"How’d she leave it?"

"I don’t know. I saw Kerry leading her into the lounge when I came on. And when Kim left she wasn’t happy."

******

Useless…

The word had echoed again and again in Kim’s thoughts as she caught a cab home, eschewing a stop by the grocery store, and pushed open the door wearily. It had hounded her through the last dregs of the afternoon and into the evening, accompanying the day’s first shot of Connemara.

She toasted the sunset with a bitter smile.

Her first vision of Kerry Weaver had been one of overpowering competence, a dazzling mixture of technical skill and non-clinical tenderness with patients who frequently brought of the worst in ER docs. One reason Kim loved specializing in what she referred to as "crash-and-burn-psychiatry" was the exhilarating moment of helping someone reach out, take that first step to putting themselves back together. But for that first step to happen, they had to turn somewhere, broken and distraught; and very often that place was County’s emergency room– to doctors who were overworked, underpaid, and treat and street was a mantra heard far too many times.

Kerry, however, had never displayed any of the impatience or dismissive arrogance that Kim had seen far too many docs bring to psych cases. She seemed intuitively to understand that mental illness was as much a medical problem as a broken arm or head laceration, and treated those brought to her with the same care and attention as she paid to the self-inflicted wounds that often were the badges of their disturbance. Her tendency and willingness to question the judgment of pysch doctors, on the other hand…

Rubbing her brow tiredly and wishing for an oblivion the whiskey and the darkly brooding Buddy Guy album wouldn’t bring her, Kim was startled quietly out of her thoughts by the gentle, but insistent, chime of her doorbell.

Ambling to the foyer, she was more than a little surprised to see the red hair of her ex-lover shining through the pane. "Feel the need for a sudden house call?" she asked softly, opening the door.

"Figured you probably skipped the store on the way home. And I know you don’t keep food in this house." Kerry held up the white bag ubiquitous to so many take-out restaurants.