Mark watched from the next room when Susan took Harvey to the patient's bedside. He was a rugged-looking guy. Tough as nails, you'd assume, but he took her hand with tears in his eyes and Susan fled the room.
She checked the lounge was empty – she couldn't bare another confrontation. Not tonight. A combination of exhaustion and the heartbreaking scene she'd just witnessed had tears in her eyes. The headache didn't help. She swallowed 2 glasses of water, finding some vicoden on her way, then lay down on a couch. She checked her watch, "2 hours to go." She let her eyes fall shut.
Susan woke up exhausted. She'd had three days off and at the end of them, with a standard twelve-hour shift looming ahead, she was still exhausted. Sitting up she whacked her head neatly on the headboard and mumbling profanities fell back into the pillows.
Half an hour later she got up with the gut feeling she was going to be late, or she'd read the timetable wrong, or she'd turned her pager off and shouldn't have… something was wrong.
She stumbled into a remarkably tame ER an hour later.
"Nice weekend?" Kerry held the lounge door open as she was leaving.
"Ah… Yeah, thanks." Susan went inside. Even Kerry was being nice. Something was definitely up. But within half an hour the rumours of Kerry and Sandy Lopez had reached her and explained away that theory.
Mark was still a million miles away. He was there – in curtain three as a matter of fact, stitching up the unfortunate victim of a pane glass door. But he treated her like a stranger. In a way she was glad for it. He'd been a right bastard and until he figured that out she'd rather not talk to him. But a voice kept nagging in her head – that she hadn't come back for this.
Mark was having a crap time all of his own. Rachel was supposed to come for the weekend but Jenn had grounded her and a couple of arguments-via-phone later he'd given in. it wasn't so bad because Rachel would stay longer next time but as usual he'd given in and rather than feeling like he'd done Jenn a favour, he felt guilty.
Then Susan came in to work and he got another helping of that guilt. So, irrational as it was he was mad at her for making him feel worse.
He only had a few hours to go when she came in – covering half of someone else's shift – but even only a few hours into it she looked exhausted. He watched her from the other end of admits. She'd been bent over a chart and stretched when she stood upright, arching her back then stretching her neck.
"You okay?" Carter asked, stopping what he was doing on the computer beside her.
"Oh, yeah. Just a headache. Must have slept funny."
Mark looked back down at the chart he was holding without the first clue what the chart was about. A headache? People got headaches all the time but he couldn't kick the gut-wrenching fear the took him.