Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
CAMERON
A month later, and I still can't get Tally out of my mind. Her scent - Tom Ford Black Orchid with its heady notes of truffle and ylang-ylang - haunts me like a phantom, lingering in the collar of my white coat even after three washes. I bought a bottle at Nieman Marcus before leaving, keeping it on my nightstand in Sicily where I spray a single mist each morning, just so I can feel like she’s around.
Her eyes haunt me the most - Caribbean-clear blue-green that darkens when she laughed, with flecks of gold near the pupils that caught the light when she tilted her head just so.
The photo from the jazz club captures her mid-laugh, head thrown back, exposing the constellation of freckles across her collarbone.
I had it printed on archival paper, framed in burnished silver, and it's the first thing I see each morning on my nightstand next to my bed.
While I'm working, my mind narrows to the task at hand.
Twelve-hour shifts blur together in the makeshift clinics we've established in conjunction with the University Hospital of Palermo.
I clean wounds inflicted by smugglers, set bones broken during desperate escapes, and listen to traumatized Libyan refugees describe horrors in halting English or through our overworked translators.
Their eyes haunt me—hollow with suffering yet somehow still hopeful.
When a young man with cigarette burns across his back thanks me, or a mother squeezes my hand after I treat her fevered child, Tally's face recedes from my thoughts—though never completely.
When I get to my tent and stare at the picture of us—her raven-black hair with rainbow streaks falling across her shoulder, revealing her beautiful swan-like neck—I feel it.
I feel her warmth radiating through the glossy paper.
We were "together" for only thirty-eight days, but I know now that I felt drawn to her strongly from the moment I saw her across the crowded ballroom at Max and Celeste's first wedding, her light sapphire-emerald eyes catching the light as she laughed. And then again at Max and Celeste’s second wedding in England when, once again, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
That magnetic pull I felt wasn't some temporary infatuation. It was visceral and real, like a current running between us. But Tally apparently didn’t feel the same—I’ve sent twenty-seven unanswered texts and called her eleven times, desperate for a video call just to see those beautiful eyes again, to watch how they crinkle at the corners when she smiles—but my phone remains stubbornly silent.
So, the message is crystal clear. She wants nothing to do with me.
I've felt worse pain—when Alecia and Stephanie died, I thought I'd never breathe normally again.
But this ache where Tally used to be isn't trivial either. Here in Sicily, I’m treating refugees who watched their families murdered before enduring torture themselves.
Their suffering dwarfs mine, I know. But pain doesn't work like that, does it?
It can't be neatly ranked and filed. This particular hurt has its own signature, sharp and precise as a scalpel.
I really believed Tally might be my second chance.
Now there's just this hollow space where that hope used to live.