Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Molly
“ I ’m here!” I call as I fly into my office. “I’m so sorry. I got held up and lost track of time.”
“No sweat, Mol.” Jordan Wyles, pediatric surgeon and the third in the years-long Ben, Jeremy, Jordan best friend trio, stands and hugs me. When he lets me go, I’m mauled by his fiancée, Allie.
“It’s so good to see you!” she squeezes me tightly. “I’m so sorry I missed the adoption turned engagement party yesterday. If it had been anything other than a heart transplant, I would have gotten someone to cover my shift.”
Allie is a pediatric heart surgeon and, after Hallie, Julie, and Emma, is my favorite person on the planet. She’s funny, brilliant, completely badass, and is the kind of effortless cool that speaks to me on a soul-deep level.
When she and Jordan told me they wanted to talk about some estate planning in advance of their upcoming wedding, I was quick to agree. We don’t see them as much as the rest of us see each other because of their insane hospital schedules, so any day I get more of them is a good day.
Seeing them is almost enough to make me forget about running into the former love of my life at my favorite coffee shop this morning. Almost. But not quite.
“Allie, you literally put a new heart into a kid’s tiny body. You’re forgiven for missing a party.” I throw my bags on the couch and flop down in my desk chair, tossing the bag of muffins on my desk.
I look at the two chairs opposite my desk and cringe at the stuff piled on them. I usually have meetings in the office we set up as a conference room to avoid clients seeing my particular brand of chaos, but best friends don’t count as clients in the traditional better hide my mess sense.
“Sorry about the mess. Just shove everything onto the floor. I’ll deal with it later.”
“Molly, I love you like a sister, but I have no idea how you function in this office.” Allie starts taking stuff off the chairs and organizing it onto my side table. In no time at all, the mess has been rearranged into orderly piles. I appreciate the effort, but the second I need to find something in one of those piles, they’ll be a disaster again. It’s just who I am. It works for me. My friends are mostly tolerant of it. Or, at the very least, they ignore it since they know I’ll never change.
Unexpectedly, Gabe’s face swims through my mind. He was more than tolerant of it. He embraced it with a cheerful acceptance that no one else in my life ever had. He never once asked me to clean up or to be anything other than what I was. He was good that way.
Ugh, I need to get him out of my brain. I wish fervently for another cup of coffee. I finished my peppermint latte in the car on the way to the office—the caffeine equivalent to eating my feelings.
As if I spoke the words into the universe, Julie swings into my office, a takeout tray of coffees in one hand.
“Good morning, friends. I brought coffee.”
“Jules, you are my favorite human today.” I breathe deeply as I take the cup she hands me.
Julie snickers. “That’s a little dramatic for just coffee, isn’t it?” She hands cups to Jordan and Allie and takes one for herself, sitting on the edge of my desk.
“You wouldn’t think so if you had the morning I had,” I grumble, taking a sip and hissing when the hot coffee burns my tongue. It’s a small price to pay because—caffeine.
Allie, who has a well-honed and very accurate gossip radar, perks up. “What happened this morning? And don’t tell me it was nothing because that was not a nothing voice.”
Jordan grins. “You should just tell her, Mol. My girl is nothing if not persistent. She’ll get it out of you eventually.”
He hooks a leg under Allie’s chair, pulling it close enough to tuck her under his arm. He must decide it’s not close enough because he stands, picks her up, and settles back down with her on his lap. She kisses the top of his head and wraps an arm around his neck. He looks up at her with a face so full of devotion and love my throat gets tight. Over the last year and a half, I’ve found myself surrounded by couples who are wildly in love, but they don’t have anything on Jordan and Allie. There are no two people in the world who love each other more than they do.
Gabe’s face invades my brain again. He loved me like that , I can’t help but think. I loved him like that too.
“I wouldn’t mind knowing myself,” Julie says, shifting on the desk to look at me. “You usually come into work with rainbows practically shooting out of your ass. Grumbling is a real change of pace for you.”
I give Jules a dirty look. “Don’t you have somewhere to be? Isn’t that why I’m handling Allie and Jordan’s planning instead of you? Not that I don’t want to do your planning,” I say to them.
Allie waves that away. “We appreciate you taking the time. I would appreciate even more if you would give us the tea.”
“I have a meeting,” Jules says, reaching into my open desk drawer for a bag of Reese’s Pieces I keep there and tearing it open. “But I came in to tell you that Gabe already called to get on your schedule. You have an eleven-thirty slot tomorrow, so I gave it to him. Is that okay? If it’s not, I can call him to cancel.”
“He didn’t waste any time,” I mutter. I take a deep breath and remind myself how good it felt to be open about this part of my life to my friends last night.
“I ran into him this morning. He walked into Coffee Tree right behind me.”
“Holy shit! What happened?” Jules asks.
“Wait a second, back the truck up.” Allie sits forward on Jordan’s lap and literally waives her hand between Jules and me. “Who is Gabe, why does he need a meeting, and why is he running into you in your favorite coffee shop?”
“Gabe is Gabriel Sullivan.”
Jordan looks at me, eyebrows shooting up. “Gabriel Sullivan, the famous tech guy who invented the phone that literally everyone in the world owns? Well, except for you, Mol. What the fuck is that even about anyway?”
I glance over at Allie, who makes a face at Jordan while Julie snorts out a laugh. “The very same one.”
“Holy shit, I love this day already.” Allie is practically rubbing her hands together with glee. “How do you know him, and what’s he doing here in our fair city?”
“Tell her and make it snappy, Mol. I have a meeting in ten minutes.”
I give her an unimpressed look. “Feel free to see yourself out. No one is handcuffing you to this desk.”
“Not to this desk, no.” Julie gives me a wry look and Jordan snickers.
“I always knew Asher was a kinky fucker.”
Julie grins at him. “How do you know Asher’s the kinky one?”
Jordan wraps his arms around Allie, pulling her back against him. “Touche, Jules. Tou-fucking-che.”
“Okay, well, back to Molly,” Allie demands.
I grab a bag of Reese’s Pieces for myself and toss a handful in my mouth. “Long story short, Gabe was my college boyfriend back when he was just a really smart guy who loved robots and superheroes and built three-thousand-piece Lego sets. We were in love. Like real, huge, be with you forever, you’re the only one for me kind of love. Towards the end of our senior year, his parents died in a helicopter crash, and he had to go home to take care of his sisters, who were eight and twelve at the time. I didn’t know what to do for him, and he didn’t know how to let me help. It tore us apart. I hadn’t seen him in ten years until he showed up at the office yesterday during the party.”
I suck in a breath and take another sip of coffee. I may have cried out the initial sadness and grief in the shower last night and been buoyed by his good-natured cheer this morning, but talking about it makes my heart gallop and my stomach clench.
“Fucking shit,” Allie whispers. “That is really good gossip, Molly. What did he want?”
Jules cackles. “He wants her. You should have seen his face when he looked at her.” She waves a hand at Allie and Jordan. “You two are the only people I’ve seen look at each other the way he was looking at her. Even Asher doesn’t look at me like that.”
Jordan puts a hand on Allie’s cheek, tipping her face to his and kissing her like they are alone in the room.
“I’ll always look at you like that,” he whispers when they break apart, dropping a kiss on her forehead before sitting back in his chair.
“Jesus, you two,” Julie groans. “Can you not be sickening for, like, five minutes?”
“No can do, Jules. Gotta show my girl how much I love her whenever I can.”
Allie snickers but her face is flushed, and her eyes still look a little dazed from that kiss. None of that stops her from grilling me.
“Okay, so he was looking at you like you’re the only girl for him yesterday. What happened this morning?”
“It was nothing.” My reaction is knee-jerk, and no one is here for my shit.
“It wasn’t nothing,” Julie and Allie say together, looking at each other and laughing.
I laugh too, and it’s the tension relief I need. “Okay, fine. It wasn’t nothing. He acted like he was so damn happy to see me.”
“Why couldn’t he have actually been happy to see you?” Julie asks. “You said it yourself—you guys were the love of each other’s lives. He’s here in Pittsburgh, and he came to this office looking for you. It’s not a huge leap that he would be happy to see you.”
“Ugh, I know. It just threw me. Last time I saw him, he was grieving and broken. And last night I cried my eyes out in the shower after I saw him. It’s taking my head a second to reconcile that Gabe with the cheerful puppy dog wearing an Avengers T-shirt, buying me coffee and muffins, telling me he moved to my neighborhood, and asking me to be his lawyer. And to figure out why I didn’t hate seeing him.”
“Fuck, he moved here?” Allie asks. “You should have led with that.”
“To your neighborhood? That seems a little stalkerish for my taste,” Jordan says.
“I really don’t think he knew. He seemed genuinely surprised that I live there too.”
“So, you talked?” Julie is now basically sitting cross-legged on my desk with her elbows on her knees.
“Oh, we talked. About basically nothing. We bantered like it hadn’t been a decade since we last spoke. And I almost fucking kissed him.”
“What?” Jules and Allie both yelp.
“Oh, you bet. I was so surprised to see him I stumbled backward, and he caught me before I fell. It was like he captured me in his force field or something. I couldn’t move back, and we kept getting closer and closer to each other. I swear, if the cashier didn’t call us over, I would have kissed him right in The Coffee Tree.”
“Well,” Julie huffs out. “I don’t even quite know what to say about that.”
“I do,” Allie says. “That’s some heavy attraction to still be there after ten years. I’m sure the two of you have all kinds of shit to work out, and you should deal with all of it. But Jesus. Ten years is a long fucking time to still be drawn to someone like that. Plus, I’m sure he’s great in bed. From all the interviews I’ve seen, he’s got the hot nerd thing in spades, and that is just so fucking sexy. He looks like he’d know exactly what to do.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I mumble, as Jordan pokes Allie in the side and whispers something in her ear that has her grinning and flushing at the same time.
Julie checks the clock on my desk and stands. “When he called to schedule the appointment, he said he was looking for a lawyer and he wanted that lawyer to be you. He was all polite and everything and even apologized for crashing the party. It seemed like the beginning of a good grovel.”
I let out a deep sigh. “He always was good at that.”
“Listen, I have to go to this meeting, but I’m on your side. If you want to meet with him and be his lawyer or get back together with him and live happily ever after, or some combination of the two, I’m on your side. If you decide that you never want to see his face ever again, I’ll call him back and cancel for you. If you decide at eleven twenty-five tomorrow that the meeting’s off, I’ll kick him out myself. I am solidly Team Molly.”
I tug on the bracelets around my wrist, thinking of Gabe’s crystal-clear blue eyes and the way they lit up when he looked at me. The way his ocean and pine scent wrapped itself around me made me feel more at home than I have in the ten years since I walked out of his house. The way my whole body buzzed with electricity when he touched me, and how easily he referenced the coffee dates we used to have in college, and the way he would always buy me three muffins because I was never good at making decisions and how much I liked it. I don’t know what he’s really doing here, but I am self-aware enough to know that if I don’t see this through—whatever this is—it will haunt me forever.
I lean back in my chair, relieved, in some way, to have come to at least some sort of decision.
“It’s fine, Jules. Don’t cancel the appointment. Whatever he has to say, I think I need to hear it.”
She nods and heads towards the door, calling, “I’ll be back later for more details about this morning,” behind her.
I turn to Allie and Jordan, who are still cuddled up on a single chair.
“Do you each want your own chair for the business portion of this meeting?” I ask dryly.
“Nah.” Jordan just squeezes Allie tighter. “I have a twenty-four hour shift starting at seven tonight, and Allie is on tomorrow. I’ll just keep her close now if it’s all the same to you.” He gives me a cheeky grin, and he’s too adorable for words.
“You do you. So, why don’t you tell me what you need from me?”
“It’s kind of…sensitive,” Allie says, glancing around like there’s someone to overhear her.
I get up and close my office door, then take the vacant chair next to them. “I know we’re friends, but now I’m also your lawyer. Everything you say in here is confidential. Unless you specifically tell me to share it, it stays here.”
“Okay,” Allie breathes a sigh of relief and glances back at Jordan. He gives her an encouraging nod.
“I know we made it seem like what we need is straightforward, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
I give her a reassuring smile. “There’s no one better at complicated than I am.”
“I know. I trust you. So, no one knows this, but over the past two years, I’ve been working on a medical device. It’s a little complicated, but the gist of it is that it’s a kind of patch made with human stem cells that can help heal the hearts of kids suffering from heart failure. I know it sounds a little like science fiction, but it’s not. It’s real, and it works, and one day it’s going to save thousands of children who would otherwise die of heart failure while they wait on the transplant list.”
“Allie,” I breathe, trying to grasp the enormity of what she’s telling me. “That’s incredible.”
“Isn’t it?” Jordan asks, looking at his fiancée with awe. “So many lives are going to be saved, and it’s all because of her.”
“So, tell me what you need from me.”
Allie hesitates for a second. Jordan runs a hand down her arm and her whole body relaxes. “Tell her, baby girl.”
“I’ve been working with an intellectual property lawyer to patent the device, and the patent just came through. As soon as it did, the hospital offered to buy the patent from me for, well, a shit ton of money.”
“Do you want to sell it to them?”
Allie nods. “I do. I can’t do anything with it on my own without a big institution to back me up. The Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh is a premier research institution, and they’ll do right by it. I trust them, and my IP lawyer looked over the deal and dealt with their people. It’s all on the up and up. People already bring their kids here from all over the world for treatment. This would be one more reason why. The reason I’m here is the money. It’s…well, it’s a fucking insane amount of money, and I want to make sure it’s handled properly from a tax standpoint and whatever the fuck else. We don’t really need it now, but one day we’ll have kids, and they’ll go to college and whatever. It’ll probably come in handy then. That’s your area of expertise, not mine.”
I nod. “It absolutely is, and I can help you. I’ll need copies of the patent and all the correspondence with the hospital. I assume the offer is in writing?”
“Yeah, it is. I brought some stuff with me, and I can have my IP lawyer send you all the rest.”
“Works for me. I’ll need you to sign an engagement letter to make this all formal and everything and give me permission to contact your IP lawyer. Once I get all the details from them, I can put together a plan for you, and we can meet again to talk about it.”
Allie lets out a sigh of relief and leans over to hug me. “Thanks, Mol. This has all been…a lot. And it’s been hard to keep it quiet.”
“I’ll take care of it. I’m really good at my job. But Allie, I’m fucking impressed. You’re amazing.”
“She is, isn’t she?” Jordan runs a hand over Allie’s hair and kisses her on the side of her head. “I’m definitely marrying up.”
He grins, and Allie leans back against him.
“Love you, baby girl. Proud of you,” he whispers in her ear, and I see her eyes go soft.
Watching them has me thinking of the blue-eyed guy who once whispered I love you in my ear and looked at me like I was his beginning and end.
And I’d be lying to myself if I said I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him again.