Page 429 of The Doctors Will See You Now

“Looks delicious, Dor!” he exclaimed.

“Manners, Harry!” his wife chastised before he could plant his ass in his designated chair at the head of the table. “Greet Charlotte before you sit down and start stuffing your face.”

He flashed a soft grin in my direction. “Hi, Charlotte. It’s nice that you stopped by.”

“Hi, Harry,” I greeted back awkwardly.

“Okay. I hope you’ve got your appetites,” Doreen said after she finished pouring all three of us a glass of fresh lemonade. “Because I’ve also got a homemade apple pie in the oven for dessert.”

Harry winked. “Goodness gracious, woman. I sure do love you.”

Doreen blushed as she sat down in her seat.

“You’re in for a treat, Char,” he said as he cut himself a piece of chicken pot pie. “Doreen is an amazing cook. And this pot pie is one of the best things that will ever touch your taste buds.”

“Oh!” Doreen exclaimed and hopped up from the table. “Your heart meds, Harry! I almost forgot.” She hurried back into the kitchen and opened up the cabinet over the sink. Five orange pill bottles in hand, she made her way back to Harry’s side of the table and started setting out his medicine.

“This is what happens when you get old, Char,” he teased. “You get wrinkles and a bad heart.”

“Oh, don’t traumatize her, Har!”

Honestly, the two of them didn’t even need me to be involved in their conversation. It was a show, and I was just the audience. Given my current mental state, that probably wasn’t a bad thing.

“What?” he retorted. “You know it’s true.”

“Harry had to have a triple bypass about a year ago,” she explained with a knowing glance in my direction. “And these medications are now an everyday thing.”

“Last year was a real rough year for us,” he admitted. “I had to stop working. And one surgery and a hundred-thousand worth of medical bills later, I’m just thankful I’m still able to enjoy time with my wife.”

Jesus. No wonder their home had been put in a foreclosure auction.

Discreetly, while Doreen and Harry argued over the right order for him to take his medications, I slipped the deed for the house out of my back pocket and put it back into my purse.

I just couldn’t have that discussion with them. Not after they had invited me into this house with open arms and insisted I eat a home-cooked meal. And especially not after I’d heard about everything they’d gone through over the past year.

Maybe one day I’d find the strength to find a solution to this problem, but not right now.

Right now, I was going to enjoy chicken pot pie and the nice, adorable, and oftentimes comedic distraction that these two lovebirds provided.

Staring at the ticker as it scrolled news across the bottom of the screen and reading nothing, I lifted a spoonful of Frosted Flakes to my mouth and winced.

Soggy and completely lacking in any of their normal goodness, Tony the Tiger wouldn’t have thought these were fucking grrrreat at all.

But their lackluster quality wasn’t the fault of the manufacturer. Instead, each disgusting attribute could be solely credited to the amount of time gone by as I stared into the abyss and hated myself—time spent not eating.

It’d been almost two weeks since I’d consumed the night with Charlotte in my arms, holding on to every last moment, crying together about what could have been—but in reality, absolutely couldn’t.

And that made nearly two weeks of misery.

I’d thought initially that the mourning would be quick. Not because I wasn’t attached to Charlotte or because the decision was simple, but because giving her up meant going back to a life with which I was extremely familiar. Kind of like slipping into an old shoe, I’d still walk the same path, I’d still do the same job, I’d just do it a little less stylishly.

Fucking naïveté.

Life without Charlotte didn’t feel less colorful; it felt dead.

Routine by rote, I’d thrown myself into the hospital, working the most overtime I’d worked in two years and generally annoying the entirety of the hospital staff. Carol looked surprised to find an ogre on the other side of my office door each time she approached, and even that made me angry. How the fuck could anyone expect me to be happy right now?

Of course, she didn’t know about the breakup or the reasons behind it or how impossible it was to come back from. But despair wasn’t rational, and as a result, I was a jackass.