Hospitals have their own version of silence.
It's not peaceful. It's loaded.
It's that hush right before the lunch rush hits, or after a difficult patient finally falls asleep.
It's fluorescent lights buzzing.
It's monitors humming.
It's the sound of a dozen people holding their breath for no reason they can name.
I was in the break room, peeling a banana like it had personally wronged me, and thinking about nothing—which usually means I was actually thinking about everything.
Mostly Everett.
Ever since Marcus Vale showed up last week—the doctor with the same last name and the kind of swagger you only get from graduating with honors and never having mopped your own spill—there'd been an itch at the back of my mind.
Jude noticed it first.
Trevor tried to ignore it.
I… couldn't.
So when Everett passed by with his usual mop and quiet, I spoke before I could second guess myself.
"Everett."
He stopped.
Didn't turn around right away.
Just stood there, one hand on the mop, like it was a question he'd heard before.
Then he stepped into the break room.
Didn't sit.
Didn't speak.
Just stood, arms resting on the mop handle like it was a staff from some quiet order of monk-janitors.
"Got a minute?" I asked.
He tilted his head.
"Sixty seconds. Seventy if you share your banana."
I tossed him the second half.
He didn't thank me. Didn't need to.
We've worked together long enough to know that some gestures are their own form of gratitude.
"Jude said something yesterday," I started. "That we don't really know anything about you."
Everett chewed slowly. Didn't interrupt.
"He's not wrong," I said. "You've been here longer than almost anyone, and yet none of us know where you came from. What you did before this. Even Marcus Vale—he walks in with your last name and suddenly we're all staring at you like you're a riddle someone accidentally left on a mop cart."
Everett blinked slowly. The kind of blink you do when you're pausing time in your own head.
"We all have pasts," he said at last. "I don't carry mine. I mop over it."
"Come on," I said, trying to keep it light. "Before this place? You could've been anyone. Government work. A monk. The bassist for a ska band. I mean, you're the guy with a PhD in mop philosophy."
He cracked the faintest smile.
Then said:
"When I met Jude, he was still a priest."
There was a beat of silence.
Then Jude leaned in from the hallway, holding a donut like a communion wafer.
"Yeah. I was real enthusiastic about baptism by fire."
I blinked. "Really?"
Jude nodded, powdered sugar now decorating his scrubs. "And by 'fire,' I mean I accidentally set the baptismal font on fire during a youth group lock-in. It was scented candles and an unfortunate proximity to hairspray."
Trevor stepped into the break room behind him without missing a beat.
"That makes sense."
I looked back at Everett.
He shrugged.
"You asked."
"I did," I said. "Just… didn't expect that answer."
"That's the trick," Everett said. "You never really know what someone left behind to become who they are now."
Jude hopped up on the counter like a cat with ADHD.
"I wasn't a very good priest," he said. "Technically I didn't make it to ordination. Just seminary and enough community work to get disillusioned."
"What changed?" I asked.
"Everett," he said, not even joking.
Everett rolled his eyes and reached for a towel to fold.
"I didn't change you."
"No," Jude said. "But you gave me a bucket and made me clean my own mess. That was holier than any sermon I'd ever preached."
A call came over the intercom for a patient transfer. I was about to get up when Everett's pager went off too.
He read it, folded the towel halfway, then turned to me.
"Patient in 2C slipped. Overflow from a spilled juice cart."
I stood. "Want me to handle it?"
"No," he said. "Let Marcus see it first."
"Why?"
"Because sometimes a doctor needs to learn what gets left behind when you walk past a puddle too proud to mop it."
Trevor looked up. "You really gonna let him walk through that?"
Everett raised an eyebrow.
"He's got non-slip shoes. And a lesson waiting."
Fifteen minutes later, Marcus came into the break room with a bruised ego, damp pant legs, and a towel in his hand.
"I handled it," he said, to no one in particular.
Jude clapped. "Did you? Or did the towel do the real work?"
Marcus tossed it into the bin, defeated.
"I don't understand how he just… exists."
Trevor offered him half a sandwich.
"You will," he said. "Eventually."
That night, I was walking past the mop closet when I saw Everett inside.
He was folding towels again.
One after another.
Calm. Precise.
I leaned in the doorway.
"Do you miss it?" I asked.
"Miss what?"
"Whatever it was you were before this."
He didn't answer right away.
Folded one more towel.
Then looked up and said:
"I think I'm finally becoming who I was meant to be."
I walked back toward the hallway, passing Jude and Trevor as they debated whether disinfectant wipes or bleach solution was the superior tool for existential crises.
"I'm just saying," Jude said, "I've handled spiritual trauma. Certified."
Trevor didn't even look up. "You lit a holy water font on fire."
"Yeah. Certified."
And for the first time all week, I felt… okay.
Not certain.
But steady.
Like maybe some baptisms don't come with water.
Just a bucket.
A towel.
And a friend who never quite tells you the whole story—because he knows the best ones are the kind you clean slowly, layer by layer, together.