Page 5 of Gravity of Love
Frankie opened the passenger door and guided her in, buckling the seat belt herself as Yaya grumbled that she wasn’tan invalid. She then circled to the driver’s side, slid in, and started her Papou’s Jeep Grand Cherokee with trembling hands.
They pulled out of the driveway as Yaya’s phone rang, and Frankie wondered what other surprises the day had in store for them. So far, it had been a doozy.
2
“Ten more days.”Dr. Liam Michael Davies repeated the three-word mantra to himself, hoping it would fuel him to get through the rest of his double shift as he stared at the scene in the hallway.
The corridor of the emergency room at Pine Ridge General Hospital was a harsh, humming tunnel of fluorescent lights. A runway of disinfected linoleum thick with antiseptic air. Patients in stretchers and wheelchairs were being transported by EMTs while doctors and nurses rushed past, their faces fixed with concentration.
Liam used to thrive in this environment. Every time he scanned his badge and walked through the double doors into the ER, he was charged by the frenzy of chaos, he got a rush from the urgency and sense of purpose. As the attending physician, this was his house. He was the maestro conducting the symphony of beeping machines, shouting voices, and frantic footsteps playing as the soundtrack to the drama of life-and-death circumstances unfolding on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.
But for the past couple of years, something changed. It hadn’t happened overnight. It was a faint but persistent senseof erosion, like acid rain on sandstone—subtle at first, then all-consuming. He’d lost his drive. His passion. More than that, he’d lost the part of himself that could take meaning from this relentless churn of suffering and survival. The adrenaline rush that once propelled him was absent. He felt numb on good days. Dissociated on bad. He thought it would pass, but it hadn’t.
He tried to pinpoint when the change happened. Maybe it started with the overdose kid, the one who reminded him of his little brother, who he hadn’t seen in over a decade. Or maybe it was the week he had three patients who had been in a horrific car accident, all die in the same hour, and he couldn’t remember any of their names the next morning, just the color of the bedsheets and the way the family members looked at him, first like a savior and then executioner. Or maybe it was the slow accumulation of a thousand small failures nobody else noticed but him.
He’d thought he could ride it out. All the literature said burnout was a phase, a pothole on the road to professional fulfillment. It would pass, the experts promised, if you exercised, got a hobby, and drank more water. Liam tried all of that. He ran until his knees ached. He started hiking. He drank enough water to float a canoe. None of it worked.
The numbness was there on the good days, like a thin film coating his senses. On the bad days, it was something darker, a cold shadow that hovered above him and somehow made him feel like he was watching his life from a front row on a screen. It was textbook dissociation, as if someone had cut the wires between his body and his soul.
He knew he had to do something drastic, and that’s exactly what he’d done. He’d started the ball rolling over a year ago, and now everything was coming to fruition.
Ten more days. He had exactly a week and a half until the start of his new life. Whatever that was going to be. He had ageneral plan. New practice. Slow down. Start a family. It was definitely an if-you-build-it-they-will-come leap of faith he was taking. The problem was, Liam wasn’t really a leap-of-faith guy.
From the age of ten, he’d had a plan for his life and followed it, more or less. He graduated high school with his associate’s degree and nearly enough credits for his BA by taking night and AP classes. He was able to graduate from Stanford Medical School at age twenty-two. After graduation, he joined the Navy as an officer and served his country for four years before moving to Pine Ridge and heading their Emergency Room Department, which was what he’d always said he wanted to do.
All his life he’d had a plan. His dad—or the man who raised him, who hethoughtwas his father until he was twenty-two and discovered that his entire life was a lie—Dr. Edward Sterling, was a neurosurgeon. Not just any neurosurgeon, he was internationally recognized as the leading expert in brain tumors and neuro-oncology. His career didn’t leave a lot of time for a home life, and even when he was physically home, mentally and emotionally he was somewhere else.
Growing up, Liam both idolized and hated the man in equal parts, who he now knew he shared no DNA with. Because of that, he was obsessed with learning everything he could about his chosen profession in hopes of getting some insight into him. To that end, he watched every hospital show he could. ER, House, Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, St. Elsewhere, M*A*S*H, Nip/Tuck. His favorite show was ER, and his favorite character was Dr. Mark Greene, portrayed by Anthony Edwards.
He’d based his career, his entire life, on a character on a TV show he only watched because he was so desperate to connect with a man he believed was his father, to know his world, to be a part of it in some way. A man who he desperately wanted approval from but who never showed him any attention unlessit was to tell him what he was doing wrong. It didn’t take a psychologist to see why Liam was no longer fulfilled.
“Dr. Davies.” The charge nurse, Zeta, joined Liam at the end of the corridor, tablet in hand, brow furrowed in the clinical way that indicated a headlong spill of information.
He began to walk toward the trauma bays, and she matched his pace, falling in stride with him, as he cleared his throat and tried to clear his head, determined to snap out of autopilot mode.
"Room Two—meth frequent flyer with chest pain and nausea, wants more Zofran, and his discharge ride is still MIA. Four—grandma with the syncope, labs back, potassium’s low, but the pharmacy’s running slow today. You know how it is, and the social worker is saying she can’t get ahold of any family yet, which I find hard to believe.”
Liam dipped his chin in acknowledgment, already sorting priorities in his head for substance abuse disorder in two, elderly woman in four whose family tree had more branches than the ER had beds, which made it hard to believe that not one of them was picking up. "Got it.”
Zeta continued, "In six—kid with the leg laceration, good news, plastics is on their way, and the mother brought in the insurance card finally, so registration is happy. Seven—belligerent psych consult, presenting as being off his meds, security is hovering, but he’s refusing vitals so far. Nine—ninety-year-old, hero with GSW to the shoulder, stable, waiting for radiology. Ten—victim with concussion stable and waiting for discharge or admittance."
Liam remembered hearing there was a domestic incident with an ex that resulted in a shooting but thankfully, no one was seriously injured and the ex was in custody, but he hadn’t seen either patient. As the attending physician of the ER he was always kept abreast of all cases, but he’d been busy working ona level one triage patient who had just gone up for brain surgery when they came in. He hadn’t heard the person who took the bullet was ninety years old.
Zeta stopped at a T-junction in the corridor. She gave him a look that he knew too well, the one that made it clear she’d drawn the short straw to deliver the bad news. He could read the micro-tensions in her jaw and the way she gripped her tablet like a shield. She was preparing for impact. For some reason, people got nervous to tell him things despite the fact he never raised his voice, never said an unkind thing to anyone. In fact, more times than not, he didn’t sayanything. Not one word.
His face remained neutral as he waited for her to gather her nerve.
She hesitated, then nodded toward the nurses' station. "Someone's waiting for you in the break room. Woman, attractive, dark hair, light eyes, thirties. Says it's important. Won't give a name." Zeta’s gaze didn’t quite meet his. It was the sort of avoidance you reserved for your parents when they caught you sneaking in drunk.
Dark hair, light eyes, thirty. A rep, parent, maybe, coming to confront him. Or the reporter from Channel 8 who’d been circling since the last hospital shooting, hoping for a quote. More likely, a patient’s daughter or wife—grief, gratitude, or outrage, take your pick.
“Oh, and she has a baby,” Zeta added.
"Right. Thanks," he said, already moving.
Okay, the baby was a curveball. He flipped through his mental index of all the people he’d treated in the last week who had a newborn, or, more specifically, who would want to see him with a newborn as evidence.
Liam couldn’t be one hundred percent sure who the mother and child duo were. There was a chance it was a patient he’d treated who was coming back to thank him, but he’d put moneyon it being a family member. Sister and niece, to be exact. All four fit the description to a T, although one worked at the hospital and didn’t have a baby, so it couldn’t be her. The other three had children, but only one had a baby, which meant it was Phoebe.
