37 Xavier
37
XAVIER
L EAVING WAS DIFFERENT today. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant kissing her goodbye felt like having a panic attack.
My soul took root every time I came there. It dug down and anchored me and I’d stayed so long this time I’d had to tear myself in half to leave. Being two thousand miles away was unnatural. It went against every instinct I had.
She needed me. I loved her and she needed me.
But I couldn’t take another day away. Hank had already covered for me so I could stay for the funeral. He couldn’t do two days in a row. I hadn’t even given him a walk-through of the clinic before I left. I’d just run out of there when Samantha called about her grandmother. We’d been closed the week after Christmas—I’d planned to go to the cabin, but I ended up in California instead. Now I had to get back. So I picked the latest flight I could find to give me as much time with Samantha and I left.
I had no choice but to go home.
Correction. To go to Minnesota.
Because home was where she was. Minnesota was just where I worked now. Even with the guys there, it felt like a place I was tethered to by obligation.
For all the effort it took to get to where I was in life, to have the things I had—my own clinic, a staff, people who relied on me, the giant middle finger all this sent to my parents—a very real part of me wished I’d never done any of it because the things I owned now owned me. I could never walk away from it now without it ruining my life.
Even though going back to it without her felt like the same thing.