I was smiling. Actually, genuinely smiling, the kind that made my cheeks hurt.
I pulled into my parking spot and sat there for a long moment, just breathing. Letting myself feel the giddiness, the hope, the terrifying possibility that maybe, just maybe, some things didn't have to stay broken forever.
My phone buzzed.
Beth
Well???
Charlotte
We talked. For hours. He asked for my number.
Beth
AND???
Charlotte
And he's going to call me. For coffee.
Beth
CHARLOTTE. I need details. All of them.
Charlotte
It's almost midnight. Can’t this wait until tomorrow?
Beth
Uh, NO? This is an emergency. A romantic emergency. Tell me everything.
I laughed, the sound bright and strange in the quiet car. I felt like a teenager again, giddy and hopeful and terrified all at once.
It wasn't until I was climbing the stairs to my apartment, still wrapped in Miles's jacket, that the other thing surfaced. The thing I'd been deliberately not thinking about since the moment I'd seen his hand tremble around that water bottle.
The careful way he moved. The rigidity in his posture. The way he'd shoved his hand into his pocket like he was hiding evidence.
I paused at the door, my key halfway to the lock.
He's okay, I told myself firmly.It was probably nothing. Nerves. Too much caffeine. A long day.
But I couldn’t quite let it go. The tremor had been specific, distinctive. The kind of thing I'd seen before in patients, in textbooks.
I shook off the thought and unlocked my door. Tonight wasn't about diagnoses or symptoms or professional observations. Tonight was about reconnection. About second chances. About the way Miles Cameron had looked at me like I was the answer to a question he'd been asking for fifteen years.
Everything else could wait.
I hung his jacket carefully over the back of my chair, breathing in the lingering scent of cedar one more time. Then I pulled out my phone and stared at his name in my contacts.
Miles Cameron.
Real. Here. Back in my life after fifteen years of silence.
I hugged my phone to my chest like a lovesick teenager and let myself feel, just for a moment, the pure, uncomplicated joy of possibility.
But as I drifted toward sleep that night, his face appearing in flashes in my mind, a small, worried thought curled at the edge of my consciousness.
