Friday the 13th had a reputation in the ED, and not a good one.
I wasn’t superstitious about most things—broken mirrors, black cats—but this date? It earned my respect. The staff joked about it, but I’d worked enough of them to know they were no joke.
Patients would flood in like clockwork—car crashes, bizarre injuries, and people convinced they were cursed.
Like the guy who’d impaled his thigh on the brittle base of his Christmas tree—the one his wife had been nagging him to put away since January. The wound oozed pine-scented pulp, and it took an hour to dig the splinters out.
Or the woman who got backed over by her own car after hopping out to check her taillights. Somehow, she walked away with a busted foot and a ruined coat.
But ‘thirteen guy’? He took the crown. Thirteenth child, born on a Friday the 13th, married a woman who died on the same date. He came in swearing it was his time. An hour later, he dropped dead in the hallway, like the universe had signed off on the story.
The day came with cases that kept your hands moving before your brain had time to catch up. My shift had been running on black coffee and muscle memory since dawn, and we weren’t even halfway through it. Sometimes, that was the only thing standing between life and death, so our coffee pots ran twenty-four hours a day. The muscle memory only came after years of practice.
It had been a brutal winter in the city, and though the calendar promised spring, no one believed it. The bitter cold still clung to the air alongside snowflakes. I expected plenty of interesting winter Friday the 13th injuries. The snow made physics flexible.
Maybe I need another trip to the tropics.
The thought brought a warmth with it that reminded me of squawking seabirds, sandy shores, a parade to end all parades, and a certain poet chef I’d tucked in the back of my mind. It had been eight months since I’d taken that vacation.
Since I’d met Ella.
I didn’t think about her all the time anymore, but she was never entirely gone, either. She lingered, a memory with sharp edges. The nights I let my guard down, she crept in—her laughter, the way she’d arched against me in the moonlight, the feeling of her fingers tracing patterns over my skin.
Her softness.
I’d caught myself wondering, more than once, if fate would put us back on that island at the same time. Maybe she had gone back. Maybe she was thinking about me, too.
It was a comforting thought, but one tainted by the memory of the morning after. I wondered whether she regretted leaving me like that, or if that was just standard operating procedure for her. Hookup, get out. It was just a vacation fling, after all.
If it was meant to be, we’d see each other again. That’s what I told myself on especially lonely nights. It was easy to feel lonely in winter when the chill settled into your bed to remind you that you were alone. As if I needed a reminder.
While watching the snowstorm through the window, I got paged. Preterm labor. Twins. Mother in distress.
On any given day, I dealt with all kinds of cases. Grandmother fell down the stairs. A dad with a gunshot wound. Cute kid with a broken arm. Each patient had their sob story, and you try to be as professional, yet empathetic as possible. It’s impossible to turn your humanity off entirely, though.
Preterm labor with a mother in distress was one of those scenarios that, no matter how many times I faced it, I never got numb to it.
Even still, I responded automatically and tried to slip into that controlled headspace where emotion had no place. But I couldn’t quite get there. “Going Vulcan,” my daughter Gina called it. My kids gave me a hard time for having that ability, but I never regretted being able to get to that dull headspace. It had saved my mental health more times than I probably knew.
The jog to the ED bay doors was quick—just down the hall. The paramedics rattled off stats as they wheeled her in through the doors. Blood pressure dropping. Tachycardic. Four or five weeks early.
I moved in to assess the patient. And then—
Everything inside me seized.
The hallway shrank, my pulse roaring in my ears.
Ella.
The fragile woman on that gurney wasn’t the one who’d teased me over cocktails and kissed me like she’d owned every inch of me. The Ella I remembered had been all heat and hunger, taking everything I gave her—and demanding more.
This Ella was pale. Wrung out. A fighter hanging by a thread.
And pregnant.
With twins.
She lay on the stretcher, pale and soaked in sweat, her brown hair a tangled mess against the pillow. Her breathing was labored, her hands gripping the blanket as she fought through another contraction.
Vulnerable.
In pain.
Alone?
My voice shook as I asked, “Anyone with the patient?”
“She came from work.”
I blinked, trying to clear her face from the patient’s. But it was still her. There was no mistaking her for someone else. This was Ella, and she’d been at work when preterm hit her, which meant she had been on her feet in a restaurant kitchen until now.
Fuck. No wonder she was in preterm labor.
My mind struggled to catch up with my body. It felt like I was watching a movie where the next scene didn’t make sense.
Ella, here. Pregnant. With twins.
She was supposed to be a memory. A what if. A woman I’d let slip away because I’d believed that if it mattered, life would bring her back to me.
And now she was here. Not on a beach. Not sipping a Halekulani and laughing at my jokes. But on a goddamn gurney, in my ED, fighting to live and to bring two lives into the world.
“Dr. Mortoli?” One of the nurses shot me a questioning look. I realized I had frozen—just for a second, but long enough that someone noticed. Not good.
I cleared my throat, forcing the roaring confusion inside me to settle. “She’s in active labor,” I said, my voice steady. “We need to get her to Delivery now.”
Ella’s hazel green eyes fluttered open just for a moment. She gasped, “Dom?”
I gritted my teeth against the ache in my chest. She recognized me. Even through the haze of pain, she knew me. “I’m here,” I told her, gripping the railing of the stretcher. “I’ve got you, Ella. I’m going to take care of everything.”
Her eyes closed again as her blood pressure dropped.
We moved fast. If anyone else had been on the floor to help her, I would have pulled myself from the case. I was too close to the patient. Not close. Not exactly. But I was too confused by the patient. Unfortunately, the only other person who could have taken point was Bowan, and I wasn’t about to let him touch her.
He was a good doctor. I was better. She needed that.
I focused on the medicine, on the job, because that was what I was supposed to do. It was the only thing that could save her. There was a part of me—something deeper, more instinctive—that rebelled against every rule I had sworn to follow.
This was my case, and no matter what else was true, I wasn’t letting anyone else run it.
The twins came fast, tiny but vibrantly alive, their cries thin and determined.
Two girls.
When they screamed in unison, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I wasn’t the only one.
The rest of the staff felt the same way I did about laboring mothers in distress. The NICU team swept in, their movements coordinated as they took the babies to the NICU for further observation and oxygen. Standard procedure.
But there was nothing standard about this case. Not for me, not by a long shot. Ella didn’t stir. Her vitals had stabilized, but she was completely unconscious.
I stood there glued to the spot, staring at her, my hands flexing and curling into fists at my sides. The exhaustion on her face, the way her body had fought so hard—it hit me in a way I wasn’t ready for.
I am supposed to leave now. I wasn’t needed here anymore. But I couldn’t make my feet move.
“Dr. Mortoli?”
I forced myself to turn, and it took all the strength I had left.
The OB on-call was watching me carefully. “The patient will be out for a while. She lost a lot of blood, but she’s stable.”
I nodded like that was news to me. “Right.”
He stared at me for another moment, but before he could ask why I was still around, I left.
But I didn’t go far. After getting cleaned up, I clocked out for lunch and lingered in the hallway, pretending to check my phone, pretending I had something else to do. She was here.
Ella is here.
Alone.
That was the part of it that confused the hell out of me, even more than her presence itself. If someone like Ella was going to give birth to my kids, it would have taken an army to pry me from her side. And letting her go to work at eight months pregnant, doing what she did? Over my dead fucking body.
Whatever asshole knocked her up is going to answer for not being here, and he better pray he is not that ex-boyfriend of hers. Unprofessional or not, if he shows up here, I’m kicking his ass on principle.
None of this sat right with me. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how. But I wasn’t going anywhere.
