“For Noah,” he says, glancing across the room at his son. “I haven’t seen him this happy in years. There was always something he held back. But with you, he seems like himself again.”
The irony is brutal enough to make it hard to breathe. Daniel is thanking me for making Noah happy when I’ve just made everything worse. When Noah has barely looked at me all evening.
“He’s easy to be with,” I say, because underneath everything else, that part is true. Being with Noah is easy. Not simple, clearly. Not after tonight. But easy in a way nothing has felt for a long time. He’s smart without making a performance of it. Funny when he forgets to be self-conscious. He cares too much about everything—rescue dogs, other people’s feelings, whether he’s said the wrong thing—and then gets embarrassed the second anyone notices. He’s strangely perceptive too, in the way people get when they’ve spent too long bracing for the worst. And his face gives away every thought before he can stop it, which should make him terrible at hiding things but mostly just makes him look like a deer in headlights. Even the way he panics over every minor disaster is unfairly endearing. It makes me want to catch him by the shoulders and tell him to breathe. Of course I fell for him. I’m starting to think I never stood a chance.
“Well, I’m glad he found you,” Daniel says, reaching over the coffee table to clap a hand on my shoulder. “You’re good for each other.”
“Thank you,” I say, because I don’t know what else to do with that.
Across the room, Noah laughs again.
My chest tightens before I can stop it. Rick is standing even closer now, angled toward Noah like he still has some claim on him. His hand lifts to Noah’s arm, his fingers lingering there a moment too long.
And Noah doesn’t pull away.
My grip tightens around my glass. I should look away. I should let it go. I should remember he was never mine in the first place.
Instead, I set the glass down a little too hard.
“Excuse me,” I say, already standing. “I need to use the restroom.”
I don’t wait for a response. I just turn and head for the stairs.
I need a minute away from all of it.
I make it to the upstairs bathroom, lock the door behind me, and lean back against it with my eyes closed.
For a moment, I just stand there, trying to get air into my lungs while my chest tightens and heat crawls up my neck. It’s a panic attack. I know the shape of it well enough to recognize it, even when I hate that it’s happening. But this time it isn’t grief or exhaustion or the hospital still clinging to me after a bad shift.
It’s jealousy.
Plain, humiliating jealousy, because Noah is downstairs talking to Rick, and I can’t do a single thing about it.
Which is absurd. Why the hell would I have a panic attack over that? I’m a grown man. A doctor. I spend my days talking people through fear, keeping my head while people fall apart in front of me.
This should be nothing.
I barely even know the guy.
But here I am.
I move to the sink and splash cold water over my face. In the mirror, I look worse than I expected—cheeks flushed, eyes too bright, hair mussed from dragging my hands through it. I look like a man who has no idea what to do with himself, which is inconveniently accurate.
How did this happen? How did I go from agreeing to one simple favor to hiding in a bathroom at a lake house, fighting back something that feels dangerously close to tears? I’m not the crying type. I haven’t cried since my father’s funeral, and that was years ago. But something about this weekend—about Noah—has got under my skin in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
A soft knock on the door makes me jolt.
“Connor?” Maya says from the hallway. “I know you’re in there.”
I freeze, water dripping from my chin.
“Just a minute,” I call back, then quickly dry my face with one of the clean hand towels folded in a wicker basket.
I take a breath, pull myself together as much as I can, and open the door. Maya stands in the hallway with her arms crossed, her expression impossible to read.
“We need to talk,” she says.
I step aside. It feels ridiculous, letting Noah’s sister into a bathroom for a serious conversation, but it’s still better than having this out in the hall.
