Chapter 29: The Gossip Mill
The coffee was bitter and cooling in the ceramic mug. A five-minute window between Trauma’s relentless tide and the scheduled board meeting. Y/n’s eyes were on a 3D cardiac rotation on her main monitor, but her focus was split. The ghost of wild mushrooms and a specific, quiet laughter lingered in the back of her throat.
The scrape of chairs broke the hum. She didn’t need to look up.
Foreman and Chase slid into the two seats opposite her desk, a coordinated move that reeked of strategy. Foreman’s expression was his usual practiced neutrality, but his eyes were sharp. Chase looked like a kid who’d found a locked box and was determined to rattle it.
“You planning to steal one of my patients, or is this a social call?” Y/n asked, finally dragging her gaze from the screen.
“Social,” Chase said, a little too quickly.
Foreman cut to it. He always did. “You and Cameron. Are you a thing now?”
Y/n took a slow sip of coffee. The liquid was lukewarm. “No.”
“She’s been smiling,” Chase offered, as if presenting a damning piece of evidence. “All morning. At charts. At a negligent med student she usually eviscerates. It’s… unusual.”
“You’re monitoring the facial expressions of your colleague. Should I be concerned about your workload, Dr. Chase?” Y/n set the mug down with a soft click. “Do the two of you have relationships? Functional ones? If not, you’d have no framework for comparison. Or understanding.”
Foreman leaned forward, ignoring the jab. “House has a bet going. He says you’ll screw it up. That you’re constitutionally incapable of not overthinking a good thing into dust.”
A cold spike drove itself between Y/n’s ribs. It wasn’t anger, not exactly. It was the fatigue of being a specimen under her brother’s microscope, a predictable set of reactions in a petri dish. The bet was real. Of course it was.
She stood up, her height making the space over the desk suddenly feel compressed. The motion was smooth, deliberate. She gathered a scattered pile of neural imaging scans.
“I don’t care what Gregory thinks,” she said, her voice flat and final. “About this, or about anything that isn’t living on an MRI. Excuse me.”
She walked out, leaving the door open behind her. The click of her heels on the linoleum was precise, retreating.
Foreman and Chase stared at the empty space.
“Well,” Chase said, blowing out a breath. “That was definitive.”
“Was it?” Foreman frowned, watching the empty doorway. “She didn’t deny anything about the date. She didn’t deny Cameron’s smiling. She just got pissed about House’s bet.”
“So?”
“So she’s not annoyed we’re asking. She’s annoyed he’s right. And that means there’s something to be right about.” Foreman stood, shaking his head. “It’s always more complicated with them. It’s in the goddamn DNA.”
The board meeting was a symphony of bureaucratic drone. Y/n contributed three sentences, each a model of clinical efficiency, and spent the rest of the time mentally revising a surgical approach for a complex aortic dissection in OR three later that afternoon.
Cameron was there, two seats down on the opposite side of the long table. Y/n caught the smile Chase had mentioned, soft and private, directed at the absurdity of the administrator presenting new parking permit guidelines. It was unusual. It was also, undeniably, there.
Y/n looked back at her own notes, the letters swimming slightly. Constitutionally incapable. The phrase itched.
After the meeting, the crowd spilled into the hall. Y/n hung back, pretending to review something on her phone. Cameron drifted over, the scent of her shampoo—something with ginger—cutting through the antiseptic hall smell.
“I heard Foreman and Chase ambushed you,” Cameron said, her voice low.
“They’re bored. House gave them a toy to shake.” Y/n finally looked up. Cameron’s expression was open, concerned. It was unnerving. “It’s handled.”
“By walking away?”
“By not playing.”
Cameron nodded, but her eyes searched Y/n’s face. “He made a bet, you know. About us.”
“I know.”
“It’s insulting.”
“It’s predictable.” Y/n slipped her phone into her pocket. “He reduces everything to a game because genuine emotion terrifies him. He pathologizes it. I just choose not to provide case studies.”
A group of residents passed, their chatter loud. Cameron stepped a fraction closer, into a pocket of relative quiet. “And what if I don’t want to be a case study? What if I just want to see if the pappardelle was a one-time thing, or if there’s a potential for… a second date?”
The question hung in the space between them, simple and terrifyingly direct. It demanded an answer that wasn’t deflection, that wasn’t a retreat into clinical remove. Y/n felt the walls of her own making, sturdy and familiar, and the unsettling, gravitational pull of something else.
Before she could form a sentence—a ‘yes,’ a ‘no,’ a ‘we’ll see’—a sharp, pained cry echoed from a patient room down the corridor. It was followed by the rapid, urgent beeping of a cardiac alarm.
Both of them turned, doctors again instantly.
“Room 412,” Cameron said, already moving. “Post-op coronary bypass. Thirty-eight-year-old male.”
They fell into step together, a synchronized stride towards the crisis. The personal conversation was severed, left suspended in the hallway behind them. But as they pushed through the doors into the chaos of the room—nurses scrambling, the patient seizing, monitors screaming—Y/n was acutely aware of Cameron’s shoulder brushing against hers, a point of contact in the storm.
It was neither a yes nor a no. It was a postponement. But in medicine, as in everything else her brother loved to parody, postponement was just a softer form of diagnosis. The problem wasn’t gone. It was just waiting for a quieter moment to stop pretending it didn’t exist.