Sam's flat had never been cleaner, and she hated it. Yes, the scent of Lemon Zing Zoflora was pleasant enough in the bathroom, and her skirting boards certainly looked better after a thorough hoovering, but it was their reason for being that took another little piece of her heart every time she considered it. As if there hadn't been enough torn away already.

It had taken long enough to overcome the virus, once she'd succumbed to it in Dylan's absence. Four straight days of crippling fatigue mingled with the same blinding headache she'd seen Dylan struggle to manage had scared her silly, but her cough never moved beyond a mild annoyance and faded to insignificance on the sixth day after Dylan's admission. On the fifth day she had been pain-free and 'only' dogged by tiredness, something she forced herself to work through because the tiredness didn't extend to halting frankly alarming thoughts rushing through her mind with the horsepower of a ferrari but only the brakes of a tricycle. So frenetic cleaning became her only coping strategy while she awaited not only her recovery but the expiration of her required self-isolation.

It was impossible to escape the news: it invaded every moment. Mounting deaths, staggering numbers in intensive care, a National Health Service on its knees moving ever closer to the brink of total collapse. She couldn't escape her own mind's interpretation either, imagining Dylan, sick as he'd been when she saw him last, alone and maybe frightened on a COVID ward unrecogniseable from the hospital they both knew so well. The news showed other stories too, of course, of families reunited by video calls between hospital and home. These only made her heart ache harder: Dylan's phone was an ancient artefact, a flip phone preserved out of stubbornness and undeniably incapable of video-calling. Regardless of its incompetence, it was still in the flat with Sam, so entirely moot in any thoughts of communication.

She missed him more than she'd thought possible – she wasn't entirely sure when he'd started taking up so much space in her field of vision that her flat ceased to feel like home now that he was no longer in it. There was only so much cleaning she could do that would distract her from the fear of every little noise her phone made, in case the tiny beep of a message morphed into an all-out ring for a call she didn't even want to imagine.

Yes, he was in his forties, which in the eyes of the COVID-deniers would place Dylan firmly in the position of being unable to catch the virus in the first place, but the little details drove her crazy. Forty-two was not an impossible age to be overcome by coronavirus. Dylan might have been a healthy weight but this was less to do with lifestyle choice than the lifestyle imposed by ED rotas. Adrenaline burned off most of the calories he took in, and it was a good job too, because he staunchly refused her suggestions of subtle changes to his diet. Sam could lose her sanity with the what-ifs, but did any of them even matter? There seemed little rhyme or reason to COVID sometimes: patients pushing one hundred sometimes pulled through with ease while thirty-somethings ended up ventilated and on every possible life support, to no avail. It was a hideous lottery that nobody wanted to play.

It was a shock one evening, when Dylan's phone rang. Sam was tired after a day punctuated by calls from the ward sister looking after Dylan, then Jan checking she was okay, and a disbelieving Dylan standing on the opposite side of the main landing outside the flat, determined to judge her wellbeing with his own two eyes. Considering she had accidentally reached the point of not having brushed her hair in two days, she doubted very much that she had passed his assessment.

But the fact remained: Dylan's phone was ringing and the caller ID made Sam wince. It dawned on her all at once that it had been extremely stupid to keep the stress of Dylan's illness to herself, when this caller especially would have supported her from day one, not to mention she deserved to know much earlier that all was not well.

Her stomach clenching, she answered the call. "Zoe –"

"Dylan, you're a pain, have you not seen how many messages I've sent, trying to get hold of you?"

Sam didn't know what to say. It felt strange, hearing the tone Zoe reserved for Dylan. There was something in it that in her tired fog, Sam couldn't place.

"Wait – have I got the wrong number? Who am I speaking to?"

"It's – it's me, Zoe – I mean – Sam, Sam Nicholls."

"Sam?!"

She wasn't sure whether or not to be offended by Zoe's utter disbelief – true, it had been a long time since they had drifted apart and unintentionally lost contact, but Zoe had been fully aware of how things ended with Tom. It wasn't inconceivable for Sam to have returned to Holby… Was it?

"Why have you got Dylan's phone?"

Sam could practically hear the raised eyebrow, and it inserted a deep sense of guilt where it hadn't been present before. "I know it's been a long time since we talked, and it's not exactly the prime time for medics to reconnect..." There was a moment's silence: Sam's truth was indesputable. "He moved into my flat as the lockdown happened – we knew it was coming, I think." Whether she meant they had seen the lockdown coming or their more concrete reunion as a couple, not even Sam herself was sure.

"He never said anything," Zoe said quietly.

"It's not as if he has to ask your permission!" Sam retorted, not thinking before she spoke.

Zoe bristled in irritation. "Why have you got his phone?" she repeated.

"Because..." She had never had to break this news to anyone – everyone of important, few and far between as they might be, on this side of the Atlantic, knew automatically by virtue of Dylan being admitted. "He's in hospital… with COVID."

"No, Sam, no, no!"

"I'm sorry. He caught it at work, I mean, neither of us were going anywhere else. I tried to look after him but it all happened so quickly and he was so, so unwell. I wanted to let you know," she lied, not wanting to admit that her thoughts had been nowhere near that. "But this week has been so hard, I –"

"He's been in for a week?!" Frustration made way for anger. It might have been horrendously misplaced, the result of long shifts in a hospital beyond capacity then coming hom to trying not to introduce the virus to Nick's compromised immune system, but in that moment the misplacement didn't even cross Zoe's mind.

Sam pinched the bridge of her nose. A headache threatened, fuelled by emotional exhaustion. "Just over," she admitted. "He's doing as well as can be expected; I don't think he will get worse now, but worse isn't worth thinking about." It wasn't a conscious choice not to talk to Zoe's anger, Sam just didn't have the energy.

"Well that's something at least," Zoe said sardonically. "We haven't spoken in more than two years, Sam, and all of a sudden you expect me to drop everything to play the sympathetic best friend?"

Sam could hear some muffled disagreement in the background. "No, that's not – I – that's hardly fair!"

"Isn't it?" Zoe countered, waving her hand to dismiss Nick's concern with how this call was going.

"I thought you would want to know," Sam replied quietly.

"Of course I want to know! He's in hospital with a virus that we both know can be unpredictable at the very best of times! But I shouldn't be an afterthought, ten days after the fact!" She didn't know how to make Sam understand. And then it was tumbling from her mouth, words dipped in malice that had no place in a conversation between two women who had once been so close. "For a long time, we were all we had, Sam. The two of us and that boat, and that was it."

Sam was silent.

"Unofficially, we were each other's next of kin. Did he ever tell you that?"

It felt like a slap in the face. Sam couldn't stop her gut reaction: a split-second decision to terminate the call.

Ears ringing, she sat for a moment staring straight ahead. She was so stunned that for several seconds, movement and sensation were beyond her. They returned gradually like an encroaching tide. The lump in her throat was irrepressible and seemed only to swell as seconds ticked by, threatening to envelop her entire being with the pure agony of being so deeply let down.

Because she wasn't angry about the new information she'd learned about Dylan and Zoe. Her cheeks were soaked by torrents of furious tears, and heartbroken ones, over Zoe's acid response. It hadn't been an easy decision to take the call in the first place, but she had done so in expectation that there would be at least a modicum of support from across the Atlantic. Everyone was under pressure in the medical field, but she'd be damned before she accepted she'd deserved those poison darts down the phone.

She switched Dylan's phone off at that point, though it left her feeling more alone than ever. She held it in her hands, wishing more than anything that she had more of him than the t-shirt she slept in and a phone that couldn't reach him.

It was one of those infuriating nights that unfortunately Sam knew intimately well, though they had become few and far between since returning to Holby again. She was exhausted, every reserve spent by COVID-fatigue, distraction cleaning or pure worry. Despite this, as she lay in bed with eyes closed, begging for the relief of sleep, her mind continued to race.

It came as something of a relief, then, in the early hours when her phone let out its message tone, screen illuminating the dim corner of the bedroom furthest from the bed. At first, the noise made her jump, and Sam couldn't help the momentary panic that accompanied leaping to the conclusion of a terrible turn of events on the COVID ward. But wasn't a call, or even a text. It was an email.

On reading the first few lines, Sam hated herself for having assumed she was due another telling off for leaving Zoe out of the loop.

FROM: Nick Jordan

SUBJECT:

Dear Sam,

You haven't made it easy to get hold of you, have you?! I'm getting too old for all this detective work.

Despite herself, Sam snorted with amusement and rolled her eyes. Too old? Rubbish, Nick Jordan would do anything for a mystery. Nevertheless, she was touched that he'd gone to the effort.

I happened to overhear one side of your conversation with Zoe and I need to make sure you are alright. She was out of order, you didn't deserve any of that – although officially I am not to take sides and that's the last comment I'll make on the subject…

You don't deserve either to have to handle all this on your own. I'm not working at the moment so you can call me any time, if you need a listening ear. Please do get in touch; obviously it would be better under different circumstances but it would be lovely to hear from you after all this time.

Yours,

Nick

P.S. It ought to go without saying, but I wish Dylan all the best. Please pass this on if you get the chance to speak to him.

Before she had chance to think, much less grant herself permission, great, hot tears rolled down Sam's cheeks. It was hard-wired into her not to trust others (and so often she was proved right) but this most emphatically did not apply to Nick Jordan, and never would. How could it?

She copied the number he'd left into her contacts list and after only a moment's pause to think and scrub her sleeve under her eyes, she clicked 'call'.

"Sam, is that you?"

There was so much concern and compassion in his voice that yet another lump rose in her throat. This time, however, she found the strength and the impatience to push it away. "I'm so, so glad that you got in touch," she said, not bothering to build her usual walls. Now, more than ever, it was clear that life was too short.

"Stupid question, I suppose, but are you okay?"

Sam buried one hand in her tangled hair. Her knuckles were sore, the skin dried and damaged by all the cleaning products she'd used lately without bothering to put on a pair of gloves. Was she okay?

"Sam?" Nick pressed.

She sighed. "Oh, I don't know, Nick!" The expulsion of energy drained her further. "I wish," she said slowly, "that I had the energy or the inclination for the social nicety of insisting everything is fine." That would certainly be easier than summarising the last week of COVID and emotion-based agony.

"It's not like you to have the propensity to even try"

"It's not like me to cry every five minutes over the man I love being in hospital, either, but here we are!" A moment later, she realised what she'd said and she felt her insides seize with embarrassment. It felt very strange to say it aloud, especially to someone who wasn't Dylan (and even then, it wasn't as if the word surfaced regularly.)

"Well..." Nick said, and Sam could have sworn blind that she could hear him smiling. "I knew it."

"What?" This wasn't the direction she'd imagined the conversation taking at all. "You knew – how? When?"

"About five minutes after I first watched you working with him in my ED," he remarked calmly.

Sam's cheeks turned red, the most colour she'd had in days. "Oh." She pressed her fingertips to her lips and looked up at the ceiling. The empty space in bed beside her seemed to resonate its profoundness all of a sudden.

"So, how is he?"

Of course she had expected the question, but knowing how to answer it when she knew she wouldn't get her head bitten off was another matter entirely. "Um… He's been in for ten days, I think, and as far as I know he isn't getting worse, but –" She stopped, her mind flooding with how ill he had been the last time she laid eyes on him.

Sensing her deep discomfort, Nick gently inserted himself between her thoughts. "No buts. If to your knowledge he's stable, then that is what you concentrate on," he said, firm and kind.

"Thank you, Nick. I really appreciate it."

"You call back, any time you need to, okay? I meant it in my email. Any time, Sam."

"Thank you," she repeated, more quietly.

"Do yourself a favour, Sam. Try and get some sleep now, alright? I'm not sure physical exhaustion is going to sit too well with COVID-fatigue, not if you're trying to get well enough to go back to work."

Sam rolled her eyes, though she smiled too. Even after all this time, he knew her well. Some things just never changed. Catching up could wait: it was certainly too late in the day (or should that be early?) to try and explain how and why her uniform was now green instead of blue...