Sarah had passed through the ED very quickly that night to find it was in chaos. Will had three teenage overdose patients, and very little information to go on. She was genuinely glad she wasn't directly involved in that one. Instead, she was paged to a consult in the ICU with Dr Charles. The patient was okay, they were confident of that much - it turns out two out of three patients up here develop this sort of delirium. You really couldn't blame them, considering where they were and what it meant.

They made

"So I spoke to my mom today. Told I was a psych resident."

"What, just now you're telling her?"

"Well, yeah. I knew how she'd react. And I was right - she laughed. Said I was the last person she could ever imagine becoming a psychiatrist."

"Wow. Whole load of confidence there."

Sarah made a non-commital noise of agreement. She was used to her mom, after all. This was just a fact of life.

"Do I ever get to meet your mom, by the way?"

He'd asked her very conversationally, but she still shot him a look. He knew what her mother was like. It had come up in conversation on more than one occasion.

"Well, she never bothered to meet Connor and I dated him for more than a year. I highly doubt she'd be interested in coming to meet my work family."

"Ah, well," Dr Charles shrugged. "Can't help bad taste."

Sarah laughed. This is why she had such a great relationship with her mentor. They had very similar senses of humour.

Dr Charles was very surprised to hear her tell him that she'd volunteered for an overnight shift. She was projecting a false sense of confidence, after all. It was her very first overnight as on-call resident on her own. She was hoping for the best, but her hopes were very quickly dashed. She'd just been paged to declare a patient dead. And she'd never done that before.

Thankfully, the nurse in charge was able to walk her through it. But that didn't make it any easier.

And then it happened again. And again.

Three. She'd had to pronounce three patients dead, one after the other. It was the worst part of practicing medicine over, and over, and over again.

By the time the morning rolled around, all she wanted to do was go home and cry. Sleep was an afterthought, but that was on her list of priorities too.

Of course, this was not what the universe had planned. She was standing at her locker and trying not to cry. And that was when Connor entered the doctor's lounge.

"... Sarah?"

She looked up with tears in her eyes and stubbornly found herself wiping them away. "Hey. I heard you operated on a panda."

Connor knew she was deflecting, but he went with it. "Yeah. Definitely not what I thought I'd be doing tonight."

"I don't think anyone plans on that. Anyone who's not a veternarian, anyway."

They laughed, but she was suddenly blinking back tears again.

"Are you ever going to tell me what's been going on?" he asked her gently, approaching her slowly now.

She looked him in the eye and finally cracked. "Please don't hate me."

"Hate you? Why would I hate you?"

"Because I should've told you, long before now, and I didn't." Classic Reese - she was rambling. "Even though I knew you deserved to know, and I would want to know if I were in your shoes. But I still didn't tell you because I didn't want to deal with it. Frankly, I'd rather I didn't know but I don't have that luxury because it happened in my body, not yours."

"Whoa, Sarah," he said, grabbing her hands and forcing her to look at him again. "What are you talking about?"

She tried to stop herself, to pause and find a way to delicately tell him, but the words just tumbled out of her mouth.

"I had a miscarriage."

He dropped her hands and froze.

After a long moment, he managed to say very, very quietly, "You what?"

"I -"

"- When?"

She should've known. She should've been able to anticipate that that would be his very first question, because he was a very practical person and-

"When, Sarah?!"

Okay. He was mad. And this was not going to help things.

"About a month after we broke up."

His hands were rubbing his face now, so she figured she may as well tell him all of it. It's not like it would soften the blow if she left it for later.

"About six weeks along."

"Six ..."

She could see him mentally doing the math, so she filled in that blank for him. "Yes. The last time we had sex." When she felt an unexplainable rage starting to boil up in her blood, she found herself adding with venom, "That was almost a very permanent ending to us. So at least you got out of that one."

They were both on their feet now, their voices starting to get louder and louder.

"And what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"You've made it very clear that you wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. I'd think you'd be counting yourself lucky that you didn't have an accidental permanent attatchment."

The door cracked open, and Noah briefly appeared, but just as quickly the door was closed and he made himself scarce. At least he had the sense not to walk into the middle of their inevitable argument.

"Accidental permanent ... Sarah, we lost a baby!"

"No Connor, I lost a baby. You were nowhere to be found!"

"Because you didn't call me! I would've been there in a second!"

It was all she could do to hold back tears, but she was yelling now anyway. "Oh yeah? And how was I supposed to know you would've come if I'd asked someone to call you? Would that be the complete and total silence, or the fact that you stopped responding to 'hello' in the mornings?!"

"You had made it very clear that you wanted nothing to do with me!"

"BECAUSE THAT WAS THE MESSAGE I HAD GOT FROM YOU!"

Her sudden outburst seemed to pull them both back into reality. They were in the hospital. At work. And suddenly very aware that their colleagues out on the other side of the glass doors could both hear and see absolutely everything that was going on in here.

"Look," she said in as even a speaking tone as she could manage, "I know I'm not completely blameless in this either. We were supposed to be cordial and professional, and instead we avoided each other like the plague any time we unnecessarily crossed paths. We both screwed this up, Connor."

"But?" He knew there was more to it.

She squared her shoulders and stood her ground. She wasn't entirely blameless, but she wasn't entirely wrong either. "You could've come to me. If you wanted to talk as badly as you seemed to, you could've forced my hand."

He shook his head. "No. No, I couldn't have."

"Yes you damn well could've. Your messengers all let me know how badly you wanted to speak. But all you had to do was man up walk into the psych ward to see me in person. You didn't."

"I -"

"- No," she stopped him dead in his tracks. "We were planning a life together, and you wouldn't cross the threshold of those doors."

She walked toward the door now, opening it and not caring that their colleagues could hear what she was about to say.

"What does that say about our relationship, Connor?"

It was like a slap in the face. She wasn't wrong, and he knew it.

He watched her walk out of the ED entirely before he even dared move a single step. There was no point going after her. There was nothing he could say.

When he did finally emerge from the lounge, Maggie was ushering the staff back to their regularly scheduled jobs. It appeared the entire department had stopped to see the show.

"Thanks, Maggie," he said quielty. He'd meant to breeze past her and be literally anywhere but here, but her hand gripping his arm stopped him.

"Oh, that wasn't for you. It was for Sarah."

"Maggie -"

"- No, you listen here Connor Rhodes."

He'd never seen her so fired-up and protective. It was honestly quite intimidating.

"She's right. You weren't here the day it happened, and you wouldn't have come even if she had called."

"I would've come if I'd been paged."

"That's out of obligation. You wouldn't have come because you wanted to be here."

He closed his eyes and sighed - it was a silent admission of defeat. Because she wasn't wrong. Even if they had paged him and he'd come down, it would've been for all the wrong reasons.

"The point is, Connor, you weren't there. I was the one holding her hand, watching it happen and knowing there was nothing anyone could do to stop it."

Hearing that broke his heart in two.

A/N: So, he knows. The entire ED now knows. He's going to have to deal with this, and it's not going to be easy. But they'll make their peace eventually ... Right?