Hi, I'm back! Uni things have taken over a little bit in the last couple of weeks, sorry for the gap! Not too long before my long summer break now :)

Holby City Hospital, November 2017

It was awkward and embarrassing when Lily accepted a patient from Iain and Sam. Having to maintain utmost professionalism in resus and communicate effectively with them, however, was far worse. She felt so watched, as if everyone was daring her to make this situation even more difficult than it already was. But if she felt judged by everybody else, this was nothing compared to how harshly she was judging herself.

She had brought this situation upon herself. She had been exceptionally stupid to accuse there being anything between Sam and Iain without concrete proof. For someone so logically-minded, someone who only ever ruled with her head, Lily had let herself down. It was blindingly obvious now, that there was a special kind of friendship between the two paramedics; Iain had not been Lily to say that relationships built on tour were made of strong stuff. But still, even when Lily was mentally punishing herself for the foolish decision she had made, and second-guessing herself at every opportunity, there was still so much conflict in her mind. If it was just friendship, then why was she still so painfully jealous?

Nothing stayed private for long in the ED: by lunchtime, she'd heard whispers, or worse, been met by instantaneous silence on entering a space. It was grating. Lily had spent so long on the periphery of the team when she'd started out as a pushy, blinkered F2. Somehow, she had worked her way to uneasy and then mildly easy acceptance. But now, she found herself ousted to the nether social reaches, out on her own again. Letting down her frosty guard had softened her somewhat; she wished she could be blinkered once more. She could no longer blank it all out and act as though she did not care.

"Is everything okay, Lily?" Elle asked delicately, even though her answer was abundantly clear without being vocalised by the registrar at all.

Lily sat up straighter in the tall chair she had chosen by the staff room's breakfast bar. She turned too, so that her back was no longer to Dr Gardner. "Um, yes, of course," she lied. "Why?" Breezy and nonchalant had never been in her repertoire of skills.

Elle shook her head a little sadly. "No reason, it's nothing." There was something going on with Lily, but obviously she wasn't going to share it. "I've got something for you, actually."

"Oh?"

Elle headed over to her locker and opened it to retrieve an email that she had printed that morning. "Here, I was forwarded this, and it's not my thing at all, but it might be yours. When opportunity comes knocking, et cetera." She handed the sheet of paper to Lily, who seemed to brighten a little.

It was a notice for available research positions, although Lily's heart leapt into her throat when she realised that they were situated in Hong Kong. She didn't know what to say; she wasn't sure whether the temptation to escape entirely from the ED might fade if she was suddenly six thousand miles away. Rendered slightly speechless, she managed to stammer out, "wow, just… what an opportunity. Wow." Then she excused herself clumsily from the conversation, folded the printed email into perfect quarters and walked out of the room in the hope that she was projecting control rather than blind uncertainty.

Behind the locked door of a toilet cubicle, she folded, crumpled, and cried.

She felt incredibly guilty for wanting Ethan's level head and distance to talk her out of her impossible confusion. While she knew this was what she wanted, she equally couldn't shake Iain's accusation outside the pub that she had been spending far too much time with the Clinical Lead. He was inside her head now, making her feel awful for wanting her best friend, who was the only one who'd listen to this whole thing and remind her that the world would keep turning when it was over. At that moment, Lily was very grateful for having resisted talking about Iain and Sam with Ethan; his perspective on it was not skewed in anyone's favour or otherwise.

She was all set to go looking for him, when she remembered that his office was dark and had been empty all day. He had stubbornly resisted her advice to take a day off work until he'd had no choice — in the end, it had been Charlie that convinced him that he was too sick to be in work. His perfect attendance record finally marred, he wasn't here when Lily really needed him to be.

Oxford, August 2011

Theirs was an intense relationship. The yin and yang had held them together for four and a half years.

They either lived in such proximity that they were barely out of each other's earshot, or they were three and a half thousand miles apart. They spoke every day or not for six weeks. The frequency of exchanged letters was fairly constant, however. They argued fiercely or they would sit in the same square foot for hours doing everything and nothing. They turned the radio up loud or sat in silence. They didn't drink at all or they couldn't remember the night before (an arrangement from which Sam seemed to recover far faster than Dylan.) They were so close that they couldn't let go, or they were solitary. They were intensely in love or intensely out of love.

It was so painfully difficult, this decision to walk away.

Sam had thought that once she had made the decision to leave her husband, her reason for doing so would stay the same: she was leaving selfishly, having damaged herself with the hurt she brought by sleeping with somebody else. But in the five short days that she had been back on English soil, her reason had changed.

In confessing her affair, she had expected an explosion. She thought that she could accurately predict this extreme in their marriage, or what was left of it. She'd thought that there was more left of it. She had expected an explosion but had been met by silence. At first, she'd wondered if he had heard her, if he hadn't realised exactly what she'd said.

"Don't make me say it again, Dylan, please."

"No need, heard you the first time."

Then silence, a shrug, and a reach for a glass that was already half empty.

Up until the point he'd reached for the glass, she'd still clung to a hope that they could move past seeing his drinking laid bare had shown her that there was no hope. If he couldn't even look her in the eye and tell her that she'd screwed it all up, if he'd rather look into the bottom of a whiskey, then what was there left to save?

She had lasted two and a half minutes of silence, staring blankly at the six o'clock news, before retreating and curling up in bed. She couldn't even read; she couldn't concentrate on the words and hold them in her mind long enough when she knew that Dylan was downstairs drinking himself to oblivion. She stared at the wall until she succumbed to sleep.

Now she was packing a bag, she was relieved that they didn't live on a patch this time, so it would be simple for her to find somewhere to go, and for the end of their marriage to not become common knowledge by the end of the afternoon.

In the back of her wardrobe, pushed under winter clothes that she hadn't touched in years, there was a shoebox full of things that made her want to change her mind, put all her belongings back and stay. They were just little things, things that she thought that Dylan would have thrown out years ago.

Two hospital IDs, from King's. His and hers — in a moment of youthful madness she had tied them together when neither were needed anymore. They were still looped and tightly tied, intertwined exactly as they had been at the moment she had bonded these two small inanimate objects.

There was a photograph from a Christmas party. When she turned it over, Dylan's handwriting stated that it was Christmas 2007. It wasn't crisply focused, instead it was a little fuzzy, perhaps matching their minds in that moment (their past selves in the photograph clasped champagne flutes, and she didn't think they were their first.) But they were both smiling. Dylan was smiling. She tucked the photo back into the box, behind the hospital ID that wore a far more familiar expression. When was the last time she had seen Dylan smile, or exhibit any of his behaviours that were equivalent to that slightest happy twitch of his lips?

She picked out a small pot of paint, one of those testers that were usually emptied and discarded. By the looks of it, a thin crust of pain lay unevenly at the bottom of the pot. The colour was a blue so light it was nearly white. The colour that she had coerced Dylan into choosing when they had repainted parts of his flat during the summer of 2007. He'd been obstinately indecisive, and in the end, she had given him two options from a line-up that he'd seemed to think were acceptable. This had been the result, although she couldn't think why he would have kept the tester pot. It hadn't been a historic event. It hadn't even been a particularly good paint job; she recalled picking emulsion from the ends of her two plaits that evening, after washing her hair and lazily half-drying it before weaving it into two French plaits, while they watched QI over takeaway pizza.

This box tied up so many memories; Sam squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose as she felt a dull ache in her chest, trying to convince herself that leaving was for the best.

She rummaged further into the box's layers of years and moments.

Their wedding photograph.

Part of her, a large part really, wanted to go through everything in this box. She wanted to look at everything that Dylan had deemed important enough to keep and let it all convince her heart to stay.

And then she found the pregnancy test.

At the bottom of the box, she plucked out the smooth stick of plastic; the stacked photographs, letters and notes had concealed it so she was relying on her touch to identify it until she pulled it free of the box. She dropped it onto the carpet beside her as if it had given her an electric shock.

She needed to hold onto it, allow herself to cry over it once more, and keep holding it until Dylan came home to tell her it was time to put it away. But she was getting swept away in wistful fantasy; returning her mind to reality meant returning to flaring anger and bitterness.

Why the hell had he kept that? Why would he want to remember that? What was he thinking?

That was the problem though. He wasn't thinking. He was just drowning every intelligent thought with copious amounts of alcohol, and it broke Sam's heart. If he'd abandoned all of these memories in her wardrobe, where he didn't have to look at them, then obviously he didn't want them anymore and it had just been too much of an inconvenience to remember to throw them out in between disposing of so many glass bottles.

She tucked everything haphazardly back into the shoebox, replaced the lid and went on with packing her things to leave.

By the time Dylan walked in from work, her big rucksack was sitting calmly in the hall beside a small holdall. She was perched on the edge of the sofa: she hadn't found it in her to walk out without saying goodbye.

"Sam?" she heard him call.

She walked out of the living room, her boots laced and jacket half-zipped. Her insides crumbled when she saw the expression on his face: confusion, hurt, realisation, guilt? Maybe the guilt was wishful thinking. Maybe it was anger instead. She stopped trying to read him; it wasn't helping.

"What's going on?" he asked, standing in the place where he had frozen on noticing her bags. They were three feet apart, but it might as well have been three miles. This at least told Sam that she was doing the right thing: feeling alone when she was in the same room as her husband was not how things were supposed to be. "This doesn't have to happen, we can talk about this. We can fix it."

"Dylan, stop," she pleaded. She clasped her hands together in front of her mouth, and saw his face fall further before she remembered that she had pulled off her engagement and wedding rings and slipped them onto the chain around her neck. They were still with her, she wasn't ready to let go yet, but she wasn't about to allow Dylan to think this too. "You never listen, least of all when I want — when I need — to talk about us. But please, please hear me now. I've spent months on the front line, and still, leaving you is, without doubt, the hardest thing—"

"Leaving? You're not - you're not leaving, are you?"

Sam could smell something familiar on his breath that instantly boiled her blood. "Leaving?! You're lucky I'm not reporting you to the GMC."