16. Ethan
ETHAN
L ong before I open my eyes, I know she’s gone.
Not gone in the way that means vanished or fled, but gone from this bed, this warmth, this quiet cocoon we built between midnight and morning.
It’s the absence that wakes me first—not cold sheets or silence, but the hollow pull of space where she should be.
I reach for the spot where she slept, still faintly warm, the scent of her skin clinging to the cotton in a way that makes my throat tighten.
The fire’s burned low, little more than glowing ash in the hearth, and the cabin has settled into that hushed rhythm it only finds at dawn.
I sit up slowly, my joints stiff, back still aching in that way it always does after years hunched over operating tables.
I breathe deeply, steadying myself with the scents of cedar and smoke and the faint trace of her, and for a long moment, I don’t move.
A soft sound pulls me back—a rustle, a hiss of steam—and I know exactly where she is.
I find her in the kitchen, haloed in soft morning light, barefoot in my shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows as she pours coffee into one of the chipped porcelain mugs my mother collected decades ago.
There’s something almost sacred in the sight of her like this.
She fits here. That’s the part I can’t shake.
Not just in the room, but in the rhythm of it, moving through this space like it was always hers, like she’s always belonged.
When she glances up and sees me watching her, she doesn’t startle. She only lifts the mug slightly, offering it like a peace treaty. “I made coffee,” she murmurs, voice still husky from sleep. “Didn’t think you’d mind.”
I step into the room slowly, drawn more by the quiet tether between us than the caffeine. “I’d be insulted if you hadn’t.”
She passes me the cup, and when our fingers brush, the contact is warm. Familiar.
We ease into the morning with that same quiet intimacy, the kind that comes from shared silence rather than shared words.
It’s easy, deceptively so. She moves around the kitchen with an unspoken grace, pulling ingredients from the pantry while I light the stove.
There’s no need for direction. No need to talk through the steps.
She cracks eggs while I slice shallots, the kitchen filling with the scents of butter and smoke and something sweeter I can’t quite name.
“I’m still surprised at how well you cook,” she says at one point, eyeing the way I stir the pan with practiced care.
I glance at her. “You think a man makes it through fourteen-hour shifts without learning how to feed himself?”
Her laugh is soft. “Touché.”
And somehow, it spills from there. Stories, little pieces of who we used to be before the world came for us.
I talk about the hospital, about the years spent buried in anatomy texts and long nights shadowing trauma surgeons who had stopped believing in anything but the scalpel.
I tell her about the patient I lost in my third year of residency, a boy not much older than I had been when I first put on a white coat.
“He coded on the table,” I say quietly, setting the spatula down. “Internal bleed we didn’t catch fast enough. His parents were waiting just outside the OR. I walked out with blood on my hands and a lie on my tongue, because no one teaches you what to say when a life slips out from under yours.”
Ivy doesn’t interrupt. She doesn’t look away.
“I was supposed to go into politics,” I add after a beat, pouring coffee into her mug.
“Family money. Diplomatic lineage. The Cross name was built on marble estates and boardroom wars. But I grew up surrounded by men who would rather polish a lie than face the truth, and somewhere around seventeen, I realized I’d rather wield a scalpel than a signature. ”
Her expression softens, eyes tracing mine with something I can’t quite decipher. “Do they hate that you walked away?”
“My mother pretends I’m on sabbatical,” I say dryly. “My father stopped pretending anything a long time ago. He thinks saving lives is noble… for someone else’s son.”
I could stop there. I should. But something about the way she watches me—open, still, curious in a way that never feels performative—makes me want to hand her something real.
“You know, the Holts used to summer with us.”
That’s when her shoulders go still. She doesn’t look up, but her hand freezes over the rim of her cup, her thumb just hovering there.
I keep my voice even, as if I don’t notice the way her entire body just locked down.
“Daniel’s father and mine sat on a dozen boards together.
Mergers, land development, political funding.
There was a time I couldn’t go to a holiday gala without tripping over one of the Holt boys in a pressed navy blazer and a haircut they all seemed to share.
Daniel was the youngest—always watching, always listening, even when no one wanted him around. ”
She still doesn’t move.
This time, it’s evident that I’m on the right track, even though Ivy still hasn’t named any names or told me anything about her past in a way that should make me suspect Daniel of being a jackass.
“I didn’t like him. Not then, not now. Something about him always felt calculated. Too quiet, too observant. My mother used to tell me that kind of silence meant good manners. But even at fifteen, I knew better.”
My voice lowers, memory bleeding in.
“There was this one night. Summer estate in Chesapeake. I was seventeen. Daniel showed up late to a bonfire, smelling like scotch and ash, even though he was just a kid. And when he laughed, it wasn’t right.
Not like someone who was having fun. Like someone who was practicing.
I remember thinking—God, this boy’s going to be dangerous one day.
That was the first time I ever thought something and prayed I was wrong. ”
I glance up. Ivy is staring into her coffee like it might offer her a way out. “I dated him for a while.”
I nod slowly. “Yeah. Drew and I weren’t fans.”
“You never said anything.”
“Didn’t seem like my place.”
She’s quiet again.
But it’s not the kind of quiet that invites comfort. It’s the kind that closes doors. The kind that drops drawbridges and locks the bolts twice.
I lean forward a little, bracing my elbows on the table, trying not to make her feel cornered.
“You don’t have to tell me more,” I say quietly, watching the way her jaw tightens, the way her hands have stopped moving altogether. “But I know that look, Ivy. And whatever happened between you two, it left a mark.”
She looks up at me, eyes sharp now, not angry, not hurt—just resolute.
“You don’t understand,” she says, and it’s not cruel, not cutting, but I hear the weight of it, the distance she’s trying to put back between us, brick by brick.
“I think we should head back.”
I straighten where I’m standing, coffee cooling in my hand, the fire low behind me. My chest is sore with disappointment, but maybe I brought this on myself by bringing up too much, too soon. In reality, I’m worried about what could happen if Ivy keeps hiding things from me.
“Back to the city?”
She nods once, not looking up from the countertop where she’s slowly folding the same dishtowel over and over again like it’s the only thing holding her together.
“Ivy,” I say carefully, setting the mug down. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
I cross to her, slow but firm, stopping just short of touching her.
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m not doing anything,” she says lightly, the smile tugging at her lips all wrong, like it’s been stitched there. “We just… needed a break, right? Now we’ve had it.”
I reach for her wrist, not to hold her, just to anchor her back to the moment, but she pulls away so quickly it feels like a slap.
She turns before I can speak, walks past me, and starts gathering her things with the kind of precise, mechanical focus I’ve only ever seen in grief.
I know that rhythm. I’ve lived it. I’ve performed it after funerals, after patient deaths, after the nights when the OR fell silent and no one had the guts to say the name of the person we lost.
It’s the rhythm of someone locking the door behind their own heart.
“Ivy,” I try again, stepping into the doorway of the bedroom where she’s folding her jeans, zipping her bag, too fast, too sharp. “If this is about last night?—”
She shakes her head.
“No. It’s not.”
And even though this is on me, this is about what I just told her and expected her to tell me, I want her to talk about it. I want her to let me help before it’s too late. “Then tell me what it’s about.”
She unzips her duffel with a single motion and tosses a sweatshirt inside. Her voice doesn’t crack. It doesn’t even tremble. “It’s about what’s smart. I shouldn’t have stayed. That’s on me.”
There’s something brutal in the way she says it. As if she’s giving a medical diagnosis with no interest in the patient.
I move closer. This time, I do reach for her hand.
“Ivy, talk to me.”
But she’s already pulling on her coat, eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder.
“I don’t need to talk, Ethan. I need to go.”
The silence that stretches after that sentence is the kind I used to hate during surgery—when a monitor flatlined and no one wanted to be the first to say the word “Code.”
I step back. Nod once.
“Alright,” I say, my voice low. “Get your things. I’ll pack up.”
We don’t speak as we leave the cabin, and the silence that falls between us isn’t gentle or comforting or anything close to peaceful.
I hold the door open for her even though she doesn’t ask me to, still absurdly protective even now, watching the way her hand tightens around the strap of her bag, her eyes flicking once toward the trees, not like she’s taking them in but like she’s already erasing them from her memory.
She climbs into the passenger seat without a word, her jaw set and her gaze fixed on something far beyond the pines, and when I slide in beside her and start the engine, I pretend not to notice the way she leans away just slightly, not enough to accuse her of retreating, but enough that I feel the loss of her warmth like a physical thing.
We drive. The tires whirr beneath us, the forest rising like a cathedral of verdant stillness on either side, and still she says nothing, her arms folded across her chest and her fingers gripping the sleeve of her coat like she’s bracing herself for impact.
I watch her from the corner of my eye, studying the shape of her in the morning light—the curve of her neck, the tension in her mouth, the way her body refuses to settle into the seat, like even here, even with me, she doesn’t believe she’s safe.
And I know that look. I’ve seen it in patients waking from anesthesia, eyes wild with pain they can’t name, still fighting battles their bodies haven’t recovered from yet.
I’ve seen it in the children of addicts, in the wives of dead soldiers, in the mirror on days when I remember how many people I couldn’t save.
She’s building a wall right now, stone by stone, quick and clean and practiced, the kind of wall that doesn’t crumble with begging or softness or even truth, and the worst part is, I can tell she thinks she’s protecting me.
As if I haven’t spent a lifetime walking into the fire.
As if I didn’t choose her, knowing full well that she was already burning.
I want to tell her that I’ve carried more than this.
That the blood under my fingernails and the ghosts I keep company with haven’t made me run from the things that matter.
I want to remind her of what it felt like last night, the way her body opened under mine, the way she trembled when she whispered my name into my mouth like it meant something more than surrender.
But none of that will reach her right now, not while she’s retreating into herself with that terrifying grace, not while she’s pretending that what we shared was temporary, a lapse in logic instead of the truth it revealed.
So I don’t speak. Instead, I watch the way the road curves ahead, how the trees thin and the land flattens as we near the outskirts of the city, and I wait, knowing this is the moment she expects me to let go.
Because what she doesn’t know—what she has never understood—is that I don’t let go of the things I want. I never have.
Not when I walked away from the kind of family legacy men sell their souls for just to prove that I could build something with my own hands instead of coasting on inherited power.
Not when I left behind the manicured halls and country club politics of the Cross family name, trading them for blood-stained scrubs and sleepless nights and the kind of respect you can only earn when no one hands it to you first.
And not now, especially not when I’ve seen what’s behind the mask, not when I’ve tasted the truth beneath her silence.
My jaw tightens as the skyline sharpens in the distance, each mile drawing us closer to the life she’s trying to hide from and the man I am no longer willing to be. I can feel the words stacking in my chest, ready to strike, ready to shatter the quiet she's trying to use like a shield.