Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
CALLA
FIVE YEARS AGO
I was sitting in the locker room, still in my scrubs, scrolling through messages on my phone while I waited for the OR to be prepped for my next case.
Most of it was the usual noise. Department memos.
Scheduling updates. A reminder about the mandatory compliance training I'd been ignoring for two weeks.
Then I saw the subject line.
Fellowship Opportunity - International Trauma Consortium.
I opened it without thinking, expecting another mass email or another generic recruitment pitch that would end up in my trash folder within seconds.
I read it once. Then again, slower this time to be certain I'd misunderstood something.
I hadn't.
They were offering me a position. Not an invitation to apply.
But an actual position, extended directly to me based on my research and surgical outcomes over the past three years.
Two years at one of the most prestigious trauma programs in Europe, fully funded, while working with surgeons whose papers I'd been citing since medical school.
It was the opportunity people spent their entire careers hoping for.
And eight thousand miles away from Cassian…
I closed my laptop and pressed my palms flat against my thighs, forcing myself to breathe.
I should tell him. That was the obvious answer—the right answer.
We’ve always been honest with each other about career opportunities and made decisions together.
That was the agreement we made when we got married.
Partnership. No one's career mattered more than the other's.
We would figure things out together, compromise when necessary, and support each other's ambitions even when it was hard.
But this felt different.
This felt like a choice that couldn't end well no matter what I decided.
If I told Cassian about the fellowship and turned it down, I would resent him eventually.
Maybe not immediately, maybe not obviously, but the bitterness would grow.
Every time I hit a ceiling in my career, while I watched colleagues surpass me because they'd taken risks I hadn't, I would think about this moment.
I would think about what I gave up, and I would blame him for it—even though the choice would have been mine.
If I told him and he encouraged me to go, I would leave anyway.
We would be apart for two years, squeezing in video calls at odd hours and visits that would never be frequent enough.
Our marriage would crumble under the weight of it.
I had seen it happen to other couples, their relationships dissolve across time zones until there was nothing left but polite emails and divorce papers.
But I could say no. I could decline the fellowship, delete the email, and pretend it never existed. Cassian would never have to know.
Except I wasn't sure I was capable of burying something this significant without it poisoning everything around it.
I pulled out my phone and stared at Cassian's contact. His face smiled up at me from the screen, a photo I'd taken on our last vacation, his hair windswept and his eyes bright with laughter. He looked happy in that picture.
We'd been happy.
My thumb hovered over the call button.
One tap. That's all it would take. I could tell him right now, hear his voice, and let him help me figure out what to do.
But my thumb wouldn't move.
Because I already knew what I wanted. I knew from the moment I read the email and felt the surge of excitement that I couldn't quite suppress no matter how hard I tried.
I wanted this fellowship. I wanted it more than I'd wanted anything in years—maybe more than I'd ever wanted anything in my professional life.
And I was terrified of what that said about me.
I put my phone away and went back to work.
I spent the next three hours in surgery to save a fifty-three-year-old man with abdominal aortic aneurysm, brought in by ambulance after collapsing at a grocery store.
His wife had been with him, clutching his hand until the paramedics pulled her away.
I saw her face in the waiting room before I scrubbed in.
There was fear and desperate hope in her eyes.
This was why I'd become a surgeon. This moment, this responsibility, this chance to pull someone back from the edge of death. Not for the gratitude or the recognition. For the work itself.
I saved him.
It took six units of blood, and a repair that pushed the limits of my technical abilities, but I did. When I finally stepped out of the OR, with my shoulders aching and my scrubs damp with sweat, his wife was still waiting. Still hoping. Still praying.
"He's stable," I told her. "The next twenty-four hours are critical, but he made it through surgery."
She burst into tears, unable to contain her relief. "Thank you," she managed. "Thank you, thank you, thank you so much."
I nodded and escaped before she could say anything else. I was never good at these moments, the raw emotion of families confronting mortality. I could handle the surgery, the blood, the chaos, and the pressure of holding someone's life in my hands.
But the gratitude afterward, the tears and the hugs and the desperate need to connect, that always left me feeling exposed in ways I didn't know how to manage.
I changed out of my scrubs and drove home, my mind still circling the fellowship.
Cassian had beaten me there. When I walked through the door, the smell of garlic and tomatoes and something rich and savory made my stomach growl despite everything.
He was standing at the stove, stirring something in a large pot, a dish towel thrown over his shoulder.
He'd already changed out of his work clothes into jeans and a worn t-shirt, his feet bare against the tile floor.
Soft and acoustic music played from his phone on the counter, something he listened to when he was relaxed and happy.
"Hey." He turned when he heard me, his face breaking into a smile. "Perfect timing. Dinner's almost ready."
"You cooked."
"I did." He abandoned the stove long enough to cross the kitchen and kiss me, his lips warm and familiar. "Nonna's pasta recipe. The real one, not the shortcut version."
That recipe took hours. He only made it when he had time and energy to do it properly and wanted to create something special for us.
"What's the occasion?" I asked.
"Is there a need for an occasion?" He handed me a glass of wine. "I had a good day. I wanted to share it with my favorite person."
My favorite person. I took a longer sip of wine than necessary, using the glass to hide my face.
"Tell me about your day," I said, because focusing on him was easier than facing what was in my own head.
We sat down to dinner with candles lit and wine poured. The pasta was as good as he'd promised. Cassian talked about his cases, his residents, and a scheduling conflict he'd finally resolved with the chief of surgery. He told me about a first-year who'd fainted during a routine appendectomy.
"Poor kid went down like a ton of bricks," he said, laughing. "One minute he's holding a retractor, the next minute he's on the floor. He kept apologizing while the nurses were trying to get him flat. I had to tell him three times that it happens to everyone."
I smiled at the right moments and asked follow-up questions. I played the part of the engaged wife, while my mind calculated time differences, flight costs, and how many hours we could reasonably expect to video call per week.
Eight thousand miles. Fourteen hours difference. Two years.
The numbers kept running through my head like a terrible equation I couldn't solve.
"You okay?" Cassian asked eventually, his fork pausing halfway to his mouth.
"Just tired."
"Long day?"
"They're all long days."
It wasn't a lie, exactly. Just an incomplete truth—a half-answer I'd gotten too good at giving to avoid conversations I wasn't ready to have.
Cassian studied me for a moment, his green eyes searching my face for something I hoped he wouldn't find. Then he reached across the table and took my hand, his thumb tracing circles on my palm.
"Want to watch something mindless and fall asleep on the couch?"
I faked a smile. "That sounds perfect."
We did exactly that. We played an action movie neither of us paid attention to.
I curled against Cassian's side with my head on his shoulder, his arm around me, and his fingers tracing absent patterns on my arm.
The rhythm was soothing and hypnotic. I let myself sink into it and pretend that everything was normal and I wasn't carrying a secret that could destroy us.
His heartbeat was steady under my ear—strong and reliable, like everything else about him. Cassian had always been my anchor and the calm center I orbited when everything else felt chaotic and overwhelming. He grounded me the way I'd never learned to ground myself.
And I was considering leaving him for two years to chase a dream he didn't even know existed.
What kind of person did that make me?
I knew the answer. I became the same person my mother had been afraid I would become—ambitious to the point of selfishness, so focused on achievement that I forgot how to value the people who loved me.
My mother had given up her career for my father, followed him to a new country, and built a life around his dreams. She'd never complained. Not once.
I wasn't capable of that. I'd known it since I was young and felt it in the way I pushed and strived and refused to settle for anything less than excellence. My mother had called it drive. My father called it determination.
I called it what it was: selfishness dressed up in acceptable clothes.
"I love you," Cassian murmured against my hair.
The words made my stomach turn.
I swallowed, feeling the thorns stuck in my throat. "I love you too."
I did. That was the worst part. I loved him completely, desperately, in ways I didn't know how to express. And I was still going to hurt him.
The email sat in my inbox, unanswered, for three more days.
I reread it at least a dozen times. In the locker room before surgery. In my car during lunch breaks. At three in the morning, the glow of my phone illuminated Cassian's peaceful face beside me. Each time, I told myself I would make a decision. Each time, I closed the email and did nothing.
Felice called on Saturday. "You sound weird. What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Calla."
"It's nothing. Work stuff."
She fell silent. I could picture her on the other end of the line, probably sitting at her drafting table with a pencil tucked behind her ear, seeing through my deflection.
"When you're ready to talk about whatever 'nothing' actually is," she said finally, "I'm here. You know that, right?"
"I know."
I didn't call her back. I didn't tell her about the fellowship, the same way I hadn't told Cassian. Sometimes some secrets were easier to carry alone, even when the weight of them threatened to break you.
The deadline for response was approaching. And I knew I had to decide.
On Sunday morning, while Cassian was out for his run, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open and typed my reply.
Dear Dr. Larsson,
Thank you for the incredible opportunity. I am honored to accept the position with the International Trauma Consortium.
I stared at the words for a long time, my finger hovered over the send button. I pressed it before I could change my mind and the confirmation email arrived within minutes.
I closed my laptop and sat in the silence of our kitchen, surrounded by evidence of the life Cassian and I had built together—our matching coffee mugs in the dish rack, the photos on the refrigerator, the worn spot on the couch where we always sat, the cushions shaped by years of our bodies pressed together.
This was my life. Our life together, built on love and compromise and a thousand small moments that added up to something I'd thought was permanent.
And I had just agreed to leave all of this without telling my husband.