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The realization didn’t make me feel any better.
I glanced at Jenna out of the corner of my eye for at least the hundredth time since we’d taken our seats together on the flight home. Yesterday, I’d checked in online and paid extra so we could be seated together. Apparently, that had been a terrible mistake. We were about to touch down in Philadelphia, and I still didn’t understand what had changed that morning in our suite, when she’d informed me she didn’t need me to come to her sister’s wedding.
I was trying—and failing—not to be hurt. After only a week, Jenna knew me better than maybe anyone, which meant she had ample evidence that I was probably the worst person to take to a wedding. And I was pretty sure that’s what she’d been trying to say in her nice way, when she told me she knew I hated talking to strangers and she’d be busy. She was probably thinking she wouldn’t have time to make sure I didn’t bore her sister’s guests.
I hadn’t initially taken her words to mean we should break up, but since that conversation she’d been totally distant, emotionally and physically. Gone was the comfortable, easy way we’d touched and talked to each other the last few days, replaced by an awkward restraint we couldn’t seem to push past. The night before she had said she hadn’t been able to imagine us not dating. What could have changed in such a short space of time?
I’d reviewed all the events of the morning in my mind, over and over through the long flight, trying to determine the exact moment everything fell apart. I’d been drafting an email to Cassidy urging her to accept the conference presentation offer for herself even though I wouldn’t be able to attend. Grandma gave me the scrapbooks. I came back and Jenna told me she didn’t want me at her sister’s wedding.
I couldn’t draw a single conclusion to explain the change in her demeanor.
After we landed, we squeezed our way down the aisle, past the gate, and to the baggage claim. I retrieved Jenna’s bags from the luggage belt and then looked out for my disinfecting equipment while Jenna typed away on her phone.
I had to say something to get the conversation going between the two of us. “Any news alerts?” It was a sorry excuse for a topic, but it was all I could come up with.
“I’m texting Ellie,” she explained, waving her phone. “She’s here to pick me up.”
Earlier she’d seemed excited by the prospect of having dinner together. Maybe she’d like to come over after she dropped her stuff. “What time do you want to eat?”
Jenna looked up, biting her lip apprehensively, and I was gifted with rare-for-me intuition. She didn’t want to have dinner with me.
She didn’t want me at all.
“I think I got a little carried away on the cruise,” she told me. “We had such a good time that I let myself forget how messy it was dating a coworker. But now that we’re back home, I think it would be best if I had some time to think things over.”
I nodded tightly. Last night, I’d offered to leave my job if it would make her happy. But obviously one gesture, even if it was a big one for a workaholic like me, wasn’t enough to turn a Bio-101-level boyfriend into a Nobel Prize–winning life partner.
I had to make some kind of response, but there was an alarming lump in my throat. I reached for the rational, analytical part of me, the focused persona that had gotten me through every work crisis and family struggle for over two decades and forced a reply. “I understand. Thanks for all your help on the cruise. You made Grandma really happy.” I didn’t add “and me,” even though it was true that I’d been happier than I could remember.
Jenna stood for a second, staring at me uncertainly, perhaps wondering if it was obligatory to hug me goodbye.
Hadn’t I suspected all along that she’d just been too nice to turn down my request to come on the cruise? She didn’t have to do anything else for me. I waved a hand toward the exit. “Better not keep Ellie waiting.”
“Yeah.” Jenna gave an awkward wave. “Bye.” She grabbed both bags by the handles and moved toward the exterior doors.
I watched her walk away from me, heart heavy. Sinking. Broken. Every trite idiom I never used to describe a range of human emotions. For the first time, I understood the need for such figurative language.
I didn’t feel any better through the train ride back into the city, or as I walked the couple blocks to my apartment. Maybe I’d leave my suitcases in my apartment and then catch up on emails from the sanctuary of my Beaufort office. I didn’t officially have to be back at work until the following day, but perhaps familiar surroundings would restore the clinical detachment that had gotten me through everything from family squabbles to medical school.
Nobody looked up as I walked through the halls of the hospital. Not one person seemed to notice or care that I was back from vacation.
I settled into my desk chair, pulled up my emails, and tried to enter a flow state as I read through them. But returning to the setting for many award-winning observations about drug-resistant bacteria wasn’t enough to dispel the persistent belief that I’d discovered the most vital element of life only to let the findings slip from my grasp.
Intrusive thoughts attacked me. What was Jenna doing? She probably didn’t want me to text her. What if she was waiting for me to contact her, to try to make things work? What if she blocked my number?
I sat back in my rolling chair, restless gaze darting around the room. Degrees on the wall, medical books on the shelves. No family pictures, not even of Grandma. Nobody walking into the office would be able to discern anything about me other than my educational and professional attainments.
Maybe Jenna had been right to worry that the cruise wasn’t a reflection of real life. Back in Philadelphia, I was Dr. Adam Donaldson, boring loner with no life outside Beaufort Hospital. So awkward that even someone as nice as Jenna didn’t want anything to do with me.
With a sigh, I packed up to go home within minutes of entering my office. Since work hadn’t steadied me, I’d try sleep.
Standing in the hallway outside my office was one of the absolute last people I expected to see in the halls at Beaufort.
“Dr. Donaldson!”
I blinked at Cassidy Croft. Had I somehow stepped into an alternate timeline where the last few months hadn’t yet happened, and Cassidy hadn’t finished her fellowship?
“What day is it?” I demanded.
