It started with a code blue.
Talia had just sipped her third coffee of the morning, its bitterness doing little to keep her grounded. The hospital intercom crackled, a voice urgent and sharp:
"Code Blue—Room 407. All available staff to 407."
Ezra looked up from his notes across the nurses' station, their eyes locking for a split second. They both moved at once.
Room 407. It was Mr. Halbridge — 63, diabetic, a frequent flyer in the system. Heart issues. Kidney failure. Talia had joked once that he knew more nurses than residents by name.
He was also Ezra's patient.
They burst into the room alongside the crash team. Nurses handed off paddles. The defibrillator was already charged. A nurse was doing compressions — hard, fast, mechanical.
Ezra took lead. Talia hovered by the med cart, watching as he barked orders with clarity.
"One milligram epinephrine. Let's shock again. On my count."
The beep of the monitor was a flatline.
Ezra's jaw clenched.
Shock. Compress. Wait. Repeat.
Nothing.
20 minutes later, they called it.
"Time of death: 10:17 a.m."
Ezra stepped back from the bed. His hands were shaking, chest heaving. Talia watched as he stared at the body on the bed — eyes wide, like he hadn't fully processed it.
This wasn't like the simulations. This was real.
"Ezra..." she murmured.
He didn't answer.
A nurse gently patted his shoulder, offering condolences, but he didn't respond. He just stood there. Frozen.
That night, he didn't come home.
Talia checked the break rooms. The on-call areas. The stairwells.
Nothing.
Her calls went unanswered.
By 1:00 a.m., worry had morphed into panic. Not the dramatic kind — the kind that simmers under your ribs, whispering worst-case scenarios in the back of your mind.
She went back to the hospital.
He wasn't on any active rotation, but she found a trail of half-eaten protein bars and a familiar hoodie folded up in the staff lounge.
And then, at 1:26 a.m., she found him. In the basement morgue hallway, sitting on the floor, back against the cold tile, knees to his chest.
Her heart dropped.
"Ezra—" she knelt beside him, her voice soft. "What are you doing down here?"
He didn't look at her. "I thought I could save him."
"You did everything right."
"Then why is he dead?"
Talia sat beside him in the quiet, letting the silence fill the space between them.
"I keep hearing his wife's voice," he said after a while. "She kissed his forehead this morning and said she'd bring his crossword puzzle at lunch. I never even called her. He died, and I never even—God."
He scrubbed his face with his hands.
"I don't think I can do this, Talia. Not if this is how it ends."
She gently took his hand, lacing her fingers through his. "You're not alone in this. We'll get through it—together. But you can't disappear like this. Not from the people who care about you."
His eyes flickered to her, bloodshot and rimmed with fatigue.
"I was afraid you'd see me as weak."
"I already know you're human," she whispered. "And I love that about you."
Later, as they walked out of the basement together, Ezra stopped near the elevator.
"I want to be better," he said. "Not just as a doctor… but at facing the parts of this that scare me."
Talia looked up at him. "Then start with me."
He nodded.
As the elevator doors slid closed behind them, the hospital felt quieter than usual. As if it, too, was holding its breath. But in the center of that stillness was something new — not certainty, not peace… but resolve.
Because medicine would always bring heartbreak.
But it could also bring healing.
And sometimes, in the darkest corners of the hospital, when everything else was stripped away, what remained between two people… was love.