I scrub in, catching my reflection in the mirror at the bay. Bags under my eyes, jaw unshaved for the first time in years. I look almost as bad as I feel.
The scrub room smells of chlorhexidine and stale coffee. Inside the OR, sterile iodine. I open a chest cavity, work through a full day of standard Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting surgeries—I could do them in my sleep. My hands move on autopilot while my head throbs with static, the same loop of her face when she found out.
Days pass like this. I text Rose, not knowing if she even has her phone back. I’ve tried reaching out to Easton. Roger told me he’d heard back from him—only to say that Rose was safe, nothing more. We didn’t deserve more.
But fuck, I wanted more. I wanted everything.
Ihadeverything.
Should I have just told her the truth? When I realized what had happened?
No, I shouldn’t have signed the fucking letter in the first place. Pearl was right. I barely read it. And for the investors to drag Rose’s name through the mud, based on nothing but lies, means it must have been worse than I thought.
I fucking deserve this, but Rose does not. Rosaria Lopes. Quiet, calm, steady, thoughtful. Passionate, brilliant, beautiful. And the whole world turned against her. All because her sisterheld a grudge. And because I, Logan Wells, am a fucking asshole. Just like she said I was.
Two weeks pass.
I leave the hospital past two in the morning most nights, burying myself in case notes. The night air is cool. It’s October now. I stand outside for a while, not really going anywhere.
I barely had her. A blink of time, really. Not even close to enough. But the loss of her has rearranged my brain chemistry, and I don’t know how to function.
I head home. I don’t sleep. I lie in bed, but my mind keeps playing out new scripts—going back in time, trying to fix things. Telling her the truth before she found out in such a vicious way. Me never signing the letter in the first place. Discovering it was Rose behind The Resilience Project, and us falling in love sooner, having even more time together. Every memory of her, I twist and elaborate into a lifetime ahead of us. A lifetime that will never come.
I pull out my phone and send her another undelivered text. I call, but it says the user is not available.
When sleep never comes, I climb out of bed. It’s six AM. No surgeries scheduled today, but I need to prep for next week. I get up and make coffee, moving how I feel—slow and miserable.
There’s a knock on my door.
I go still. My heart does something stupid—thinks, for just a second, that somehow it’s her.
But when I look through the peephole, it’s not my short, brown-haired succubus.
It’s Pearl.
Bracing myself, taking a deep breath, I swing open the door. Her hair is in a sleek, high ponytail. She looks perfectly put-together, and it enrages me.
“I fucked up,” she says before I can slam the door in her face. “Okay? Now let me in.”
I stare, dumbfounded, as she pushes past me.
“Youfucked up?” I repeat slowly.
She rolls her eyes. Walks over to my coffee maker, moving about my kitchen as though she’s been here a thousand times. She has, actually. She pours herself a cup, takes one sip, makes a face, then dumps it down the drain. “You really should move to cold brew.”
“What?” I ask, shaking my head, slamming the door shut as I follow her into the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”
“I… I don’t know. All I know is that I’m uncomfortable. And I don’t like this feeling. It’s new. It’s… itchy.”
“Itchy?”
She huffs and rolls her eyes again. I swear she’s been body-swapped.
“Look, I feel bad or whatever.”
“Pearl—”
“Be quiet and hear me out.”
