Chapter Text
i was supposed to be sent away
but they forgot to come and get me
- fortnight, taylor swift
When he gets home from PittFest after the worst fucking shift of his life, Abby is waiting for him. She’s waiting for him when he pulls in the driveway, opening the front door before he can even get his hand on the knob, pulling him into a hug immediately, rubbing her hand along his spine over and over like she always does when she’s trying to soothe him.
“Thank God you’re home,” she says, and he thinks he can hear tears in the way her voice wobbles. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” he answers. He lies. Or actually, he’s not sure if he’s lying or not. He’s felt kind of outside his body since Robby found those pills in his locker, and he’s not sure what’s real and what’s not.
“Okay,” she says, nodding against him and dropping a kiss onto his shoulder before pulling away. “Okay. I just put the kids in bed, but you might be able to catch them before they fall asleep if you go up now.”
He nods, the friendship bracelet around his wrist burning hot into his skin. And then, because he’s a fucking coward, he says, “I think I’m going to get something to eat first.”
Abby’s brows furrow for just a moment, but she quickly pulls her face together and smiles sadly at him.
“There’s leftover pizza on the counter.”
She starts towards the kitchen and he follows her mindlessly. He feels like he’s floating, untethered to anything in the world. Like he could disappear at any moment.
He should tell her, he thinks, as she pulls two pieces of pepperoni pizza out of the box and puts them on a plate in the microwave for him. He should tell her. Get it over with. He’s going to have to tell her sometime.
Instead, he stares at the plate she puts in front of him blankly, pulls off a piece of lukewarm pepperoni and pops it into his mouth. It tastes like dirt. How did this happen, he thinks. How is this happening?
Before Abby can say anything else, he clears his throat.
“I think I need to decompress a little bit.”
She nods slowly.
“Alone, I assume?”
“I think,” he starts, exhaling slowly through his teeth. “I think that would be best.”
He thinks he sees a flash of hurt pass across her face. It would make him feel like an asshole if he was capable of feeling anything at all. He never used to need to spend time alone following a long shift; in fact, coming home to Abby and Tanner, and later Penny, after a grueling day at work had always been a balm to his soul. He’s not sure when that changed – recently, he thinks, but he can’t be sure. All he knows is that now, sometimes being with his family after coming home from the hospital makes his skin crawl. Sometimes, he just has to be alone.
Again, this usually makes him feel like a piece of shit. But tonight, he doesn’t even react to Abby coming over to him and kissing him on the cheek, that same sad smile on her face when she pulls back, her eyes full of pity.
He hates when she looks at him like that. Like he’s not a real person, or at least not the person she married five years ago. He’d never asked him to feel bad for him because of his profession. In fact, that was one of the he loved the most about her in the beginning – she could see right through him, past all the bravado and hero bullshit some people projected onto him when he’d tell them he was going into emergency medicine.
Somewhere along the line, that changed. At some point, the sharp clarity in her eyes when she looked at him changed to sympathy, which eventually turned to pity. And he hates it.
How did this happen? How is this happening?
“Don’t be too long,” she tells him, making sure he nods before turning and starting up the stairs.
He waits until he hears the bedroom door click closed before going over to his backpack that he dropped on the floor in the entryway, carrying it over to the couch and searching through it frantically, just in case Robby accidentally forgot to pocket the Librium he fucking stole when he angrily threw his stuff at him and ordered him to leave.
He didn’t forget, of course. He still searches, though, dumping the contents of the bag on the floor eventually in desperation and combing through the items on the carpet with his fingers.
But it’s not there. He grabs a throw pillow, goes to scream into it, but thinks better of it at the last minute. Instead, he throws it down onto the couch, and then curls up on his side on the cushions, crossing his arms tightly across his chest like he’s trying to hold himself together.
And he doesn’t go upstairs.
He honestly doesn’t even realize that he’d fallen asleep until Abby wakes him with a shake to his shoulder.
“Frank. Frank.”
He opens his eyelids just a crack, and then closes them again when he encounters the bright sun shining in through the French doors that lead out to the deck.
“Frank,” Abby repeats urgently.
“What?” he groans, slightly opening his eyes but throwing this forearm across his face to, again, try to block out the sunlight.
“You’re late for work! You fell asleep down here last night, and you must’ve forgotten to set your alarm.”
His eyes pop open wide at that. Shit. Shit.
He still hasn’t told Abby.
“I’m surprised Dana isn’t calling your phone on loop, honestly.”
She laughs lightly at that, but there’s a serious tone to her voice that makes his stomach drop, like she’s already starting to catch on to the fact that something isn’t right.
He rubs a hand down his face, then looks up at her. She’s leaning over him, still in one of her sleep shirts and white silk pajama pants. Penny is sitting on her hip, babbling idly.
“Are the kids scheduled to go to daycare today?”
Her face scrunches in confusion.
“Uh, no. It’s Thursday. They’re home on Thursdays.”
She says it like it’s obvious, like he’s a good enough father and a good enough husband to have his kids’ daycare schedule memorized. It’s as if she doesn’t know him at all anymore.
He sighs heavily.
“Can you still send them?”
“Um,” she begins, thinking. “Probably? I’d have to call and ask.”
“Can you call and ask, please?”
“Uh.”
“We…we need to talk,” he admits, finally.
“Okay,” she says. The word comes out sounding like a question. “Aren’t you going to work?”
“Not today,” he murmurs.
“Why? Are you sick?”
He once again fights the urge to scream at this whole godforsaken situation.
“Just…take Tanner and Penny to daycare and come home. We’ll talk more then.”
She opens her mouth to protest, but he speaks again before she can.
“Please, Abs?”
“Okay,” she says, finally. “But can you just tell me that everything’s okay, first?”
So he lies, again. He’s been doing it a lot, after all. He’s gotten pretty good at it.
“Everything’s going to be fine, Abby.”
* * *
She doesn’t say anything when he finally tells her. Instead, she lets him ramble on for at least fifteen minutes, lets him spill every last frantic and jumbled thought that has been brewing in his brain for the last eighteen hours in a speech that he’s sure doesn’t make any sense. She doesn’t even say anything when he tells her that he used at work, that he used when he was around the fucking kids. She just stares at him, blankly.
He stares down at his shaky hands when he’s finally run out of words (the first time that’s happened in fucking forever). He can’t look at her – he would if he thought he would find anger in her expression, but he suspects that he would just see that awful pity that was there last night, and he wouldn’t be able to stomach that.
Moments pass, and there’s nothing but deafening, soul-crushing silence. It’s driving him absolutely fucking insane, and after a few minutes, he can’t help but fill it with the question that’s been on his mind since he walked in the door last night.
“Are you going to leave me?” he asks in a strangled whisper.
Still nothing for a few seconds, and then, she lets out a heavy sigh.
“Are you going to get help?”
He laughs once, humorlessly.
“I mean, I have to. If I ever want to get my fucking job back, I have to.”
“That’s not what I mean, Frank,” she murmurs. “Are you going to get help for us? For me, and Tanner and Penny?”
Her question – the reminder that he didn’t just fail Robby and the Pitt, but also his fucking family – finally brings him back to Earth, like he’s been struck by a meteor. His muscles ache. His vision blurs with tears.
“Yeah,” he says, even though the thought of getting help and all it will entail makes him want to die. “Yeah, I am.”
“Then of course I won’t leave you, Frank,” she tells him, and he can hear in her tone that she means it. “I’m not going to leave you just because you’re sick. I love you. The kids do, too.”
He decides then that he hates the term sick. He’s not sick; maybe according to textbooks he is, but he knows that he’s gotten to this point because of bad decision after bad decision. He’s not someone’s patient, or a problem waiting to be fixed.
He’s a fuck up. At some point, he’d rotted down to his core and ruined his life.
“We’re going to get through this together,” she says, reaching across the kitchen island and taking one of his hands in hers.
He hazards a glance at her, and of course, there it is. The overwhelming, suffocating pity. It makes his stomach twist in the absolute worst way, and he almost thinks he would prefer if she screamed it him, called him every fucking name in the book. If packed her and the kids’ bags right now and left, never to return.
He almost tells her that. But instead, he makes himself twine their fingers together and give her hand and gentle squeeze.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Okay, Abs.”
Abby keeps her word. Abby stays.
She stays through his first stint in rehab. She stays through his relapse and second stay, too. She stays through all the NA meetings, the endless appointments with PTMC’s HR department, the constant random drug tests. She stays through his depression. She stays during the days when he locks himself in her home office because his self-loathing is so strong that he can’t stand to be around any of them, through the nights when he cries himself to sleep, turned away from her in bed and curled into himself.
She stays even though he’s sure he’s a shell of his former self. She stays. She loves him, and she stays.
Sometimes – more often than he’d like to admit, actually – he just wants to tell her to fucking leave already, to take Tanner and Penny and run. What the fuck are you doing, Abby? Why are you here?
He feels like he’s drowning. He feels like he’s in a house that’s on fire, inhaling smoke that burns and clogs his lungs until he can’t catch his breath. When he tells his therapist this, she presses her lips together, says it’s due to overwhelming guilt, which he’ll be able to work through, even if it takes months. Years, even. He’ll work through it, and eventually he’ll feel like he has the ability to come up for air. That soon, he’ll be grateful that she stayed, just like he was in the beginning, when he used to spend her entire weekly visit at the rehab center weeping and thanking her incessantly for being there, for not abandoning him, for not fucking running away.
(How did this happen? How is this happening? How the fuck did we get here?)
Abby stays. And as the days tick by, one by one, he wonders with increasing frequency if that’s actually a good thing.