Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
TAY
“I’ll fucking kill him.”
“Rory.”
“No, I will.” Woolen light trickled from the window across the kitchen tiles. Rory took three steps to the right, stopped by the counter, turned, and walked the same three steps back. “Dude made me a promise. He broke it.”
My head was pounding to the beat of some faraway marching band. “A promise?”
“That he wouldn’t send you back looking like—” Rory gestured at the way I was slumped over the table, listlessly poking at a bowl of leftover rice and veggies when all I really wanted was to sleep. Maybe never get up again. “Like this.”
“He doesn’t love me, Rory.” The words caught in my throat. “It’s not a crime.”
“Yes it is.” Their voice was fierce.
I exhaled a laugh that tasted bitter. “Yeah, no. Not last time I checked.”
“It should be.” Rory waved a sponge around. Once I’d run them through the abrupt end to my imaginary honeymoon, they’d stopped halfway through doing the dishes to pace like an outraged cat.
I set my fork down and dragged a hand through my greasy hair. Everything about me felt greasy, down to the very core. “Still a no.”
“Tay.” Rory dropped into the chair across from me, the sponge drooling dishwater onto our table. “Look—if love scares him, fine. I mean, no—not really. But, okay. Forgivable. Sprinting off like his dick’s on fire, though? Big fat no.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
I would be. Even if it didn’t exactly feel like it right now.
“You absolutely will be.” Rory sounded about ten times more convinced than I felt, their hair sticking up in stubborn hedgehog spikes. “But that’s not the point. The point is that he damn near fawned over you all week—and don’t tell me he didn’t because it’d be a lie.”
Had he?
Telling me I was beautiful, kissing me like I mattered. Listening. The way he’d moved with me, how he’d let me take him apart, trusted me like no one before.
Yeah.
“I…” My throat felt dry. “I guess he kind of did.”
“Exactly.” Deeply satisfied. “So he’s got no fucking right to act shocked and appalled at the idea that you caught feelings. Fucker.”
I rubbed at my tired face. “I think he was just… overwhelmed. Fresh off the flight, a patient of his just got a heart and they called him in. He’s not exactly great with emotions and vulnerability. Not part of the surgical curriculum, let’s face it. Plus, he’s got family baggage.”
“So fucking what?” Rory was just a beacon of eloquence today, weren’t they?
I couldn’t work up even a hint of amusement, too drained to feel much at all.
“Sure, patient emergency, big deal. Still. He doesn’t feel the same?
Least he could’ve done is send a ‘Talk later’ from the cab. Stop making excuses for him.”
Something in me snagged like faulty wiring.
Rory was… not wrong, maybe. Dean must be in the OR right now, would be in a mental zone where time and space ceased to exist. But before, yeah—it would have taken him a minute to send some kind of reassurance from the cab, even just a couple of words.
And instead… nothing. My phone silent but for my sister’s string of increasingly worried messages that I didn’t know how to handle right now.
Maybe I’d let Rory reply; the two of them could bond over all the ways in which they wanted to take Dean down.
I pushed the bowl away and breathed in, out.
Let myself really think about that awful moment—the harsh lighting and low ceilings, the baggage carousel whirring next to me, tangled voices and Dean pulling into himself, like shutters coming down.
“I need to go.” How he’d turned away and hadn’t looked back.
“You’re…” I bit the inside of my cheek, leaned into a quiet spark of anger. “You’re right. I—yeah. He could’ve sent something. Anything.”
Rory leaned forward, halfway across the table. “Repeat after me: I deserve better.”
“I…” My pulse thudded in the quiet space between us. “Yeah. I do.”
“Say it.”
I inhaled, chest tight. “I deserve better.” The words scraped loose another spark of anger, sent it upward like embers floating from a fire—not quite white-hot, no, but stubborn and defiant.
“Yes.” Rory sat back and crossed their arms. “You were honest, he couldn’t handle it. That’s his issue, not yours.”
For a beat, I closed my eyes and focused on the slow, sad thudding of my heart. It fucking hurt—falling without a safety net, nothing there to stop the crash. But I was alive, breathing.
And I deserved better.
I opened my eyes. “Yeah. I’m not chasing someone who doesn’t want me.”
“Good. Hold on to that.” Rory rose, went to the sink, and returned with a glass of water for me.
“Drink this. Then take a nap, okay? I’ll wake you up in an hour, we’ll get some dinner going together, watch a stupid movie with lots of car chase scenes and people taping up their own bullet wounds.
Might even let you talk about all the ways in which that violates medical reality. ”
“You’re the best.” I accepted the water and caught Rory’s wrist for a squeeze. “Seriously—thank you.”
“You’d do the same for me.”
“Yeah. I’d help you hide the body, any body, at three in the morning.”
Their tight expression softened, shoulders easing. “I know. Now, come on, babe. Rest a little. I’ll handle your sister—Ley and I have lots to talk about.”
I got up, briefly steadied myself with a hand flat against the tabletop, the familiar wood grain blurring in front of my eyes.
A deep breath, and I turned to trudge down the hallway.
My suitcase sat half-open by the bed, probably filled with island sand and salt-stiffened clothes. I kicked it shut. Tomorrow.
The room was chilly, winter air sneaking in through the weathered frames of old windows. I shucked my hoodie but not the rest of my clothes, too tired for proper post-travel hygiene, and slipped under the covers just as Rory ducked in with my refilled water glass and some ibuprofen.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
They petted my forehead with a smile, then left without another word.
Silence.
I let my eyes drift shut, exhaustion weighing me down to the very marrow of my bones. In my head, phantom waves whispered like the echo of a broken dream.
Forty-eight hours of silence. Guess I had my answer.
The overhead lights seemed to flicker in time with my thoughts—harsh and clinical, a little faded with history. I leaned into the tight hold I had on a metal pole as the train swayed toward the hospital, rereading my sister’s text from earlier.
He looks at you like fireworks in those pics you sent. You deserve a follow-up, apology, explanation—pick AT LEAST one.
Yeah, no argument there—I did. But it was Ley’s second message that tripped me up, not sure how to respond.
What if he DOES apologize?
The overly sweet aftertaste of an energy drink lingered on my tongue, caffeine humming in my blood along with something that might be sadness or anger—wasn’t sure I could really tell the difference anymore. What if he did?
I don’t know
I erased the words and replaced them with something a little more honest.
Depends how. He made me feel about half a foot tall so…
Three typing dots, then Ley’s response came in.
So he better make you feel like a giant.
For a week, he had—raised me up, made me feel like I was floating three inches above the ground. “Anyone would be lucky to kiss you.” Maybe that’s why it had hurt even more, being jerked back into the cold glare of reality where I was just… me. Really not that special.
The train pulled to a halt, doors whooshing open.
I pocketed my phone and stepped out onto the platform, into a midday crush of bodies that swept me up and carried me toward the exit.
The hospital loomed against a winter sky doused in shades of gray.
I swiped my badge, waiting for the beep before I pushed inside.
Back to work. Where I might run into Dean without warning, simply by turning a corner.
He was on a different floor, though—pediatric surgery was on the second, CT on the fifth. No reason we’d meet by accident if I dodged the staff cafeteria and the rooftop he’d shown me. Then again… why the fuck should I?
I had nothing to be ashamed of.
Two ventilators, one warming blanket, six people, and a four-year-old who seemed tiny under the overhead lights. I inhaled through my mask, smelled warmed plastic and antiseptic.
“Your turn, Dr. Carter.” Even through layers of PPE, Dr. Wilson’s voice carried a faint smile. Dreadlocks tucked into a cheerful cap printed with cartoon hearts, she’d nodded at me ten minutes ago at the scrub sink. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Here goes nothing.
I stepped into the space she made for me. God—the hole between the child’s two lower heart chambers was no bigger than a pencil eraser. It would need purse-string sutures, thin as spider silk.
Breathe. Focus. You trained for this.
And yet doubt crept in like fog around the edges of a half-closed window, my palms tingling. Then the memory of Dean’s voice slid in, uninvited—words low and certain, the ebb and swell of waves beneath us. “Whatever you choose, you’ll be good at it. Just don’t lose your humanity.”
Fuck him. But also… God. Somehow, it helped. So I pinned it to the back of my mind and bent closer, gave myself a moment to marvel at this small life that, right now, was my responsibility.
All right. You can do this.
One stitch. I anchored the first loop. Exhaled. Then the second. Inhaled. And the third. Hands as steady as the beeping of the monitor.
I stepped back.
“Clean,” Dr. Wilson said—the surgical equivalent of a glowing review. I kept breathing as she prepared to close, skin tingling all the way down to my toes, belly filled with relief like helium. I’d done it. I hadn’t fucked it up.
“You’ll be great.”
Outside the OR, my gown and gloves stripped off, Wilson handed me a bottle of water. “Take thirty, Carter. Get some air. I want you sharp for the next one.”