Frazer rubbed her eyes, feeling like a child. “Aw, thanks, Tia.”

Tia raised her eyebrows. “Well, you do.”

Frazer slumped back into her chair. “What do you want?”

“How was your on call last night?”

Frazer swallowed. That was the question of the day. A birth hadn’t affected her like that since the first one she’d done without a supervisor, the life in her hands flailing and screaming with lungs powerful enough to knock over her new parents. “Fine.”

Fine did not cover it, but not much else could.

“Good to hear. Did you get much sleep?”

Frazer shrugged. “I got a few hours in an on call room.”

Lies. It had been at this very desk.

Really, it had been a few hours of staring at the wall, remembering the depth of Cora’s eyes as they’d stared at her. Instead of anger, a feeling of nothingness had settled over her. Frazer was too tired, too numb, to take any of it in.

After a long moment that would be etched in her mind for the rest of her life, Jack had handed the baby over to Frazer, who had handed it over to the adoption representative.

Afterwards, Cora and Frazer had sat with Jack until he fell asleep, the bruises under his eyes overshadowed by the grief that shimmered in them. At the first sign that Jack was completely out, Frazer had slipped out of the room and left Cora whispering her name behind her.

Frazer didn’t have it in her.

“A few hours isn’t enough. Shouldn’t you be going home?”

Frazer didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to be thinking. She wanted to be buried in work. Or sleeping in her office and pretending to be buried by work. “I’ll go home early?”

Tia raised her eyebrows at her.

“I will!”

“Sure you will.”

Sighing, Frazer asked, “Did you come here just to mother me?”

The answer of silence had Frazer looking up at sharply. Tia was watching her, a look on her face Frazer couldn’t decipher. “Tia?”

A purse of the lips. A quirk of the eyebrows. “Cora has been watching you.”

God, was that all? Frazer rolled her eyes. “I know. I told her to stop.”

“She hasn’t.”

Frazer really didn’t need this right now. “Tia, what do you want from me? We ended it. She told me to leave her alone, I told her to stop watching me all the damn time. I’m staying away from her.”

Tia’s arms dropped to her sides. “Okay. But maybe you shouldn’t?”

Maybe she shouldn’t? This was Tia who had been so mad it had been going on. Frazer’s affair with Cora had been stupid and selfish and wrong. And now Tia was saying— “What?”

Tia’s lips pursed again as she stared at Frazer, as if assessing her. “Do you want to be with her?”