Stuck with my Second Chance (The Coffee, Chemistry & Connection #3)

1. Liv

Chapter one

Liv

“Put me down for fifty bucks that she bails by tomorrow morning.”

Priya’s voice rings out from the speaker of my phone, loud and crystal clear, echoing off the high ceilings of my apartment.

“Make it a hundred,” Sam chimes in, her video square showing her walking down a busy Manhattan street, dodging pedestrians.

“She hasn’t taken two consecutive days off since we met at the Donut four years ago, let alone two weeks.

She’s going to unpack that suitcase by midnight. I can feel it in my bones.”

I press my thumb against the zipper of my packing cube, pulling the nylon taut over a rolled stack of linen sundresses. “I can hear both of you,” I call out, carrying the cube out of my bedroom. “And for the record, my flight to Barcelona leaves in twenty-two hours. I am getting on that plane.”

I drop the cube into the open hard-shell suitcase resting on the luggage rack by the front closet. Then I walk back to the kitchen island, where my phone is propped up against a heavy stack of quartz tile samples Priya left here last week.

The video squares stare back at me. The Boss Babes. My best friends, my lifelines, and currently, my absolute biggest skeptics.

“We just worry about you, Liv,” Priya says.

She’s standing in what looks like a half-finished hotel lobby, wearing a bright yellow hard hat over her perfect blowout.

As a high-end commercial interior designer, she spends half her life arguing with stubborn contractors, and right now, she looks incredibly stressed.

“If my client actually insists on putting a crushed velvet sectional in a high-traffic corporate reception area, I might need you to stay in New York. I’m going to need a defense attorney when I inevitably snap and murder him. ”

“Tell him velvet traps bacteria and it’s a massive corporate liability,” I say smoothly, leaning my elbows on the cool marble of the island. “I can draft you a threatening email outlining the health code violations. And I can do it from a beach in Spain just as easily as I can from Manhattan.”

“Absolutely not,” Nadia chimes in, pointing a stern finger at her phone camera. “No drafting emails. Eat your weight in tapas. Flirt with a bartender who doesn’t speak any English. Do literally anything that doesn’t involve a billing code.”

I reach out and adjust the stack of items resting perfectly squared with the edge of the marble.

This is my designated command central. A sleek folder holds my printed flight itinerary, my passport, and my hotel confirmations.

Beside it, my laptop charger is coiled into a tight circle, resting next to a spare universal adapter.

I am ready.

“I am going to relax so hard you won’t even recognize me,” I tell the screen.

Priya laughs. “You packed your suitcase twenty-four hours early, Liv. You’re probably reviewing TSA liquid regulations in your head right now.”

I absolutely was reviewing the TSA liquid regulations, but I keep my face carefully neutral. “I just like knowing where my shoes are.”

“Have a safe flight, honey,” Sam says, her tone softening into something genuinely affectionate. “Call us when you land. We love you.”

“Love you guys.”

I tap the red button to end the FaceTime. The screen goes dark, and immediately, the vibrant energy of the call is sucked out of the room. Without their voices filling the airspace, the apartment is too quiet.

I turn, scan the living room. Magazines stacked. Pillows squared. I drag a fingertip along the edge of the coffee table, then pull my hand back.

I’ve worked sixty-hour weeks for years to afford this beautiful, dustless fortress. I navigated cutthroat partnership tracks and endless corporate mergers to build a life where I hold everything together.

The stillness is supposed to be my trophy, proof that I survived my own chaotic history. But standing here in the quiet, the stillness presses in.

My jaw tightens. I don’t do melancholy. I do action plans.

I cross back to the kitchen island, picking up the coiled white charger to double-check the wire for fraying. I just need to set my out-of-office auto-reply, confirm the car service to JFK, and run through the checklist one last time.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

My hand jerks. The laptop charger slips from my fingers, hitting the marble counter with a smack.

I freeze, staring across the hardwood floor at the solid oak of my front door.

My building has a twenty-four-hour doorman. It has a security keypad in the elevator. It is ten-thirty on a Thursday night. Nobody knocks on my door unannounced.

My brain snaps into problem-solving mode, cycling through a rapid-fire list of practical explanations to push down the sudden spike of adrenaline in my chest. Hector, the night doorman, must have let a neighbor up.

Maybe the super is checking a pipe leak from the floor above.

Maybe a food delivery driver got hopelessly lost and bypassed the front desk.

The knocking sounds again.

It isn’t loud, but it’s incredibly tight. Urgent. A rapid burst of knuckles against wood. Whoever is standing out there is running completely out of patience.

I leave the dropped charger on the marble island and cross the living room. I stop a few inches from the door, holding my breath to listen.

Through the door I can hear a low, rhythmic shuffling sound. Someone is shifting their weight anxiously from side to side. A heavy breath exhales, harsh and ragged.

I lean forward and press my right eye to the brass peephole.

The hallway lighting is notoriously harsh, casting deep, unflattering shadows against the patterned wallpaper.

But I don’t need good lighting to recognize the broad, familiar line of those shoulders.

I would recognize the slight, exhausted tilt of his head anywhere.

I would recognize that messy dark hair that still refuses to lie flat, even after seven years.

Josh.

I pull my head back from the door so fast I nearly lose my balance.

My pulse jumps. We pass each other—elevator doors sliding open, or on the stairs when I take them instead.

We don’t stop. The last time we did was months ago.

Group dinner. Loud enough to keep things easy.

He belongs in a different part of my life.

One I don’t open. The ‘ex who is now sort of a friend’ box. The ‘do not examine too closely’ box.

He does not belong in my hallway at ten-thirty at night, twenty-two hours before I am supposed to leave the country.

My fingers wrap around the brass deadbolt. I should look through the peephole again, tell him through the wood that I have a flight to catch. That I am busy packing. I don’t. I turn it. The brass metal mechanism slides back with a loud, final click.

I have not opened a door for Josh Miller in fourteen months. But my hands seems extremely happy to break that streak.

I pull the door open.

Josh stands in the hallway, looking completely dismantled.

The first thing I notice—filed away in a fraction of a second, entirely against my will—is that he still smells exactly the same.

A faint, grounding trace of winter air and clean cotton, underscored by the sterile, antiseptic soap he uses at the hospital.

My body registers the memory of it before my brain can construct the necessary walls.

But the second thing I notice makes the breath stop.

His dark eyes are wide and deeply bloodshot.

The calm, unshakeable confidence that makes him the city’s best trauma surgeon is entirely gone, replaced by a raw panic.

He is clutching an overstuffed canvas bag over one shoulder, the thick strap digging awkwardly into the lapel of his expensive jacket.

And in his other hand, his bicep strained by the weight, is a heavy-duty baby car seat.

A chubby, sleeping baby is strapped securely into the five-point harness, one little fist tangled in a yellow fleece blanket.

I stand frozen in the doorway. My right hand grips the edge of the wood. I take in the overstuffed diaper bag. I look at the sleeping baby.

Finally, I look back up at the man who is currently blowing my meticulously controlled world into a million unrecognizable pieces.

“Liv,” Josh says.

His voice is rough. It’s stripped of its usual easy humor, scraping out of his throat. His eyes dart past my shoulder, catching sight of the packed hard-shell suitcase on the luggage rack by the closet, and then the neatly arranged travel folders sitting on my kitchen island.

He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing sharply.

“It looks like you are getting ready to travel,” he rasps, his grip tightening on the plastic handle of the car seat. “I have no right. I should have called first. I shouldn’t be here. I almost turned around at the elevator, but—”

I step back from the door frame, leaving the entryway wide open to the apartment.

I don’t speak. I don’t know if it means come in or explain yourself immediately.

But the exact second my hand drops away from the wood of the door, the baby in the car seat shifts, scrunches its tiny red face, and lets out a thin, piercing wail.