I made a mistake.

It’s been hitting me all week. All month. Shit, possibly even the first day I stepped into the hospital. I thought I could weather it out. What’s one more day. One more week. One more year. But my boots clap along the sterile halls, and I feel my time draining away with my energy and will to keep course.

Pushing open the break room door with my shoulder, charts fill my hands, and I see the sofa. Instantly, I collapse on it lengthwise and kick my feet on the cushion.

Charts lie on my lap, but I don’t have any desire to finish them. I have—I glance at the wall clock—around fifteen minutes before I’ll need to check on my other patient. Unless someone codes.

It’s been that kind of day.

“Can’t believe he tried to shock an asystole rhythm,” Dr. Shaw says, entering the break room. The third-year Med-Peds resident heads straight for the coffee pot. “Nice catch on that intern, Keene.”

I stopped a first-year resident from trying to shock a flatline. Asystolic patients are non-shockable and won’t respond to defibrillation. And if an attending had been present, he would’ve done the same thing as me.

I can’t muster a response. I just click a pen.

Do your motherfucking job, Farrow.

Dr. Shaw pours coffee. “You look beat.” He sweeps me from head to toe. “Rough day?”

I could explain to him how a simple diagnostic exam that’d normally take twenty minutes lasted an hour and a half.

The patient instantly recognized me and wanted pictures, wanted an autograph, wanted to Instagram Live—which I turned down. And then she called her friends, who showed up ten minutes into the exam. I had to run through the whole parade again.

It’s not the same as patients gawking at my tattoos and piercings. I was used to that.

Being famous. Not so much.

I’m recognized every single day, sometimes minute-by-minute. I’m stopped walking down the hall. I’m stopped when I eat lunch in the cafeteria. When I’m minding my own fucking business during rounds.

If it’s not the patients or their families, it’s the nurses, technicians, doctors and hospital staff. They want to gossip with me about the Hales, Meadows, and Cobalts like I’m their direct outlet to secret information they’ll never be allowed to have.

Every day I have to brush them off. I’m perfectly fine with a bad reputation. I don’t give a flying shit if people call me cold or arrogant or an entitled bastard—but when it affects my job, when it affects my ability to be the best at what I do, then I fucking care.

I hate knowing that I’m not contributing enough. That I’m taking the spot of someone who could potentially do better work than what I’m doing.

I could tell Shaw about this morning.

When I had a patient who refused to give me a medical history. He said he didn’t trust me. Not with that kind of personal information, and I tried to explain how there’s clear patient-confidentiality laws, but he didn’t want to hear it.

In his eyes, I have too many ties to the media and public and the things that I say aren’t just a whisper in the night.

Hell, that wasn’t the first time I had to hand over a patient to another intern. Or be reprimanded by the hospital board for not carrying as big of a load as the other residents in my year.

And I can’t argue with them. It takes me three times as long to do a job that they can do in under ten minutes.

I thought it’d be different coming back to finish my residency, but I didn’t imagine this kind of struggle. I’m not sure I could have.

I’ve become a “celebrity” doctor, and that’s hindered my ability to help people inside Philly General. And I feel worthless here.

Three years. It’s what I keep telling myself. That in three years I’ll be worth more again. I’ll be out of this hospital and working for the famous families.

But that’s three years of running at a brick wall and not being able to breathe.

I haven’t been able to talk about this with Maximoff. I want to protect him from feeling at fault, or from blaming himself. Broaching the topic means that I’m reaffirming his worst fears: I’ve lost an immeasurable source of happiness by being with him, by being famous. And that’s not how I see it.

He’s my happiness, and I’m fighting for the day where I go back to him. And fuck, it’s right there. The day is right in front of me.

Just go.

I sit up, boots dropping to the ground. I glance back at Shaw. “Just a long shift,” I tell him, my mind racing.

Just go.

“Tell me about it.” He downs his coffee and then disappears into the locker room.

When the door swings closed behind him, I stack the charts from my lap and place them onto the coffee table.

Quickly, I push into the locker room. “Hey, Shaw!” I shout.

“Yeah?” He sticks his head out, past a few cedar lockers. Bare-chested, he pulls on a Polo shirt.

“Who’s on-call tonight?” I ask while I yank open my locker.

“Morris, Kim, and Bakshi.” He narrows his eyes at me while I take off my scrubs and change into black pants and a plain shirt. “I thought your shift ended at ten.”

In an hour. “It does.” I tuck my black V-neck in my pants and buckle my belt. For me, that hour will be stretched to three depending on how many people will stop me and ask for pictures.

It’s why I’m always late. To everything.

Shaw hangs on his locker door. “Is it Maximoff Hale?” he asks. “I can keep a secret if you need to talk or something.”

“I’m good,” I say.

“You know I’m not like those other people,” Shaw continues. “I’ve watched Maximoff Hale on TV since I was about ten. He’s practically a real person to me, not just a celebrity.”

I’ve heard the same speech a hundred different times, a hundred different ways.

“Shaw,” I say, grabbing my backpack and shutting the locker door. “I’m good.”

He nods, but he blisters beneath my words. “Yeah, Keene. Of course.” And he coldshoulders me as he returns to his locker.

I pass him silently out the door.

Just go.

By the time I reach the parking garage, my pulse is racing. I drove the Audi to work, and I find the car where I left it. I don’t slide into the driver’s side. Immediately, I climb into the back, lock the car doors, and lie down on the stretch of the seat.

Resting my boot soles on the leather, I dial a number and put the phone to my ear. Staring up at the car’s interior roof.

The line rings once before I hear his voice.

“I was just thinking about you,” Maximoff says.

It pummels me, and my hand cements to my mouth, raw emotion surging. I can’t speak yet. My eyes burn, and I know this is where I would say: of course you were, wolf scout. You’re obsessed with me.

“Farrow?” Concern hardens his voice. “You okay?”

I shut my eyes and drop my hand to my chest. “It’s sucking the life out of me,” I breathe out. And I tell him everything about what’s been happening.

All of it.

I knew one day I would, but I thought it’d be at the end of three years. And then I’d confess, but now it’s come sooner. Because I’m done.

I’m done.

Maximoff responds with more strength of heart than anyone could ever believe. Ever know or see. “I fucking love you,” he tells me, “and you should step back. Don’t finish your residency. You don’t need it, Farrow.”

I’d been worried that he’d apologize, stuck on a turntable blaming himself for this, and thank fucking God he’s not. Thank God.

I shift my phone to my other hand. “Maximoff…” I knew I’d end this here, and I was about to ask his feelings on that. Hell, I didn’t even need to ask. He just told me. But this choice comes with a greater cost than he might realize.

See, I’m still able to be a concierge doctor. I passed my Step 3 exam, so I’m now licensed and can prescribe medication. But… “I won’t be board-certified,” I tell him. “It means that if any of your family has to be rushed to an ER, I can’t practice medicine inside Philadelphia General.” I can’t help.

That hospital requires doctors to be in a residency program or board-certified. I will be neither.

“It’ll annoy you,” Maximoff tells me, “especially when you have to hand that task off. But Farrow, my family having serious medical emergencies like that—it might happen only a few times in your lifetime. It’s not worth three years of being beaten down and feeling empty.”

I open my eyes. The parking garage is quiet, and the Audi windows are tinted. No cameramen have found me yet. “I never imagined not being board-certified,” I admit and comb a hand through my hair while I lie down. I keep my palm on my head. “It feels like halfway.”

I don’t usually go halfway.

I go all-in.

A bed squeaks on his end of the line. He must be sitting down. “Maybe if you only loved medicine, it’d be halfway,” Maximoff says, “but I think you’re going all the way and you don’t even fucking realize it, man.”

My eyes sear, staring unblinkingly at the interior roof. I start to smile at the thought. Medicine isn’t the only thing that fulfills me. Protecting him, loving him, just being there—it’s what I live for.

I look far away. “Are you implying that I love you, wolf scout?”

“Yeah,” he says confidently. “I am.”

I smile more. “You’re not wrong.”

Flashes start glaring through the car windows. The click, click, click too familiar, and paparazzi shout my name. But I stay on my back for another minute.

“There’s a downside,” I tell him. “People will have a lot of opinions about me practicing without being board-certified.” Even if this isn’t a measure of my worth or skill as a doctor, it definitely will be to the public.

“Fuck those people,” Maximoff says.

I instantly breathe stronger. And I sit up. Phone to my ear, camera lenses pressed to the windows, I’m ready to change course. And I’m spinning his world in a new direction, but at least this one puts us together again.