Page 17 of Never Quite Gone

“BP's in the basement!” Someone shouted. “70 over palp!”

Focus. Here. Now. Blood and bones and things I could fix. This was real. This was solid. This was?—

Sunlight streamed through the ER windows, throwing patterns across the trauma bay that looked exactly like Alex's fucking courtyard designs. For a moment, the shadows seemed to dance, showing me places I'd never been but knew like my own hands?—

“Doctor Monroe?” My resident's voice yanked me back, waiting for orders like a lifeline.

“Type and cross four units,” I barked, forcing myself into the present. “Trauma panel and get me another large-bore IV.”

The familiar dance of emergency medicine took over - blood pressure readings, trauma assessments, the steady beep of monitors keeping time. But somewhere in the back of my head, Alex's voice echoed with impossible certainty.

“Some things are written in the stars, beloved.”

I'd never heard him say those words.

Had I?

My hands moved on autopilot, placing lines and calling orders, but my mind kept sliding sideways into spaces that shouldn't exist. A candlelit room where those same hands mixed paints instead of medications. A battlefield tent where they stitched wounds by torchlight. A smoky club where they danced across piano keys while blue eyes watched from the shadows.

“Doctor Monroe!” Sofia's sharp tone snapped me back. “OR Two's ready.”

Right. Here. Now. Blood and gauze and science. Not memories that couldn't be memories. Not eyes that seemed to know me better than I knew myself.

But as we rushed the patient toward surgery, the shadows kept dancing on the walls, showing me glimpses of other times, other places, other lives where those same blue eyes had found mine across centuries of forgetting.

Maybe I was finally losing it. Maybe grief and exhaustion had finally cracked something vital in my carefully ordered world.

The thought terrified me more than any trauma case ever had.

My vision blurred as I stared at the tablet screen, the patient notes swimming together like watercolors in rain. Thirty-six hours of fluorescent lights and trauma calls had turned my brain to static, each blink lasting a fraction too long. The headache drilling behind my eyes matched the rhythm of the distant monitors beeping their endless digital lullaby.

“You're coming with me.”

Sofia's voice cut through the fog like a scalpel. She stood in my doorway, transformed from her usual scrubs into dark jeans and an oversized sweater that somehow made her look both softer and more determined. Her curls, finally freed from their tight bun, framed her face like a storm cloud ready to break.

I raised an eyebrow, trying to summon some resistance. “And where exactly are we going?”

“Out. Somewhere that doesn't reek of bleach and broken promises. Somewhere with actual fucking music instead of those goddamn monitors that've been haunting my dreams.” Her eyes softened slightly. “Somewhere you can stop being Doctor Monroe, Chief of Emergency Medicine, and just be... Eli.”

“Sofia, I don't think?—“

“No excuses.” She crossed her arms, channeling every resident who'd ever faced down an attending's bullshit. The look in her eyes told me she was seeing past my careful walls, past the pressed white coat and perfect posture, straight to the cracks I pretended weren't there.

Twenty minutes later, I found myself in a bar that straddled the line between hipster haven and comfortable decay. Exposed brick walls held decades of stories, while Edison bulbs cast shadows that danced like memories across worn wooden tables. The music – some indie rock band I was probably too old to recognize – throbbed just loud enough to drown out the echoes of flatlines and grieving families that usually followed me home.

Sofia slid a whiskey across the table. The amber liquid caught the light, transforming it into something ancient and familiar, like sunlight through stained glass windows I'd never actually seen. My chest tightened as fragments of impossible memories tried to surface.

“To surviving another day,” Sofia said, her glass hovering in the space between us like an offering.

“To surviving,” I echoed, the words tasting like ash and old regrets.

The bar's ambient noise washed over us – glasses clinking,scattered laughter, the percussion of life continuing despite everything. But my traitor mind kept slipping sideways into other sounds: paintbrushes whispering across canvas, feet pounding against stone that had crumbled centuries ago, music that existed only in dreams that felt more real than my waking hours.

“You didn't deny it,” Sofia said finally, her dark eyes reflecting the warm light like she could see straight through to my soul.

“Deny what?”

“That there's something about Rothschild.”

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