"I need medical attention," I say. My voice is remarkably steady for someone who's watching their blood pool on the floor. "This is a deep laceration."
"And I need someone who can do their job without bleeding all over my kitchen." Gordon's face is twisted — not with concern, not with the normal human response to seeing a colleague injured, but with fury. Pure, selfish, white-hot rage at the inconvenience of my pain. "You're fired. Get out."
Seven years.
Two thousand five hundred and fifty-six days of 4 AM starts and menu changes and thrown pans and scrapped work andyes, Chefand performing fine and telling myself this is the industry.
Gone in one sentence.
"Get the fuck out of my kitchen," Gordon says, and turns back to the gala prep like I've already stopped existing.
Sarah drives me to the ER. I hold the towel against my hand and stare out the window and I can't feel anything — not the pain, not the road, not the seat underneath me. Everythinghas gone distant and numb, like someone turned the volume down on reality.
"I'm coming in with you," Sarah says in the parking lot.
"No. Go back. He'll fire you too."
"Robin—"
"You have two kids and a mortgage. Go back."
She stares at me. Her eyes are wet and fierce and I can see her fighting it — the desire to stay, the terror of losing her own job, the guilt of leaving me. I've watched Sarah do this math before. It always comes out the same way.
"Text me the second you're out," she says. Hugs me careful of the hand. "I'm so sorry."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine."
"I know. Go."
She goes. I watch her car pull out of the parking lot and I stand there in a bloody chef's jacket holding a blood-soaked towel against my hand and I am completely, perfectly alone.
The ER waiting room is fluorescent and cold and smells like hand sanitizer.
The triage nurse moves me up the list when she sees the towel — saturated now, dark red, the blood seeping through despite the pressure. She takes my vitals, asks me to rate the pain on a scale of one to ten.
"Six," I say, because I'm a liar. It's an eight. Maybe a nine.
"Kitchen accident?"
"Professional hazard."
She hands me intake forms. The pen is in my right hand — at least I can still hold a pen — and I start filling in the boxes. Name. Date of birth. Insurance. There's a blank that reads EMPLOYER and I stare at it for thirty seconds before writingN/A.
Then the line: EMERGENCY CONTACT.
I stare at it.
Vaughn. I could write Vaughn's number. He'd come. He'd be here in twenty minutes, sitting in this uncomfortable plastic chair, probably bringing coffee, definitely bringing that quiet steady presence that makes everything feel survivable. He'd hold my good hand through the stitches and drive me home and put me to bed and I would be taken care of.
But.
I already needed him to rescue me from Brett. I already cried on him about work. I already couldn't cuddle after sex. I already picked a fight about Gordon. I am, by any reasonable metric, a rolling disaster, and Vaughn has been dealing with my disasters for weeks, and at some point he's going to do the math and realize that Robin Martinez is more work than he's worth.
I can't be the disaster boyfriend who constantly needs saving. If I call him now — bleeding, fired, crying in an ER — that's what I become. The project. The broken thing he has to keep fixing. And people get tired of fixing things that keep breaking.
My phone buzzes. Vaughn:How's your day going? Mine's boring without you distracting me.