“Who the fuck is Simon?”
A snort blasted out of me and I immediately burst into giggles, dropping my head into my hands. “I don’t even know why I did that.”
Henry’s hand still on my shoulder, he said, “You should know that I love when you snort, but I might love your reactions to it even more. So fucking precious, Whit.”
Still hiding behind my hands, I said, “I’m really not.”
“Trust me on this. You are.” He dragged his palm up the back of my neck and kept it there. “Now, tell me who the hell this Simon is because he wasnoton the guest list.”
“Simon is—well, I don’t actually know anything about Simon other than his interest in the bodies lost in Lake Tahoe and his aversion to pomegranate seeds, but I promise I’ll tell you everything later.”
He pulled my chair away from the island and stepped between my knees, forcing me to look up at him. “There’s going to be a later?”
“I hope so.” Dragging a finger over the seating chart, I said, “I want to hear the rest.”
“Basically, I was banging my head against the wall to understand what the hell was going on with your table. Up to that point, I hadn’t mentioned any of this to Mason. Definitely not Florrie. I’d called in help to identify some folks, but kept most of this off the radar. And the only reason I had a lot of this info was because the wedding planner included me and Miah on the emails. But all this time had passed and I was no closer to finding you.”
I nodded. Meri and I had worked very hard at making sure we couldn’t be found.
“I was out of options and I needed you,” he said simply. “I couldn’t sleep. Even in those brutal first months of residency when I was dead on my feet every damn day, I’d get into bed and I—I’d miss you. And I told myself it was crazy because we’d hadonenight. Twelve hours. But I felt like I knew you and there was nothing I could do to get you out of my head.”
“It wasn’t crazy.”
A real, true smile broke across his face. “That’s good to know.”
“I thought about you too,” I admitted. “After.”
“What did you think about?”
I raked my teeth over my bottom lip. “The horrible toast, mostly.” He turned and stalked into the hallway, a hand on the back of his neck as he grumbled about never living that one down. “I wanted to know why you couldn’t stay in character during the ceremony and whether you liked the job you were married to and how many Taylor Swift songs you knew byheart.” I ran my hands down my legs and forced myself to say, “And I wondered whether you remembered me.”
“I couldn’t forget.” He returned to the kitchen, pointing to the piles of papers. “I talked to Mason that morning, before the start of the transplant rotation. I was trying to get more photos and”—he tapped his fingers against his belt—“and if I hadn’t been running late for pre-rounds, I would’ve confessed this whole scheme to him because I knew I couldn’t survive September without an answer.”
“Funny how things work out sometimes,” I said.
Henry closed the laptop and shot a quick glance at me. Somehow, after all this, he looked nervous, his gaze falling to the floor and his finger still wearing a divot in his belt. Then, “Whitney.” He said my name like a sigh. “I need you to know that I didn’t spend three months of my life deep-diving into the identities of six hundred wedding guests at the slim hope of finding you because I wanted to change a single thing about you. I love you exactly the way you are and I want this because you cleaved my life into two parts that night. There’s before and there’s after, and even when I had hardly any hope of finding you, I still wanted the after.”
I wasn’t sure when I’d started crying, but I was, and I couldn’t seem to stop. All this time and all this energy I’d put into holding myself together but I couldn’t do that anymore.
“When you blew my whole fucking world up by walking down the hallway that morning,” he continued, “I knew I’d wait as long as it took. The rotation, the year, the whole damn residency. I didn’t care. I still don’t.”
“A whole damn residency is a very long time,” I said, still sobbing my face off.
“I don’t think you understand how mad I went looking for you.” Henry ducked into the bathroom and returned with a boxof tissues. “I would’ve waited. At least I knew where you were. Hell, I finally knewwhoyou were.”
I blotted my eyes and cheeks. There was a hot, simmering pressure building in my chest and I didn’t know if I was about to laugh or scream or watch while my internal organs shot out from behind my rib cage and flopped on the floor at his feet.
“This is the last piece of evidence I have for you,” Henry said, pulling his phone from his back pocket. He tapped the screen a few times before turning it to face me. “Do you see the date that I made this?”
I scanned the playlist and glanced up at him. “Two days after the wedding.”
“Because I couldn’t get any of this out of my head.” He ran a thumb over my cheek. “It was the only thing I could do to focus on orientation—and the truth is, I only survived because Cami, Reza, and Tori wouldn’t let me blow it. That week was complete hell. I wanted to fly back to Tahoe and find you. I had to talk myself into staying every day.”
“It’s a good thing you did.”
“You are the challenge, Whit. You’re the only one that has ever truly mattered.”
Henry reached for my hand and pressed play on his phone. The first chords of “Into the Mystic” filled the kitchen. I went into his arms, my head tucked under his chin and my arms around his waist, and we swayed with the music. It wasn’t so much dancing as holding each other while the world went on spinning, while some hearts stopped and others started all over again for the first time, and I finally knew what it meant to fall in love.
