Chapter 30 #2
We lie side by side, not touching, the narrow space between us humming.
Our breaths don’t sync the way they once did.
Every nerve in my body is awake and ready to fire.
She shifts onto her side, turning her back to me.
Want crowds close enough that I could close the distance with one careless movement.
She slides toward me until her spine warms my side, and I’m powerless to stop my body from shifting and molding my front against her smaller frame.
Her hips move, just slightly, and the pulse of desire sharpens.
When she presses back again, firmer this time, there’s no pretending she doesn’t feel what it does to me.
The ache is immediate. Heat, temptation, lust—all of it leashed only by care, by the fragile trust she’s handed me tonight.
I set my hand on her hip to still her and nearly groan at the warmth of the bare sliver of skin beneath my palm. More than that, I register the jut of her hipbone. Softer than it used to be.
“Robyn,” I whisper.
She wiggles instead, her hand closing over mine, increasing the pressure in a quiet plea.
I dip my head, breathing her in, with my nose in her hair.
I know what she wants. Maybe she even needs it.
But as my thumb digs gently into her hip and her head tips back toward mine, I understand the line I’m standing on.
I could give her this and let it be a bandage for tonight—or I could fumble through.
Show her I have it in me to be more than that.
Prove I’m in it for the long haul. I shut my eyes and kiss her bare shoulder, lingering and deliberate. My hair brushes her cheek.
“Talk to me, sweetheart.”
She collapses against me.
It isn’t pretty or quiet. It’s a failure of strength, a messy break that turns into shaking sobs. I slide my arm beneath her head and draw her closer. Her fingers clutch my sleeve. Her tears soak my forearm.
She’s speaking, but the words blur together while I hold her.
Eventually, the story finds shape between her bawling.
He was her patient, and she thought she’d saved him—caught what everyone else missed.
Until today when there was nothing left to catch.
Protocols don’t save everyone. And if all the extra care she gave him still wasn’t enough, how is she supposed to keep saving people?
I don’t interrupt. I breathe slow and deep, hoping her body takes its cues from mine. I listen.
She doesn’t need me to explain death. I’m no doctor, but I get how futile and patronizing those words would be.
She knows that sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.
I taught her that lesson, in case she missed it.
I can even imagine how underneath it all, wrapped around this patient she thought she saved, is the grief for her Mom.
She tells me everything between sobs but without hiding.
The pain of her Dad’s neglect and disappointment threads through every word.
Later, in the dark of her bedroom, after her breathing evens out and sleep claims her, the truth settles heavy in my chest. My stupidity weighs on me once again.
Before tonight, the last time I held her, we were sitting outside her hospital under a crabapple tree. The breakup had been unreal to me until that moment, something she’d decided but I was not yet living. I lost her then because I wanted to feel needed.
Now—Now I’d give anything not to be holding her like this. I’d trade every selfish want I’ve ever had just to erase the reason she’s in my arms. Even if it meant she’d never need me again.
Three and a half weeks pass. Long enough for the shock to settle and for Robyn to look …
normal. We’re something akin to friends now, walking each other to our buildings, stopping to chat downtown.
And we’re back at our reading club for two.
Only now, we don’t text, we call and listen to each other breathing as we read.
It gives us less time to dwell on the subtext of everything we say.
It’s more honest, even if it’s harder to hide in.
Tonight, we’re on the last chapter of How Buildings Learn. She’s on her armchair, blinds drawn up; I’m on my couch, curtains open. I don’t think she can hear my heartbeat constantly above its baseline, but I bet she can guess.
“And that’s the point, right?” She hums. Thoughtful. “The concept building doesn’t fail because it gets remodeled. It fails when it can’t.”
I smile to myself. Of course that’s the line she latches onto. We talk through the chapter—layers, adaptation, the arrogance of thinking permanence is a virtue. It’s easy. Easier than it has any right to be.
Until it isn’t.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, casual on the surface. I meant to ask her last week and chickened out, worried about disturbing this quiet peace we’re finding.
“Mm. Depends.”
“Why did you change your allocations?”
The morning after her patient died, I expected Robyn to struggle—and she didn’t.
She went to work, ready to face the day, and she did the same the day after that.
Julian even said she sounded better than he does when he loses a patient.
So, I figured it was par for the course, and the show must go on, as they say.
Then, one morning while waiting for her latte, she mentioned it in passing. To Zac of all people. A change in her role: seventy percent research and thirty percent clinic hours. So now I have to wonder if she’s really okay.
“I adjusted them two weeks ago,” she states. Neutral. Measured. Doctor voice.
“Why?”
Robyn has always wanted to be in a clinic. Direct care. Faces, stories, and hands she can hold. And now … not so much.
“I’m still seeing patients,” she says after a pause. “I didn’t stop.”
“I know,” I murmur. “That’s not what I’m asking.”
Glancing at the window, I see her chair more than I see her, but I can still fill in what my eyes can’t catch—knees drawn up, thumb worrying the edge of the cushion. Composed but not untouched.
She sighs. “I’m okay, Nate.”
I believe her, and sometimes, you’re okay and not okay at the same time.
“I know you are, but that doesn’t always mean—”
“I love patient care,” she mutters. “I still do. Every doctor does, but … someone needs to do the research. Revise the protocols. Improve them so clinicians can save more people.”
She’s right, and the hollow in my chest that I still hope she’ll reclaim one day knows sometimes you must step back so you can step forward. But I also worry it’s not the whole story and a choice born out of a misguided impulse.
“Hey,” I say. “Can I pitch you something?”
“I’m not becoming an architect”
I huff a laugh. “Of course not. We’d need a few more books for that.”
I glance at the folded flyer on my coffee table, edges worn from being picked up and put down too many times.
“There’s a conference next weekend in Seattle. Open to the public. It’s … not my field and not yours either.”
“Oh?”
“Resilience. Burnout.” I hesitate, then add, “It’s about practitioners and professionals in high stress roles. About staying balanced and grounded in the work.” My heart thunders in my chest. “I thought, maybe it’d be something you’d want to sit in on. No pressure. Just—listen.”
The line crackles faintly. I imagine her blinking, surprised. “You’re inviting me,” she says slowly.
“Yes.”
“To Seattle.”
“Yes.”
She’s quiet long enough that I start rehearsing how to make this smaller, safer, easier to decline. Then she finally says, “Okay.”
Relief hits me so fast I have to grip the armrest. “Okay?” I repeat.
“Okay,” she says again, and there’s something warmer there now. “I think … I think I’d like that.”
I close my eyes. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I really would.”
We drift back to the book, to buildings and layers and the grace of adaptation, but the call feels different; I feel different. Maybe I can fumble through just fine.