What was I thinking? I wasn’t, and that’s not gonna work for me.
I scrub a hand down my face, set the glass down too hard on the counter, and start pacing. Bare feet over cool tile, back and forth from the fridge to the hallway and back again. What the hell did I do? I barely know thiswoman. She’s in her twenties. Injured. Broke. Clearly shouldering more emotional weight than she knows what to do with. And me? I’m a tired, overworked ER doctor who wasn’t enough to keep the woman I married from looking elsewhere. I like my privacy. My autonomy. My routine. I work too much to be part of anyone’s life.
This is a disaster waiting to happen.
Only—
It doesn’t feel like disaster.
It feels like…instinct.
When Lucy looked at me, glassy-eyed and trying like hell not to cry over her roommate threatening to sell all her stuff, when she told me about her dad and his judgment, offering help didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like gravity. Like something older and deeper than logic pulled the words out of me before I even realized what I was saying.
“Bring your things here.”
“I’ve got space.”
“I want to help.”
Bennett and Grayson’s words from family dinner come back to me, about how Lucy is the perfect blend of stubborn and damsel in distress. I get how it looks, and once they hear this new entry in the saga, they’ll never let it go, but my interest in Lucy doesn’t stem from pity. It’s not savior complex. It’s not even loneliness, though I’ve had my fair share of that too.
It’s her.
It’s Lucy.
A woman who limps into my life with bags of bakedgoods, already halfway out the door, and somehow makes everything feel different just by the way she looks at me, like I’m the only steady thing left in the universe. I close my eyes and exhale through my nose.
I should call her. Take it back. Tell her it was a mistake.
But I won’t.
Because the part of me that keeps pretending I’m fine—the one that runs trauma codes and answers middle-of-the-night pages and smiles through the administrative bullshit—that part quiets down when she’s around.
And suddenly I’m starving for something I haven’t let myself want since Jadelyn left.
Connection.
I move through the darkened living room, past the couch I’m never home long enough to sit on, toward the hallway. My footsteps slow as I reach the last door on the right. It’s not locked. Never has been. Just… closed. Like most of the things I don’t want to deal with.
I open the door.
The room smells faintly of dust and missed opportunities. The bed is made. The nightstand’s empty. The closet holds nothing but a single plastic tub filled with sweaters I haven’t worn since residency. It’s not a guest room. Not really. It’s a storage unit with throw pillows and bad memories.
But if Lucy takes me up on my offer, it’ll be hers.
I step inside, flick on the light, alone in the epicenter of the end of my marriage. Jadelyn wanted to turn this space into a nursery. Said it with hope in her voice andsomething desperate in her eyes. I agreed—let her dream—even though we were already splintering, and deep down, we both knew it. She thought a baby might bring us back together. I let myself believe I could be present. That I could be a husband to Jadelyn, a father to our kid, and the guy at the ER who always managed to save the day.
Turns out I couldn’t be two of those things at once, let alone three.
So the room stayed empty.
The last thing she said to me?“If you had stopped fighting for me, I would have left. If you had admitted it was over, I would have too. It would have saved us so much pain.”
Those words still echo in these walls, in this room where Lucy might sleep. Where she’d breathe and heal and maybe cry when no one’s looking. I’d pass her in the hallway. Hear the shower running. Notice the little things—hair ties on countertops, groceries I didn’t buy in the fridge, music echoing from behind a closed door.
I brace a hand on the doorframe.
I can’t stop myself from making reckless decisions with her.
