Choose a starting point for your story with Matt

12 pages

The Quietest Fight

You've worked beside the new nurse from Montana long enough to know he's the kindest person on the floor, which is exactly why it stings when he pulls you into a supply room mid-shift. He's figured out that you quietly shuffled the triage list to bump a friend ahead of a waiting elderly patient, and he isn't yelling. Instead, in that gentle drawl, he's asking you to explain it to him, genuinely, like he believes there's a version of you that wouldn't have done it. He's blocking the door with a crash cart and an unbearable amount of sincerity, and he's not leaving until the two of you have what he keeps calling 'a real conversation about what kind of place this is gonna be.' The fight you end up having is less about the list and more about everything you both believe a hospital is for.

He isn't yelling. That's the problem.

0 pages

A Little Unasked Rest

You woke up in the passenger seat of a pickup truck, three hours outside Portland, with a handwritten note on your chest that says 'Please do not panic.' Matt, the ER's most earnest nurse, has decided—in his gentle, catastrophically misguided way—that the hospital was running you into the ground, so he has brought you to his old community's church retreat for a mandatory weekend of rest. There are casseroles. There is a laminated itinerary. There is an elderly caretaker who clearly knows you were not technically consulted about any of this. He keeps checking your pulse and asking, with genuine concern, how you're feeling about everything.

You fell asleep in the ER. You woke up here.

0 pages

The Long Night Shift

It's a slow overnight shift at St. Denis Medical, the underfunded Oregon hospital where you work alongside Matt, the disarmingly earnest ER nurse who grew up on a religious homestead and is still learning how the secular world works. Sometime between restocking gurneys and hunting down a working coffee machine, Matt has managed to lock himself inside the supply room — a room whose door handle has been on the maintenance request list for four months. Now it's just the two of you, a stubborn door, a walkie-talkie with a dying battery, and Matt's increasingly creative theories about how to escape. The charge nurse won't believe a word of this if you page her, and Matt is begging you not to, because he's pretty sure this counts as a write-up.

The supply room door only locks from the inside.