The scrap is still in my palm when I push through the ambulance bay doors into the lot, and the night air hits me like a wet towel — that San Diego September heat that never quite leaves, just sits on the asphalt and waits for you to come back out. My scrubs are stiff with twelve hours of other people's worst days. My ponytail's half down. I smell like hand sanitizer and the coffee I mainlined at 4 a.m., and I am so tired my teeth ache.

I don't go straight to my car. I stand there under the sodium lights for a second and let the doors sigh shut behind me, and I take the paper out of my pocket like I've been doing all night, like it's a rosary, like if I unfold it enough times the ink will tell me something I don't already know.

It's smudged now. The loop of the 4 in his number's gone soft from my thumb, and the dash between the digits has bled into the paper. Five digits, a dash, four more. I've had it memorized since maybe two hours after I tore it off his chart. That's the thing about me — I memorize things I'm not supposed to keep.

My car's the only one left in the staff row. A '96 Civic, dark green, one hubcap missing since June, a dent in the rear door from a grocery cart that got away from me in the Vons lot. I walk to it slow. The asphalt's still holding the day's heat through the soles of my Danskos, and it smells like hot oil and rain, even though it hasn't rained in weeks. Somewhere behind me a gurney rattles. A siren winds up two blocks over and fades.

I lean back against the driver's door and let the metal take my weight. It's cool. Condensation's beaded on the window, slick under my shoulder, and I close my eyes for a second and just breathe.

Twelve hours. A kid with a broken wrist from a skateboard. A woman my mom's age who kept apologizing for the mess she was making of the trauma bay. A man who came in with chest pain and left with a cardiology consult and a wife who wouldn't stop touching his hand. And Eddie Reyes, who came in with a sprained ankle and left with a piece of me I didn't know was for sale.

I look at the paper again. Then I fold it back along the crease — the same crease, every time, so it's getting soft there too — and I put it in my pocket and I dig out my keys.

And that's when my phone buzzes against my hip.

I freeze. Full stop, keys half out of my pocket, one hand still in the pocket with the paper. My heart does something stupid and fast and I haven't even looked at the screen yet. It's 2:14 a.m. Nobody texts me at 2:14 a.m. My mom's asleep. My friends from school are asleep. The only people awake at 2:14 a.m. are nurses and the kind of people who end up in my ER, and neither of them are texting me.

I pull the phone out. Unknown number. San Diego area code. Three lines.

It's Eddie. I couldn't sleep. You still awake?

I read it four times. The screen's too bright in the dark of the lot and I have to angle it away from my face. It's Eddie. Like there's more than one. Like there's a whole roster of Eddies who might be texting me at two in the morning and he's just clarifying which one.

I know exactly which one. I've known since he rolled in with his ankle the size of a grapefruit and his glasses fogged up from the cold pack and he looked at me like I was the first person all day who hadn't asked him for anything.

My thumb hovers over the keyboard.

And here's where I'm supposed to be smart. Here's where I'm supposed to be the girl who just graduated with honors, who has a five-year plan taped inside her closet door, who knows better than to text a patient back at two in the morning. He's a patient. He's — and I still don't fully know what he is, except that when I asked him what he did and he said I play a little ball, he said it the way people say I dabble in landscaping when they mean they own the nursery.

He's somebody. I don't know how much somebody. I know he's got a teammate who drives him to the ER and won't wait in the car, and a sprain that made a grown man's jaw go tight when I rotated it, and a phone number he wrote under his signature like he was signing for a package.

I should not text back.

I text back.

Still awake. Just got off. Who is this really and what have you done with the guy with the bad ankle?

I hit send before I can take it back, and then I stand there in the parking lot with the phone in my hand and the Civic cool against my back and I wait. The screen dims. I tap it awake. Dims again. I tap it awake. A moth keeps throwing itself at the light above the ambulance bay and I watch it like it's the most interesting thing in the world, because watching the moth is easier than watching the screen.

Nothing.

The lot's so quiet I can hear the hum of the vending machines through the ER wall. Somewhere a car door slams. My thumb finds the paper in my pocket again, the edge of it, and I rub the crease without thinking about it.

I'm about to put the phone away and drive home and feel like an idiot about it for the next three days when it rings.

Not a text. A call. The screen lights up with the same unknown number and the little green button and my thumb's on it before my brain catches up, which is a thing I'm going to have to think about later.

"Hello?"

"Hey." His voice is low and rough, the way a voice gets at two in the morning, like he's been lying in the dark for a while before he worked up to this. There's a fan going somewhere behind him. A TV on low. "It's really me. I swear. I can send you a picture of the ankle if you want proof."

"That's the worst proof I've ever been offered." I lean my head back against the car and close my eyes. "Anybody can have an ankle."

"Not an ankle like this one." A pause. "It's purple. It's got a personality."

"I've seen it. I wrapped it. I remember."

"Yeah." His voice goes quieter. "I remember you wrapped it."

And there it is, that little drop in the middle of the sentence, like he stepped off a curb. I don't say anything. I listen to him breathe. The fan turns. The moth hits the light again.

"I'm at home," he says finally. "Ankle's propped up on like four pillows. My mom keeps coming in to check on me and I keep telling her I'm fine and she keeps not believing me. So. You know. Normal night."

"Four pillows seems excessive."

"It's not excessive. It's elevation. I looked it up."

"You looked it up."

"I looked it up," he says, and I can hear the grin in it, that goofy kid grin that doesn't match the way he looked at me across the trauma bay when I told him the X-ray was clean. "I'm a professional athlete. I do research."

"You're a professional something. I still don't know what."

"I told you. A little ball."

"Nobody says that."

"I say that."

I laugh. It comes out of me before I can stop it, a real one, the kind that makes my shoulders drop, and I realize I've been holding them up around my ears since maybe hour six of my shift. "You're a terrible liar. You know that? You told me you tripped on the mound."

"I did trip on the mound."

"You sprained your landing ankle. Landing ankles don't trip. Landing ankles land."

Silence. Then: "Okay, that's fair." Another pause. "I don't love that you caught that."

"I catch a lot of things. It's the job."

"Yeah." His voice does the thing again, that little drop. "I noticed."

I open my eyes. The lot's still empty. The moth's still at it. I should get in the car. I should get in the car and drive home and shower and sleep and figure out what to do about the fact that I'm standing in a parking lot at two in the morning talking to a man I met twelve hours ago and I don't want to hang up.

"So why couldn't you sleep?" I ask.

"Honestly?"

"Honestly."

"I kept thinking about the way you laughed at me."

"At you."

"At me. When I said the thing about the mound. You didn't do the polite laugh. You did the real one, where you kind of snort first."

"I do not snort."

"You absolutely snort. It's —" He stops. I hear him shift, pillows rustling, the fan clicking on a turn. "It's a good sound. That's all. I kept hearing it."

I don't know what to do with that, so I do what I do, which is deflect. "You should be sleeping. You've got an ankle to heal."

"I know."

"You've got —" and I stop myself, because I almost say a season, and I don't actually know what he's got. I don't know how much is riding on that ankle. I just know that when Dr. Pierce said two to three weeks, Eddie's face went somewhere I recognized, the same place a patient's face goes when you tell them the thing they were afraid of. "You've got stuff to do," I finish, lamely.

"I've got stuff to do," he agrees. "But I'm doing it. I'm elevating. I'm icing. I'm being a model patient."

"Are you?"

"No. I'm lying in the dark talking to a nurse who's probably standing in a parking lot."

I look down at my feet. My Danskos on the cracked asphalt, the little white scuff marks where I've kicked them against the wall a hundred times. "Maybe I am."

"You should go home."

"I know."

Neither of us hangs up.

The fan turns. Somewhere in his house, a door opens and closes, and a woman's voice — his mom, I figure, the one who keeps coming in to check on him — calls something I can't quite make out, soft and quick, the way moms do when they're half asleep and checking anyway.

"Yeah, Ma, I'm fine," he calls back, and then, quieter, into the phone, "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. That's —" I don't know how to say that's nice without it sounding like I'm making fun of him, so I say, "She sounds worried."

"She's always worried. It's her thing." A beat. "It's kind of my thing too, actually. The worrying."

"What do you worry about?"

He's quiet for a second. I hear him breathe. "That's a lot of question for two in the morning."

"You called me."

"I did." He laughs, and it's a real one too, a boyish giggle that doesn't match his voice at all, that comes out of him like it surprised him. "I did call you. Okay. Fair."

And I'm standing there in the parking lot with the phone pressed to my ear and I can feel the whole day coming off me, the twelve hours, the charts, the kid with the skateboard, the wife holding her husband's hand. It's like the night shift is a coat I've been wearing and somebody just unzipped it. My shoulders drop another inch. I let my head rest against the car.

"I worry about being a paycheck," he says finally. "That's the short version."

"The short version."

"Yeah." The fan clicks. "The long version costs extra."

"I'm a nurse. I take payment in sleep."

"Then I'm in trouble, because I don't have any of that."

I laugh again. I can't help it. And I hear him hear it — the little catch on the other end, like he was waiting for it, like he called at two in the morning specifically to hear me snort. Which is ridiculous. Which is — I don't know what it is. I don't know what any of this is.

"I'm glad you kept the number," he says.

And I don't say it. I don't say it's been in my pocket all night. I don't say I've been running my thumb over the ink until it smudged, until I can't read the 4 anymore, and I still know the number by heart. I don't say any of that, because it's too much for two in the morning and a man I met yesterday, even if he's a man I met yesterday who made me laugh so hard I had to turn away from the trauma bay so my patient wouldn't see.

"It was on the chart," I say. "I tear off corners of charts all the time. It's a thing I do."

"Sure."

"It is."

"I believe you." He doesn't sound like he believes me. He sounds like he's smiling. "Paula."

The way he says my name — like it's a whole sentence — does something in my chest I don't have a name for. I've heard my name a thousand times. I've heard it shouted across an ER, written on charts, said by doctors and patients and my mom and my friends. I've never heard it said like that, low and careful, like he's setting it down somewhere.

"Yeah?"

"Go home."

"You called me."

"I know. But you've been standing in a parking lot for —" he pauses, like he's checking a clock I can't see, "— a while. And you should sleep. And I should sleep. And I'm going to hang up now."

"Okay."

Neither of us hangs up.

I can hear the fan. I can hear him breathing. I can hear the moth hit the light one more time and then, finally, give up. My thumb's on the paper in my pocket again, the soft crease, the smudged ink, and I'm thinking about how I'm going to drive home and shower and lie in my bed in my apartment in Mission Valley and stare at the ceiling and hear his voice saying my name like that.

"Eddie," I say.

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad you called."

A pause. Long enough that I can hear him smile. "Yeah," he says. "Me too."

And then he does hang up, and the screen goes dark, and the parking lot is just a parking lot again — cracked asphalt, one moth, one Civic with a missing hubcap, one nurse standing next to it with a phone in her hand and a folded scrap of paper in her pocket and the whole night shift finally, finally off her shoulders.

I look at the phone. The call log says Unknown, one minute and forty-seven seconds.

I should save the number. I should get in the car. I should do a lot of things.

I stand there a little longer, in the quiet, with the phone still in my hand and no answer yet.

I save the number.

Not the paper — the paper stays folded in my pocket, smudged 4 and all. I type it into my phone with my thumb, standing in the dark of the parking lot, and I stare at the little screen for a second after I hit save. The contact name field is blinking at me. I could put Eddie. I could put Eddie Reyes, which is what the chart said, what the discharge papers said, what the little printed wristband said before I cut it off him. I could put Patient, which would be the professional thing, the thing a nurse who has her head on straight would do.

I put Eddie. Just Eddie. And then I get in the car and I drive home.

Mission Valley at three in the morning is nothing but freeway and streetlights and the occasional truck. I take the 8 east and get off at Mission Center and my apartment is on the third floor of a building with a courtyard full of dead grass and a fountain that hasn't run since I moved in. I climb the stairs with my keys already out because that's what you learn in the ER, keys out, phone in the other hand, eyes up. The hallway smells like someone cooked garlic at midnight. My neighbor's cat is sitting outside my door like it owns the place. I let myself in and lock the deadbolt and stand in my kitchen with the light off and just breathe for a second.

Then I shower. Then I lie in bed with wet hair and stare at the ceiling, and I do exactly what I told myself in the parking lot I would not do, which is hear his voice saying my name like that, low and careful, like he was setting it down somewhere I could keep it.

I don't sleep much. I never do after nights. But I sleep some, and when I wake up it's almost noon and the sun is coming through the blinds in stripes and my phone is on the nightstand and there's a text on it.

Unknown: this is the guy from the parking lot. the one with the ankle. if you get bored of not knowing me, you know where to find me.

I read it three times. Then I laugh — actually laugh, out loud, alone in my apartment, at a text message from a man I met yesterday.

I text back: that's a lot of confidence for a man with a grade two sprain.

He answers in under a minute. grade two is the good one. the doctor said so.

The doctor said stay off it for two weeks.

the doctor says a lot of things.

I put my phone down and go make coffee and I'm smiling at my own kitchen like an idiot. I know what this is. I know exactly what this is. I've watched enough of my friends do this — the texting, the smiling at nothing, the way you start structuring your day around a screen. I know it's a bad idea. He's a patient. He's famous, apparently, though I still couldn't tell you what for, exactly, beyond "baseball." He's got a nine-million-dollar job and a season he's watching slip through his fingers and a whole life I know nothing about, and I'm a twenty-two-year-old nurse who just started her first real job and has exactly one plant and a stack of unpaid student loans.

And none of that stops me from texting him back.

We text all afternoon. Not about anything. That's the thing — it's not about anything. He tells me his mom made him sit on the couch all day and he's going out of his mind. I tell him I slept until noon and I'm not sorry. He sends me a picture of his ankle propped on a pillow with an ice pack on it, and then a second picture, which is the same ankle but with a pair of Oakleys balanced on the ice pack, like the glasses are the patient. I laugh so hard I have to set my coffee down.

You're an idiot, I text.

i'm a professional, he texts back. this is professional behavior.

Around four I have to go in for my shift and I tell him so, and he says okay, and then a minute later, have a good one. don't let anybody skateboard into you.

And I'm standing in my bedroom pulling on my scrubs and I realize I've been smiling for four straight hours and my face actually hurts a little, and I think, okay, Paula. Okay.

The shift is a shift. A kid with a broken wrist from a skateboard, which is funny in a way I can't explain to anyone. An older man with chest pain who turns out to be fine and thanks me four times. A woman in labor who gets sent up to OB before I can do more than start her line. It's the usual. But every time I have a second — charting, waiting on a lab, standing at the Pyxis — I catch myself checking my phone, and there's always something there.

my dad just got home. he asked if i was doing my ankle exercises. i said yes. i was not doing my ankle exercises.

my mom is making lumpia. i can smell it from here. i am a prisoner in my own home.

question. if you had to eat one food for the rest of your life what would it be. this is a test.

I answer that one at 2 a.m. from the break room. Pho. Easy.

correct answer, he says. you passed.

Was there a wrong answer?

yes. if you'd said salad i was going to hang up on you.

I don't even know when we switched from texts to calls. It just happens. Somewhere around the third night I'm walking to my car after shift and my phone rings and it's him and I answer it like we've been doing this for years.

"You're up early," I say. It's six in the morning.

"I'm up late," he says. "Same thing."

And that's how it goes. He calls when he can't sleep and I call when I'm driving home and the calls get longer and the silences in them get easier, which is the thing that scares me more than the talking. Easy silences are how you know. Easy silences are the tell.

By the end of the first week I know things. I know his dad is retired Navy and works for the sea lift command and gets up at five no matter what. I know his mom works at an electronics plant in Kearny Mesa and makes lumpia when she's worried, which is often, which is her thing. I know he was born in Honolulu and moved so many times as a kid that he stopped bothering to learn the names of his neighbors. I know he lives at home — at twenty-four, with a nine-million-dollar salary — because he's waiting for the guaranteed contract before he buys a place, and because he saves and invests almost everything, and because the only two dumb things he's ever bought are a dark blue BMW he parks in his parents' driveway and a Rolex Submariner he wears on the field and off and never once mentions unless I ask.

"Why a Submariner?" I ask him one night, lying on my couch with my feet up, the fan of my own apartment clicking.

"Because it's the one you can actually swim in," he says. "It's not for showing off. It's — I don't know. It's a tool. It does a job."

"You wear it to pitch."

"I wear it everywhere." A beat. "It's the only thing I own that I picked for me and not for the number."

I don't ask what he means by the number. I know what he means by the number. He's told me, in pieces, over a week of two-in-the-morning phone calls — the contract year, the arbitration, the four starts he's about to miss, the way the front office is watching him like a stock ticker. He doesn't say it like he's bragging. He says it like it's a weight he's been carrying so long he's forgotten what it feels like to put it down.

And I tell him things too. I tell him about the kid with the skateboard and the wife holding her husband's hand. I tell him I just graduated and I'm still not sure I'm good at this, that I'm good at the tests and the skills but I don't know yet if I'm good at the part where a person is scared and you're the one standing there. I tell him about my apartment and the dead fountain and the neighbor's cat. I tell him I'm not a baseball fan and he says good and I ask why and he says because then you're talking to me and I don't have an answer for that.

On the eighth day — a Tuesday, the middle of July, the heat coming off the asphalt in waves — he asks if I want to get food.

Not a date. He doesn't say date. He says, "I've been on this couch for a week and my mom is starting to look at me like I'm a piece of furniture. Do you want to get food? I can't drive. My ankle's still — I mean, I can drive, technically, but Dr. Pierce would kill me, and also my mom would kill me first, and then Dr. Pierce would kill me again."

"So you're asking me to drive you."

"I'm asking you to get food with me. The driving is a logistics problem."

"And the ankle is a logistics problem."

"Everything is a logistics problem. I'm a pitcher. That's all I do. I solve logistics."

I should say no. I know I should say no. He's a patient. He's a patient with a nine-million-dollar contract and a whole world I don't belong to and a face I've been thinking about for eight days straight. I should say I'm working, which is true, and leave it there.

"I'm off Thursday," I say. "Seven a.m."

"Seven a.m. is breakfast."

"Seven a.m. is breakfast," I agree.

"Then I'll see you Thursday." A pause, and I can hear him smiling again, that same smile I've been hearing through the phone for a week. "Paula."

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for answering."

And he hangs up before I can say anything back, which is his thing, which I've noticed — he always hangs up first, like he doesn't want to be the one still holding the phone. I sit on my couch with the phone against my ear for a second after the line goes dead, listening to nothing, and then I set it down and I go to bed and I don't sleep, because Thursday is in two days and I have nothing to wear and no idea what I'm doing.

Thursday morning I'm standing in front of my closet at six-fifteen in a panic. I've been a nurse for three months and I've forgotten how to dress like a person. I try on a dress and it feels like a job interview. I try on jeans and a T-shirt and it feels like I'm not trying. I settle on jeans and a white tank and a light blue button-down I leave open, my hair down instead of in the ponytail, and I tell myself in the mirror that this is not a date, that this is two people getting breakfast, that I am a professional and he is a patient and we are just —

I stop. I look at myself. I know exactly what this is.

I grab my keys and I go.

The address he texted me is in Paradise Hills, a house on a street of houses that all look the same, low and tan with lawns that somebody clearly cares about. There's a dark blue BMW in the driveway, parked carefully, and a basketball hoop over the garage with a net that's seen better days. I park on the street and I sit in my car for a second and I watch the front door, and I think about driving away, and then the door opens.

He comes out on crutches — actual crutches, which he did not mention — wearing a black form-fitting T-shirt and gray shorts and his black-rimmed Oakleys, his hair freshly faded on the sides, and he's got one crutch under each arm and he's moving slow and careful down the two steps to the walkway, and when he sees my car he grins, that goofy kid grin, and he lifts one crutch off the ground and waves it at me like it's a flag.

I get out of the car. The morning's already warm. The sprinklers have been on and the sidewalk smells like wet concrete.

"You didn't say crutches," I say.

"You didn't ask." He plants both crutches and stands there looking at me, and his grin goes a little quieter, a little more careful, and I watch him look at my hair, at the button-down, at me, and I watch him decide not to say whatever he was going to say. "You look —" He stops. Adjusts his glasses. "Hi."

"Hi."

And we stand there on his parents' front walk in the July morning, two people who have talked for eight days and never once been in the same room, and neither of us moves.