He should've known better than to try to lie to his mother. That's just the sort of thing you can never really get away, no matter how well you think you've done, but she was his mother and she knew. Micah had always been observant-perhaps it came as a result of his introverted nature- he'd always been the quiet one in the corner. On the first day of kindergarten. Every party of his college career. Family dinners every holiday. It allowed him room to watch and to notice and to stay away from the prying eyes of the rumor mill, so of course he'd noticed that Emily Owens was cute. However, these observations fell to the wayside when he realized that above and beyond cute, she was different, and that was what made him watch. Observing her actions as a doctor and an intern made it easier to push to the side the smaller details like the little curl that always dangled in front of her face or her subtle grace and poise in tough situations or even the way that when she smiled, she would light up the room until he could feel a matching smile slowly working its way onto his own face.
The first time the great and revered Dr. Bandari asked her for a diagnosis, fully expecting to catch the rookie intern off her guard, the wispy blonde smiled at the twelve year old girl lying in a hospital bed and explained to her patient, not her attending physician, what was wrong. From then on, he kept his eyes trained on her just to see what she would do. She wasn't like the other interns that walked the halls with her. She wasn't like any of the interns Micah had ever seen, really.
There was no doubt in his mind that she was an intelligent and competent doctor. There were moments he saw the scared girl underneath, and he wondered when she would wake up to the fact that she's good at what she does and the rest doesn't matter. He didn't want to seem judgmental or condescending when he pulled her out of the stairwell, but he needed her to pick up and move on- not just because he was her resident but because he needed someone else there to care not for the prestige or privilege of being a surgeon but the patients. That's what he saw in her that he didn't see in any of the others. That's what made her different- the selflessness and the compassion that left her holding back tears at the nurse's station when she lost her first patient.
Micah wasn't sure he'd known the kind of frustration he'd felt at bearing witness to seeing anyone and everyone take advantage of that fact: Will and his apparent tendency to take and take in his relationship with Emily with such hesitancy to give, Tyra using her as nurses' bait, and Cassandra using every opportunity to assert herself as a superior physician. He wondered at her ability not to become hard, but he supposed that's how some people function. Instead of building up walls, she would break down and then proceed to put herself together again. She put herself together by seeing others put back together- like his mother, sitting in her chair receiving chemo treatments, smiling up at the girl who seemed more like an angel with a crossword puzzle between them. Of course he'd noticed that she was cute. And gentle. And kind. And a list of other things that left him a little confused and full of wonder at who she thought she was to make his world spin that much faster.