“I think Molly and I just broke up.”
He stopped moving, and while I couldn’t see him, I could feel him staring at me. “Say what?”
I picked up the glass and rolled it in my shaky hands, then put it back on the counter, not really wanting to repeat myself. Not wanting to make it real. The anger and hurt that had been surging through my veins an hour ago had been replaced by a deep, visceral emptiness.
He pulled out the stool next to me, his hand squeezing the back of my neck. “What happened? She broke up with you?”
I shook my head slowly. “No.”
“You broke up with her?”
I shook my head again. “I don’t know what I did.”
“Okay, walk me through it.”
I rubbed my temples. I wasn’t sure what had happened; I’d entered the hospital the happiest I’d ever been, and left it witha hole in my chest, my heart splattered all over the walls of the fifth floor. Even if that was a little dramatic for a description. Or a lot dramatic. Okay, a Drew level of dramatic.
And as much as I wanted to blame it all on Hunter Reyes, this wasn’t his fault.
“I had my x-ray this morning and Reyes told me that Molly had been chosen for some kind of award thing. It’s kind of a big deal.”
“Whoa, really? That’s great.”
“Yeah, except she didn’t tell me about it, and she’s known for two weeks.”
It sounded so trivial when I said it out loud. So high-school teen drama-esque. So disproportionate for the level of anger I’d felt. But then I remembered why I was angry: because my girlfriend didn’t trust me. And there was nothing trivial about that.
Drew leaned back on the stool. “Why not?”
“Because she hadn’t decided if she wanted to accept it. And he seemed to think she wasn’t going to. He said that she was a worse surgeon because of me, that I was holding her back.”
“What the actual fuck?”
“Yeah, he’s a class A dick.” I sighed. “But you know how stressed out she gets about her hours and worrying about not coming home to me?”
He nodded.
“That’s why she didn’t tell me. It’s more hours than what she’s already doing.”
He frowned, and I knew he didn’t understand, because to no one but Molly, it may as well be the end of the world.
“She thinks we won’t make it with all her hours.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“She doesn’t trust me, man.” My hands scrubbed down my face. “She doesn’t trust that I’ll stick around and we’ll make itthrough, and I don’t know how I can get her to understand. I’ve already told her a million times, I’m like a broken record, but she doesn’t hear it.”
“What did you do then?”
“I gave her a week and said she needed to decide whether she could trust me. Then I left.”
The bile was burning the back of my throat so I took a sip of the whiskey. It could burn from that instead.
“What did Molly say?”
“She was crying and saying sorry. It’s all she ever says, but I’m not sure she even means it. She just throws it out there and expects everything to be okay.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket. It was buzzing with Molly’s face. I stared at it until it stopped ringing. I couldn’t listen to her tears, and I knew if I picked up nothing would have changed. She needed to feel why I was so pissed, understand why I was my heart was hurting, and she could only do that on her own.
