The director's office had never felt so claustrophobic.
The light spilling in through the blinds was faint and diluted, casting tired lines across the polished floor like scars time had forgotten to hide. Rowan didn't knock. He entered with the quiet of someone who'd already made peace with what he was about to do. Arthur Brenner looked up from his desk slowly not surprised, not defensive. Simply... aware.
"You've made a spectacle of this hospital," he said. His voice was low, clipped, the tone of a man still convinced he held authority over every room he occupied.
Rowan didn't answer. He stood tall, still, as though the words had landed but never pierced.
"You've chosen to stand beside someone who's made it her mission to destroy everything we built."
"No," Rowan said. His voice didn't rise. It didn't shake. "I stood beside someone who reminded me what integrity looks like."
The shift was immediate not in volume, but in weight.
Arthur leaned forward slightly, narrowing his eyes. "She's turned you against your own name."
Rowan stepped closer. "I was never fighting my name. I was fighting the man who made it mean nothing."
Something in Brenner's expression fractured, just for a moment. The air between them was no longer cold, but burning. Father and son, locked in a war where blood meant nothing and truth meant everything.
"I gave you a future," Brenner snapped.
"You gave me a mask," Rowan replied. "And I'm done wearing it."
The silence that followed was a shattering kind the type that can only exist when two men who once shared everything now shared nothing at all.
"I resigned this morning," Rowan said.
Arthur blinked. Slowly. Like the words took longer to register than they should have.
"You're walking away from everything," he said, more quietly now. "For her."
Rowan's jaw clenched, but his voice remained calm. "I'm not walking away from her. I'm walking back to myself."
He turned toward the door.
Brenner didn't stop him.
Nora didn't see him leave.
She was in the ER, reviewing post-op notes when an envelope was left at her station. No name. No label. Just her first name, written in careful, familiar handwriting.
Her heart skipped.
Inside, a single sheet of paper. Folded once.
Heavy with meaning before she even read a word.
Nora,
I didn't say this to your face because I know you'd stop me.
You'd ask questions I'm still too ashamed to answer.
And you'd see straight through the parts of me that are still tangled in silence.
I'm leaving Westbridge.
Not to run. To breathe. To reclaim something I lost long before I ever met you.
This hospital taught me how to hold a scalpel.
You taught me how to feel the weight behind it.
You showed me the sound silence makes when it starts to suffocate.
And I can't pretend anymore.
Not with him.
Not with myself.
You once told me you didn't know what was real with me.
This is.
This letter. These words.
The nights I sat beside you in absolute stillness and said nothing not because I didn't care, but because I cared too much.
Every time I hesitated, every time I looked at you and couldn't speak
It was because you made me feel something I didn't know how to name.
I'm not asking for forgiveness. Or even understanding.
But I need you to know... I believed in you. Long before I had the courage to show it.
And even now walking away from the only place I've ever known I still do.
If this is goodbye, let it be honest.
And if it's not...
Maybe someday, I'll be someone worth coming back to.
R.
She read it once.
Then again.
Slower the second time.
Her hands didn't tremble. Her lips didn't part.
But something inside her shifted quiet, deep, permanent.
She folded the letter gently.
And for the first time in weeks... she let herself breathe.