Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CALLA
FIVE YEARS AGO
We used to have Sunday mornings.
That was our rule, Cassian's and mine. No matter how brutal the week had been, no matter how many surgeries had run late or how many patients we'd lost, Sunday mornings belonged to us.
We'd sleep until the light forced us awake.
We'd make pancakes with too much butter, the way his grandmother used to.
We'd spread the newspaper across the kitchen table and read in comfortable silence, our feet tangled together under the chairs.
Small, ordinary things. The kind that felt like breathing.
This Sunday, I woke up to an empty bed.
The sheets beside me were cold, which meant Cassian had been up for a while. I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence of our apartment. No sizzle of butter in a pan. No quiet hum of music from his phone. Just stillness, heavy and wrong.
I found him in the kitchen. Not making pancakes. Just sitting at the table with a cup of coffee gone cold, staring at nothing.
He didn't look up when I came in.
I poured myself a cup from the pot and sat across from him. The coffee was bitter, hours old. I drank it anyway, needing the ritual of it, the normalcy.
"We need to talk," he said.
My stomach dropped. Those four words never meant anything good. In all my years of delivering bad news to patients' families, I'd learned to recognize the prelude to devastation. The careful breath before the blow.
"Okay."
Cassian looked at me, and the exhaustion in his eyes was so deep it seemed carved into his bones. He'd lost weight these past weeks. I'd noticed but hadn't said anything, too consumed by my own turmoil to address his.
"I don't know how to do this anymore," he said.
"Do what?"
"This. Us." He wrapped his hands around his cold coffee cup, knuckles pale.
"The constant negotiating. The feeling like I have to choose between supporting you and building something that matters to me.
The way we keep circling the same argument without ever finding solid ground.
" He ran a hand through his hair, and I noticed it was unwashed.
Cassian, who showered every morning without fail. "I'm tired, Calla."
My throat closed around the words I wanted to say. "So am I."
"I don't want to be the reason you turn down the fellowship. But I also don't want to spend two years on different continents pretending the distance isn't slowly killing us."
"What are you saying?"
Cassian met my eyes. His were red-rimmed, the green dulled by sleeplessness. By grief, I realized. He was already grieving.
"I'm saying maybe we're trying to force something that doesn't fit anymore."
I wanted to argue. To fight. To prove him wrong with logic and passion and the sheer force of my will. But the words died before they reached my mouth. Because somewhere deep down, in the place I'd been avoiding for weeks, I'd been thinking the same thing.
"I love you," I said. My voice cracked on the last word, splitting open like a wound.
"I know." His face contorted briefly before he pulled it back under control. "I love you too. That's not the problem."
"Then what is?"
"Timing. Geography. The fact that we're both trying to build careers that don't leave room for compromise." He reached across the table and took my hand. His fingers were cold, trembling slightly. "We're drowning, Calla. And I don't know how to save us."
My hand sat limp in his. I should squeeze back, should offer comfort, should do something. But my body had stopped responding to commands. Everything felt numb, like I was watching this conversation happen to someone else.
"What do we do?" I whispered.
"I don't know."
We sat there as the morning light crept across the kitchen floor, two people who loved each other and had no idea how to make that love enough.
I thought about our wedding. The olive branches overhead. The vows we'd written ourselves, promises about honesty and partnership and choosing each other even when it was hard. I'd meant every word. I still meant them.
But meaning something and being able to deliver on it were two different things.
"Maybe we take some time," I said finally. "Figure out what we really want instead of just reacting to offers and opportunities."
"Time apart?"
"I don't know. Maybe." I pulled my hand back, wrapping my arms around myself. The kitchen felt cold, though the thermostat read seventy-two. "I can't think right now. Everything feels impossible."
Cassian looked like he wanted to argue. Wanted to tell me we could figure it out, that love would find a way, that we were stronger than this. But he just nodded, his shoulders slumping with a defeat that mirrored my own.
"Okay," he said. "We'll take time."
Neither of us acknowledged what "time" really meant. Neither of us was ready to say the word "divorce" out loud.
But it was there, waiting in the silence between us. Patient. Inevitable.
That afternoon, I went for a walk.
I couldn't stay in the apartment. Couldn't breathe in a space that suddenly felt too small and too empty at the same time, the walls pressing in while the rooms echoed with absence. I grabbed my jacket and left without telling Cassian where I was going. He didn't ask.
My feet carried me to the park where he'd proposed three years earlier. I didn't plan to come here. Didn't consciously choose this destination. But my body remembered what my mind tried to forget, and before I knew it, I was standing in front of the bench overlooking the lake.
I sat down.
The trees overhead were the same. The water was the same, gray-green and rippling in the afternoon breeze. Even the ducks looked familiar, paddling past in their eternal, untroubled circles.
Everything was the same. Everything except us.
Cassian had been so nervous that day. He'd had a whole speech prepared, pages of notes he'd rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror for a week. I'd found the drafts later, crumpled in his desk drawer, each version more elaborate than the last.
But when the moment came, he'd forgotten all of it. We'd been eating sandwiches on this very bench, and he'd suddenly gone quiet. Then he'd pulled out the ring, hands shaking so badly he nearly dropped it, and asked me point-blank.
"Will you marry me? I had a speech, but I forgot it. Just say yes. Please."
I'd laughed so hard I'd nearly choked on my sandwich. Then I'd said yes.
That felt like a lifetime ago. A different version of us, younger and stupider and so convinced that love would be enough.
I pulled out my phone and stared at my contacts. I needed to talk to someone. Needed to say the words out loud before they suffocated me.
I called Felice.
"Hey," she answered on the second ring. "What's wrong?"
"How do you know anything's wrong?"
"Because you're calling me on a Sunday afternoon instead of being disgustingly domestic with your husband. And I can hear it in your voice. You sound like you've been crying."
I hadn't cried. I didn't cry in front of people, and I couldn't seem to cry alone. The tears were there, trapped somewhere behind my sternum, but they wouldn't fall.
"Cassian and I just talked about separating."
Silence on the other end. Long enough that I checked to make sure the call hadn't dropped.
Then: "Oh, Calla."
"I don't know what to do." The words tumbled out, faster now, escaping before I could lock them back down.
"I love him. But I also want this fellowship.
And he wants his program at Obsidian. And we're both too stubborn to ask the other one to give anything up.
" I wiped my eyes roughly, though they were still dry. "How did we get here?"
"You didn't do anything wrong," Felice said gently. "You're just two people with big dreams who met at the wrong time."
"What if there's no right time? What if we're just not built to make this work?"
"Then you'll figure that out. But don't decide anything when you're this exhausted. You sound like you haven't slept in days."
"I haven't. Not really." I looked out at the lake, watching the ducks paddle past. Oblivious. Uncomplicated. "We were so happy here once. When he proposed. I thought nothing could ever touch us."
"Everyone thinks that in the beginning."
"So what, we were just naive? Foolish to believe we could make it?"
"Not foolish. Hopeful. There's a difference." Felice paused. "What does your gut tell you? Not your brain. Not the part of you that's been trained to assess every situation and calculate the best outcome. What does your gut say?"
I closed my eyes. The breeze off the lake was cool against my face, carrying the scent of water and mud and green growing things.
"That I don't want to lose him. But I also can't give up this opportunity. And I don't know how to have both."
"Maybe you can't. Maybe that's the reality you both have to accept."
"That's not helpful."
"I'm not trying to be helpful. I'm trying to be honest." Felice's voice was firm but kind.
"You and Cassian are both brilliant surgeons with incredible opportunities.
But sometimes brilliant people make terrible partners because they can't figure out how to compromise without feeling like they're losing themselves. "
"So what, we just give up? Let our marriage collapse because we're too ambitious?"
"I didn't say that. But you need to be honest about what you want. Not what you think you should want. Not what would make Cassian happy or your father proud or your career advisors impressed. What do you want, Calla?"
I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it. Because I didn't know. Or maybe I knew, and I was too scared to admit it.
"I want both," I whispered. "I want Cassian and I want the fellowship. I want to be a great surgeon and a good wife. I want everything." My voice broke, finally, cracking open on the last word. "And I'm starting to realize I can't have it."