Never crash in your backyard.
I didn’t knowhow Henry was pulling it off.
First it was the cupcake and that was fine. Understandable. But then I came into my office Monday morning to find a dozen pens gathered together like a bouquet with a peachy-pink ribbon on my desk. Good pens too. My favorite brandandstyle, which he had no way of knowing. And then, on a day that’d started with a page in the middle of the night and ended with a complicated prognosis for my patient, there was a warm muffin and fresh coffee—my order exactly right—waiting for me.
I couldn’t figure it out. I knew Jenelle had him bouncing between Hirano and Salas this week, and neither of them were known for having much downtime in their schedules. Most residents didn’t get a chance to eat lunch, forget about running across Beacon Hill for coffee and muffins the minute I left the OR.
What was Henry Hazlette’s secret? That was what I wanted to know.
I glanced at the drink he’d handed me while delivering coffee and donuts to the surgical ICU nurses before grand rounds. It was from my neighborhood coffee shop, not the donut place. Which meant he’d made two stops. At four thirty in the morning. In the middle of his first year of residency.
All he’d said was, “This one’s all yours, Dr. Aldritch,” before pointing out the gluten-free and vegan donuts to the night crew who could not have loved him more this morning.
And I’d walked away with wobbly knees and a goofy smile on my face.
Over a cup of coffee.
I couldn’t even believe myself. It was like I’d tripped and fallen into an alternate universe wherecoffeeknocked me off course and I allowed myself to wonder about an off-limits man for more than zero seconds.
What was there to wonder about? Aside from all the reasons Henry was not for me, I wasn’t for Henry. I wasn’t for anyone.
I could count my past relationships on one hand. Didn’t even need all my fingers. All of those experiences tucked under the umbrella of friends who turned into a little more before deciding we were better off friends, and I wasn’t mad about it. I’d never felt like I was missing out on anything and I didn’t love the idea of changing my life to make room for someone else.
I loved my home. I loved that I’d picked out everything and made it exactly the way I wanted. For once in my life, I knew it was all mine for as long as I wanted. I was finished bopping around from med school to residency to fellowships. I wasn’t waiting for my mother to deploy again or for her depression to creep back in again until it was so bad that I had no choice but to call Grammy and tell her we needed help.
It wasmyplace, the only one I’d ever had, and I couldn’t imagine liking someone enough to compromise on any of it for them. I didn’t see much of a reason why I’d want to compromise. I liked making decisions without consulting anyone else and I liked sleeping without someone stealing the blankets or breathing in my face. I liked the life I’d built for myself. It was full with friendship and travel and a career that I adored even when it ran me ragged. I didn’t want to change any part of my life for a man who would, in the best case, disappoint me and, in the worst case, destroy me the way men had destroyed Meri and my mother.
But that wasn’t the whole story.
Even if everything between me and Henry was different, nothing would change with Meri. If I sat her down and explained that I wanted to see what might happen with me and Henry, she’d be happy for me.Thrilled.She’d make some bawdy comments and she’d smile, and she’d swear up and down that she loved this development. That she wanted this for me. And then she’d drift away.
Meri could handle love and relationships at a distance, but she couldn’t watch them up close.
It’d been years since that awful breakup and she’d put herself back together brick by broken brick, but she’d left the worst of the wounds exposed and poked at them so often she hardly noticed the pain anymore.
She’d notice it if I loosened my grip on our singlehood solidarity and it would kill her. She’d have to take several very large steps back, regardless of how much she wanted the best for me. She’d do it not to punish me but to protect herself, and there was no way I’d let that happen.
Meri was the sister I’d chosen. She was my person and I was hers, and there was nothing more important to me than that relationship. We’d picked each other up from our worstmoments and we’d cheered each other during our best, and our lives were so deeply intertwined we could comfortably impersonate each other. We were there for each other, rain or shine, and thirty years down the road when we lived in side-by-side cottages, we’d still be there for each other.
I didn’t need a man to make me happy or complete, but I did need my best friend. She was my family—the kind that stuck around no matter what.
For as much as this coffee had made me giddy, it wasn’t worth breaking Meri’s heart. Even if everything was different, Henry couldn’t give me anything that would be worth losing her.
“Let’s crash a wedding this weekend.”
I froze with a forkful of salad in front of my mouth. I blinked at Meri before asking, “Excuse me?”
She spent a minute rearranging her panini, rattling the ice in her cup, and checking her phone. It was enough of a pause that I started thinking I’d misheard. Then, “I want to crash a wedding. Think about it. We never go to autumn weddings, Whit. We are missing out on an entire aesthetic. I found several huge soirées around town and?—”
“I’m sorry but what?” I put my fork down. I needed both hands to hear this. “You want to crash a weddinghere? Have you lost your pretty little mind?”
She eyed me like I was the one being crazy andthatwas crazy because Meri was even more cautious than me when it came to choosing weddings we weren’t invited to. I’d wanted to go to the Outer Banks of North Carolina one summer because I was obsessed with the area after reading a book set there, butshe’d vetoed that idea on the basis of it being too close to Duke University Medical Center where she’d completed her residency. A distance of two hundred and fifty miles plus years since finishing residency was too close, but weddingshere in Bostonwhere we presently lived and worked were okay?
“I think we can pull it off,” she said.
I reached over and pressed my hand to her forehead. “No fever,” I murmured. “Do you remember bumping your head at any point? Falling down? Waking up and not remembering how you got there? Eating candy or baked goods of questionable origin?”
“Kindly shut up.” She took a bite of her sandwich and stared out the café window at the gridlock on Charles Street. “I think we can get away with it.”
