cases that no one else wanted because she could do her job without it affecting her, but she was wrong.
She couldn’t keep pretending that this job wasn’t slowly destroying her.
They didn’t really talk about burnout when she was in school, but they’d mentioned it pretty much every hour during orientation when she was hired. They’d actually dedicated an entire day to burnout in the medical field and explained how quickly it affected home aide nurses and while she didn’t think that she was burned out yet, she knew that it was only a matter of time.
She couldn’t pretend that hearing her patients cry in the middle of the night wasn’t killing her or the look on their faces when they realized that their lives would never be the same didn’t destroy a part of her soul, which is why she’d taken a leave of absence.
The funny thing was, it had nothing to do with what happened with Chase.
Right now, she still loved what she did and she wanted to keep it that way. She just needed a break, some time to figure things out, and get her head straight before she decided what she was going to do. In the meantime, she was going to keep her promise and help Chase. She’d made him a promise and she wasn’t going to break it, which meant that she was going to have to cross that line one more time.
*-*-*-*
“Oh, my god! I didn’t beat him!” Sloane said from the large playhouse in the corner where she was currently cowering as Chase’s new BFF was teaching her a lesson.
“We don’t hit!” the little girl yelled, only pausing in her attack to fix her pink tiara before she grabbed hold of the green pool noodle and resumed her attack.
He should probably do something, Chase thought as he took another sip of his imaginary tea but decided against it since he didn’t think it was a good idea to get in the middle of this.
“Chase!”
“What’s wrong, Pookie?” he asked only to murmur, “This tea is delicious,” appeasing the little girl hellbent on teaching Sloane a lesson.
“Tell her that I didn’t hit you!” Sloane snapped only to gasp when she was forced to retreat further into the playhouse.
“Wouldn’t it be wrong to lie?” Chase asked, unable to help but smile when Sloane was forced to crawl out the back and abandon her cover when the little girl decided that she was done playing around and crawled in after her.
With a muttered, “I hate you,” Sloane raced back around the other chairs, jumped over a bean bag, and climbed onto his lap, wrapped her arms around him, and held on tight.
“She just wants to play,” Chase said, wrapping his arms around her as he glanced over just in time to watch the little girl’s eyes narrow dangerously on Sloane.
“I don’t want to play,” Sloane grumbled, pulling her legs up as she shifted back on his lap to get as far away from the little girl as humanly possible.
“That’s not nice, Pookie,” he said with a sad shake of his head even as he mouthed, “Help me,” to the little girl.
“Neither is she,” Sloane mumbled with an adorable pout that turned to a gasp when the little girl, more determined than ever, tightened her grip around the pool noodle and
“What did we talk about, Deb?” Grey asked as he plucked the pool noodle away from the little girl before she could make good on that attack.
There was a heavy sigh and then, “That it isn’t nice to make people cry.”
“And…” Grey said, placing the pool noodle back in the corner.
“And she had it coming,” Deb said with a defiant tilt of her chin as she crossed her small arms over her chest.
“She really did,” Chase said only to chuckle when the small woman cowering in his arms poked him in his side.
“See?” Deb said, gesturing toward Sloane, who was glaring at him for some reason.
Sighing, Grey knelt down so that he could look the little girl in the eye as he said, “Well, if you scare her off, then she won’t be able to help your brother and I thought that’s what you wanted,” Grey explained, making Chase frown as he shifted his attention away from the little girl that made the best imaginary tea that he’d had in a long time to the little boy sitting in a wheelchair by the open double doors that Grey walked through a few minutes ago.