor softened as he spoke to the older woman, and conversely how every muscle in his body seemed to tense when he noticed Wes’ presence—made him fixate on things he shouldn’t.

Wes would never claim to have a type, but his last relationship had been with the most stubborn man he’d ever met, and his moms loved to tease him to the point of discomfort about the virtues of a testy partner.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hartford,” he said, reaching for the woman’s chart. “Dr. Silverman said you’re still having some trouble breathing?”

“It’s not so bad,” she lied, in direct defiance of what Silverman’s observations said. “I’ve spent a lot more time breathing than doing anything else. I figure my lungs just need a little break.”

Kyle laughed softly at that as he maneuvered the head of a stethoscope under a blood pressure cuff. “You should look into becoming the next Bionic Woman. You could get everything regulated that way.”

“Wouldn’t have to worry about pesky little things like breathing, then!” she said with a toothy grin, gesticulating as she did so. Kyle had the patience not to tell her to keep her arm still while he was trying to get a pressure read. “Plus I’d get to have a torrid affair with Richard Anderson…”

“That sounds even better than cybernetic modification,” Wes admitted, glancing at Kyle over the woman’s chart. The hint of a smile made him feel ridiculously victorious.

“Don’t I know it,” Mrs. Hartford said with a wistful sigh.

“In the meantime, while we wait for science to catch up, I’d like to take a listen to your lungs,” he said, getting out his own stethoscope.

“Let me know if they say anything too crass. Ornery little fuckers.”

Wes bit down on his lip, willing himself not to laugh. It took even more of an effort when he could see Kyle doing the exact same thing. They moved around one another fluidly, without Wes having to say anything. He just waited for Kyle to finish taking the BP, then they traded places seamlessly. Rubbing the metal end of the stethoscope against his hand to warm it up, Wes placed it on the woman’s back.

“Deep breath for me.” When she did as he instructed, he followed it up with, “And let it out.”

This was repeated two more times, as Kyle took a pulse ox. There was clear wheezing present, and Mrs. Hartford’s breathing was more shallow than it should be. Dr. Silverman’s diagnosis of COPD definitely seemed correct. She’d explained they’d kept the woman for observation overnight to see if she continued to have issues after being given a dose of steroids.

Well that was… surprisingly pleasant. Wes left with a smile on his face and a lightness in his step that he couldn’t completely contribute to Mrs. Hartford’s sense of humor—though that certainly helped. It was rare that he’d ever found himself in sync with another medical professional. Even the doctors he’d worked alongside had their own style that tended to throw him off his game. It was a large part of why he’d decided against becoming a surgeon.

But something seemed to click in that room. Kyle understood the patient’s needs as well as Wes did, if not better. Rather miraculous, considering they’d both just started their shifts. He had a knack for reading people, and his desire to make his patients comfortable was evident in everything he did. It made Wes feel like he could leave that room and only come back when it was absolutely necessary, content in the knowledge that someone else would actually handle it properly.

And that was insane to him, honestly. He’d always checked in on his patients as often as he could. He knew firsthand what could happen if someone wasn’t doing their job; if a patient needed something but was unable to ask for it. But Mrs. Hartford was in good hands, and he moved on to the next case with a clear conscience.

Or he would have, if he hadn’t caught the latest gossip coming from the nurses’ station.

“I’m telling you, Monroe didn’t snap at him once. They spent the whole time laughing and carrying on with the patient,” Vivian said. “Whole thing was surreal.”

“So what, is this some sort of male bonding thing? He and the new guy are laughing it up while he treats the women like we’re toddlers?”

Wes drew in a breath through his nose, so tempted to correct them immediately. They must have known he could hear. It wasn’t like he was skulking about. He’d walked right past the station and had just turned the corner when they started going off.

“I think it’s more than that. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve seen the way Kyle looks at him…”

That put things into sharp perspective. This was just hospital gossip and backwoods politics—two things he didn’t have time for today. The crushing weight of Sloane’s decision came back with a vengeance, and it took a Herculean effort to shake off the mood he found himself in before he drew back the curtain for bed eight. Speaking to that patient and the next helped ground him. But before he could even greet his fourth of the day—a young boy who’d come down with some kind of stomach bug and was severely dehydrated—Wes’ pager went off.

One glance at the code was enough to send him running out of the room, a hasty apology on his lips as he raced toward seven—Mrs. Hartford’s room.

There were some doctors who thrived under this kind of pressure, but Wes had never been one of them. A code was a failure, especially when it happened while he was tending to someone else. A code on an otherwise stable patient usually meant someone had fucked up along the way and something had gone terribly wrong—to the point where it might cost a patient their life.

When he turned the corner, he saw it was curtain seven everyone was flocking to, and that made the feelings charging through him even worse. Mrs. Hartford had a simple, treatable problem. She shouldn’t be in this situation, period.

“What happened?” he barked, throwing back the curtain.

“She was looking pale and listless, so I tried to engage her in conversation and she just started convulsing.”

There was no panic in the Kyle’s voice as he said it, and Wes was grateful for small miracles. A panicked nurse wasn’t going to help anyone right now, least of all Mrs. Hartford.

“BP’s dropping,” Gina, one of the other nurses said. “She’s going into asystole.”

Everything was happening so fast, and Wes had to retreat inside himself to do what was necessary to save this woman’s life. He refused to lose a patient today. He wasn’t going to do it, streak be damned. This was about the value of life, and Wes refused to let it slip through his fingers.

“Starting compressions,” he yelled, and the rest of the staff cleared to the side of the bed for him. “Push 1mg epi, now.”

Hands positioned, stance perfectly straight, Wes began CPR, pumping the woman’s chest, checking for signs of a pulse, and then restarting.

As a kid, he’d always thought defibrillators were the first and last line of defense in saving people from death, but the reality was a lot more nuanced. There were some people who couldn’t take the shock, and some who wouldn’t be affected by it in the slightest. In general, with patients who’d had heart complications in the past, Wes preferred to treat with compressions and IV meds to kick the patient’s heart back into an acceptable rhythm.

It was damage control—a Band-Aid until he could find out what had actually gone wrong and what kind of havoc it was currently wreaking on her body.

But it was a gambit that worked. Between the meds and the compressions, Mrs. Hartford’s pulse registered again. The flurry of chaos didn’t stop then, though. They needed to make sure she was stable, and Wes needed to figure out what suddenly made his stable patient go into full-on cardiac arrest.

“What the hell happened?” he asked, his fury directed right at Kyle.

He was the one in charge of the patient’s care. He had to know.

“Everything you ordered happened,” Kyle shot back. “I gave her pseudoephedrine 30mg—”

“You gave her what?” he roared. “You gave pseudoephedrine to a woman who’s already suffering from heart disease?!”

Kyle blanched, finally stepping away from the gurney as the others worked. “You wrote it down. You wrote down pseudoephedrine. And her chart never said anything about—”

“Get the labetalol,” he barked at another nurse. “We need to get her BP down.”

“What can I do?” Kyle asked, looking pale and frantic.

“Go literally anywhere else,” Wes growled, “and try not to cause another fucking code.”

The process of saving Mrs. Hartford was drawn out more than Wes would have liked, but in the end, they managed to stabilize her. She’d even regained consciousness in the last hour and seemed to have full use of her faculties, which was always a concern after someone was down for any length of time.

It should have felt like a relief, but all Wes could think was that they’d failed the patient. That he’d failed the patient, because apparently he should have been babysitting Kyle to make sure he administered the right prescriptions.

Wes was still seething by the time he sought out the man. He knew he should’ve taken some time to cool off, maybe had a little jog around town to clear his head, but this couldn’t be left to fester. Kyle needed to know that these kinds of mistakes were unacceptable.

He found the man at the nurses’ station, staring at the ancient computer with a look of distinct frustration pinching his face. Was he having a hard day? Because Wes was about to make it a hundred times harder.

“I need to go over the Hartford case with you,” he said as evenly as he could manage.

Even if his anger threatened to boil over, he wasn’t going to dress someone down in public. Once they were behind closed doors, though…

“That’s what I’m looking at now,” Kyle said, not even turning his attention to Wes. “Nowhere in her file does it say she has heart disease.”

A cold feeling washed over Wes, and he bent down to look at the eyesore of a monitor. “Show me.”

Kyle scrolled through Mrs. Hartford’s file, pointing out the place where the procedure should have been listed. Various procedures were listed, but the diagnosis of heart disease wasn’t anywhere to be found.

“I took her history myself,” he said, taken aback. “I would’ve put it in the system.”

“Then there’s a problem with the electronic filing system,” Kyle said, pushing his chair back.

Wes just stared at him incredulously. “That’s it? ’There’s a problem with the electronic filing system?’ That ’problem’ almost cost a woman her life.”

“I know that, Dr. Monroe,” Kyle said through gritted teeth. “That’s why I was going to speak to the director about getting it looked at by IT.”

Considering Sloane currently had the same interest in this hospital as a rat did in a sinking ship, he knew nothing would be done about it. And that fact made him all the angrier.

“A faulty system doesn’t explain how you misinterpreted my med order. I never told you to give Mrs. Hartford pseudoephedrine.”

“Yes, you did,” Kyle shot back, grabbing the physical chart from the desk and pointing to the order.

Wes looked down at the chart, dread gripping him. Had he really made this big of a mistake? Was he the only one responsible for almost killing Mrs. Hartford?

He knew he’d been tired, that last night had taken its toll, but this…

When he scanned the chart, though, all he saw was the order for prednisone.

“You mean here where I wrote down prednisone?” he asked, drawing in a steadying breath through his nose.

“This?” That one word was steeped in so much disbelief that Wes’ confidence faltered. “This doesn’t say prednisone. I can barely read the fucking thing,” he hissed, his words low enough so only Wes could hear him, “but that’s not what it says. The closest thing I got from it was pseudoephedrine, which I assumed was safe for her to take.”

“You assumed?” Wes just stared at the man, at those mossy green eyes that had held such a captivating mystery before. Now they were filled with a stubborn self-righteousness mixed with a healthy dose of guilt. “So when Mrs. Hartford asks why she almost died in our hospital, I’m supposed to just tell her you assumed I wrote something and didn’t bother to ask me?”

“As long as you don’t leave out the part where you told me not to bother you unless it was urgent,” Kyle shot back. “I made the wrong call. I own that. But this chicken scratch you call a med order is illegible, doctor.”

“I guess we’ll see how Sloane feels about it when the hospital’s facing down a lawsuit for gross incompetence.”

The chart hit the table with a heavy slap, and Wes removed himself from the nurses’ station in three long strides, getting as far away from Kyle as he could manage.

It wasn’t just that the man fought him on this, stirring his temper the way none of the other nurses dared to do.

It was the fact that he was right.

Even Wes wasn’t positive what that drug order said, only what he’d intended. There was every chance in the world that fatigue and a hasty prescription had been at the heart of this whole situation, and that was on him. Not on Kyle. Not on an ancient computer system.

Him.

Ignoring everything and everyone around him, Wes stormed into the on-call room, locked the door behind him… and finally gave into the tears of stress and frustration and anger that had been threatening to strangle him since yesterday.