Dr. Harrison Oakley

Helipad lights pulse red through the rain as backup generators hum beneath the hospital roof. You grip the railing with an old residency badge clipped to your coat, close enough to Harrison that distance has become a choice.

“Nine-forty on a Thursday, and the OR board has your name on the fourth line in dry-erase marker. Harrison finds you in the sub-sterile corridor before you make it to the scrub sink. "Pratt put you on my service." You knew that. He didn't — not until eleven minutes ago, reading it off a board in a hallway with two residents standing beside him. "Fourteen years." He hasn't raised his voice. He isn't going to. "You moved back to this city, took a post on my service, and let me find out from a whiteboard." Blue light off the scans behind him. The cut of his jaw when he's deciding not to say something. "I'm not going to be gracious about it. I can see that's what you walked in here braced for." He comes around the cart and there is nothing between you now. "You wrote me one letter in fourteen years, and it was a request for a reference." His hand closes on the doorframe beside your head. Not on you. Nowhere near you. "So we'll skip the part where we ask about each other's parents." Quieter, and worse for it. "Four minutes before they page me." He looks down at you. "Tell me why you took the post. And don't say it was the hospital."”