Priya, passing through with laundry, glanced at the screen. "You're researching him."
"I'm reading my own paperwork."
"You're researching the man who flirted with your dog's medical chart."
Claire closed the laptop. "He didn't flirt with the chart."
"He flirted adjacent to the chart. That's worse. That's literature."
"Priya."
"I'm just saying." Priya hugged the laundry basket. "You haven't looked at a person like that since Ethan ghosted your anniversary dinner and then sent a playlist called 'space.'"
"Please never say that playlist name again."
"Space," Priya whispered, evil, and retreated.
Claire took Nash out for a slow sidewalk walk in the afternoon damp. The city smelled rinsed. Nash investigated every leaf as if it might contain philosophy. Claire practiced the phrases she would need if Isaiah Voss ever appeared in her life again, which he would not, because emergency clinics were not dating apps and cereal was not destiny.
Still, when a tall man in dark clothes turned the corner two blocks ahead, her pulse did something unhelpful. It was not him. Of course it was not him. She laughed at herself under her breath, and Nash looked up as if to ask whether the laugh was a training cue.
"We're fine," Claire told him. "Completely fine. Very dangerous cereal, resolved."
Nash sneezed, which Claire decided to interpret as agreement.
On the other side of the glass-paned door, Isaiah Voss washed his hands for the fourth time in an hour and tried not to smile at a discharge note.
The overnight board at Harbor Night was a living organism: red flags, yellow waits, a cat with urinary blockage in bay two, a dachshund with a suspected foreign body whose owner kept asking whether the surgery would make the dog "less himself." Isaiah liked the work the way some people liked cold water—because it woke him up into a version of himself that could hold hard things without dropping them. He did not like the politics layered over the work: who got the easy admits, who got the grief cases back-to-back, who Gwen called "reliable" when she meant "will not complain when you load the chart."
Gwen, lead overnight tech, tapped a stylus against the tablet. "You spent a long time on the cereal puppy."
"I spent an appropriate time on a first-time owner with acute distress and an eight-week-old," Isaiah said, drying his hands. "Differential doesn't care how funny the cause is until you've ruled out the unfunny ones."
Gwen's mouth twitched. "Uh-huh. Your face did a thing."
"My face does many things. It's attached to my head."
"Your head is attached to flirtation," Gwen said, not unkindly. "Keep it professional, Voss. Admin's been sniffing at 'client experience' language again, which is corporate for don't get interesting."