Back to You (You, Only You #2)

Chapter 1 Charlotte

There’s something curious about ‘being fine’: say it enough times, and the word stops meaning anything. It becomes a reflex, a placeholder, a verbal shrug you offer the world so it stops asking questions you don't want to answer.

I was fine.

Totally, completely, absolutely fine.

"Jenna, breathe," I said, my voice low as I guided the new nurse's trembling hands. She was holding a blood pressure cuff like it might sprout teeth and bite her. "Mr. Henderson's veins are tricky. You're looking for the bounce, not the river."

"The bounce?" Her eyes were wide, slightly panicked. Three weeks into her rotation, and she still couldn’t tighten the Velcro on a cuff without trembling.

"Here." I took her hand, repositioning it gently over the elderly man's papery skin. "Feel that? Right there. That's your target. Now inflate."

She followed my instructions, and I watched her shoulders slowly relax as the reading stabilized on the monitor.

"I got it," she breathed, with a hint of wonder in her voice.

"You got it," I confirmed. "See? You're not going to kill anyone today."

"That's... a low bar for success," she said, but she was smiling now.

"In the ER? That's the only bar that matters. Everything else is just paperwork." I stepped back, giving her space to finish up. "Page me if you need anything. And remember, confident hands. Patients can sense fear."

"That's terrifying."

"Welcome to nursing."

I moved away, my eyes already scanning the board. Ramirez, chest pain, waiting on troponin results. Miller, ankle fracture, needs casting. My brain sorted and prioritized automatically, a constant hum of triage running beneath every other thought.

At the central station, Sarah caught my eye as she handed off a chart to one of the residents. Her dark hair was escaping its ponytail, and she had the slightly manic look of someone who'd been running on coffee and adrenaline for about six hours too long.

"Henderson's BP is stabilizing," she reported. "Jenna got it on the third try. Only mild hyperventilation on her part."

"Progress."

"You're a saint for your patience with her. I would've taken over by the second attempt."

"That's because you're a control freak."

"I prefer 'efficiency enthusiast.'" Sarah tilted her head, studying me with the particular scrutiny of someone who'd worked beside me for three years. "You look like death, by the way. Gorgeous, professional death, but still. Death."

"Thanks. That's exactly the look I was going for."

"When did your shift end?"

I reached for the next chart, avoiding her eyes. "Recently."

"Charlotte."

"Fine. Three."

She glanced at the clock on the wall. 4:23 PM. "So you've been off the clock for almost ninety minutes, and you're still here because...?"

"I wanted to make sure Jenna didn't accidentally kill Mr. Henderson." I flipped open the chart, scanning the notes without really seeing them. "And Mrs. Gable's new medication cocktail isn't sitting right, so I wanted to flag that for the night shift."

"Uh-huh." Sarah plucked the chart from my hands and didn’t even look at it. "When did you eat lunch?"

The silence that followed was answer enough.

"Charlotte."

"I had a granola bar."

"When?"

"This morning. Seven-ish." I tried to take the chart back. She held it out of reach, which was annoying because she was two inches shorter than me and shouldn't have been able to manage it. "Sarah, I'm fine."

There was that word again. Fine. My constant companion. My favorite lie.

"You're not fine. You're running on fumes and pretending it's a personality trait." She softened slightly, her voice losing its edge. "Go home, Char. Eat something. Sleep. The ER will survive without you for twelve hours. I promise the building won't collapse."

"But what if it does and I'm not here?"

"Then we'll all die, and it won't be your problem anymore. Very freeing, really."

I laughed despite myself. "That's dark."

"I'm a nurse. Dark humor is a job requirement." She pointed toward the exit with the chart. "Go. That's an order."

"You can't give me orders. We're the same level."

"I'm older."

"By four months."

"Still counts. Go home. Eat food. Act like a person who values her own well-being for once in your life.

" She paused, then added with her rare calm manner, "You've been pushing hard lately.

Harder than usual. I'm not saying anything's wrong with that, but.

.. take a breath, okay? Before you forget how to. "

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that pushing hard was the only thing keeping me upright, that stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling.

But Sarah was looking at me with that expression: concern, and I was too tired to fight it.

"Fine," I said. "I'm going."

"Miracles do happen."

I gathered my things from my locker: jacket, bag, phone with a cracked screen I kept meaning to replace, and headed for the exit. The automatic smile I gave to a passing custodian felt thin and stretched, a gesture that didn't quite reach the cold fatigue behind my eyes.

And then I saw them.

They moved through the corridor like a slow, luminous cloud, parting the clinical bustle around them.

A young couple, late twenties maybe. The man was tall, cradling a bundle of white blanket in the crook of his arm with a tenderness that seemed to alter his very posture, making him both larger and more fragile at once.

The woman walked beside him, leaning into his side, one hand resting on his back. Her face was pale with exhaustion, dark smudges like bruises under her eyes, but those eyes... they glowed. They both did. It was a radiant, stunned, exhausted joy that seemed to generate its own gravity.

The father shifted the bundle, and a tiny, perfect hand emerged from the blanket, fingers splaying in a miniature stretch. A newborn. No more than a day or two old, judging by the pink, crumpled sweetness of that impossibly small fist.

The pit in my stomach got deep so fast, so sharp, I actually stopped walking.

It was a swift, violent puncture, a needle of pure, undiluted longing threading towards my heart. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum, an instinctive gesture, as if I could push the feeling back down through sheer force of will.

Great, I thought, with the kind of bitter humor that had become my usual reaction. Nothing like a surprise baby ambush to really cap off the day. Ten out of ten, would not recommend.

The sharpness faded, as it always did. But it didn't disappear. It never disappeared. It just transformed, settling into that familiar, dull throb I'd learned to carry. A heartbeat of absence, pulsing quietly within me.

"You okay?"

Sarah's voice. She'd followed me, apparently. Or maybe she'd been heading out too, and I'd been too lost in my own spiral to notice.

"Fine," I said automatically. The word tasted like cardboard. "Just tired."

She followed my gaze to the retreating couple, now turning the corner toward the maternity wing exit. Her expression shifted, perhaps with the particular understanding of someone who knew my history without me having to explain it.

"Char..."

"I'm fine," I repeated, more firmly this time. "Really. Just a long day."

She didn't push. That was the thing about Sarah. She knew when to back off. She just nodded, squeezed my arm once, and said, "Call me if you need anything. I mean it."

"I will."

I wouldn't. We both knew it. But the offer hung there anyway, a small kindness I filed away without knowing how to appreciate it.

I made it to my car in a hurry, and during the entire ride, all my mind could think about was the day that led me to this moment.

Seven months ago. My front door. The doorbell's chime still echoing in my ears.

Not Drew. A woman. Younger than me, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine, with soft brown hair and wide, anxious eyes that couldn't quite meet mine. Her posture was stiff, defensive, but one hand rested low and protective over the unmistakable curve of her belly beneath her winter coat.

"You must be Charlotte," she'd said, her voice too high, too tight. "I'm Chloe. I work with Drew. I think... I think we need to talk."

The world warped around me, shifted. Rearranged itself into a shape I'd been refusing to see for months.

I'd called him. My voice came out calm, eerily, terrifyingly calm. "You need to come home. Now."

Twenty minutes. That's how long it took for my marriage to officially end. He walked through the door, his face the color of ash, and he didn't look at Chloe. He looked at me.

And in his eyes, I didn't see conflict. I didn't see struggle or uncertainty or even guilt.

I saw resignation. The choice had already been made.

"I'm so sorry, Charlotte," he'd started, the words hollow as a script he'd rehearsed.

"How far along?" I'd interrupted, my gaze locked on that protective hand.

"Four months," Chloe whispered.

Four months.

Four months, while I'd been injecting hormones that left bruises on my thighs.

Four months while we'd stared at another single, cruel pink line on a plastic stick.

Four months, while I'd blamed my body, my stress levels, my age, my timing…

everything except the man who'd already found someone else to give him what I couldn't.

Seven years. Seven years of scheduled intimacy that felt like a medical procedure. Of hormone shots and fertility specialists and two-week waits that stretched like suspended grief. Of hope curdling into desperation, and desperation cooling into quiet, shared despair.

All of it ending on my doorstep in ten minutes, because Drew chose the clear, simple path to fatherhood over the complicated wreckage of us.

"I never meant for this to happen," he'd said, which was what people always said when they meant: I didn't mean to get caught.

"But it did happen," I'd replied. "And you’ve clearly chosen her."

He hadn't denied it. That was almost the worst part. He hadn't even tried to fight for us.

"She's pregnant, Charlotte. I can't just—"