CALLA
FIVE YEARS AGO
We usedto have Sunday mornings.
That was our rule, Cassian's and mine. No matter how brutal the week had been, no matter how many surgeries had run late or how many patients we'd lost, Sunday mornings belonged to us. We'd sleep until the light forced us awake. We'd make pancakes with too much butter, the way his grandmother used to. We'd spread the newspaper across the kitchen table and read in comfortable silence, our feet tangled together under the chairs.
Small, ordinary things. The kind that felt like breathing.
This Sunday, I woke up to an empty bed.
The sheets beside me were cold, which meant Cassian had been up for a while. I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence of our apartment. No sizzle of butter in a pan. No quiet hum of music from his phone. Just stillness, heavy and wrong.
I found him in the kitchen. Not making pancakes. Just sitting at the table with a cup of coffee gone cold, staring at nothing.
He didn't look up when I came in.
I poured myself a cup from the pot and sat across from him. The coffee was bitter, hours old. I drank it anyway, needing the ritual of it, the normalcy.
"We need to talk," he said.
My stomach dropped. Those four words never meant anything good. In all my years of delivering bad news to patients' families, I'd learned to recognize the prelude to devastation. The careful breath before the blow.
"Okay."
Cassian looked at me, and the exhaustion in his eyes was so deep it seemed carved into his bones. He'd lost weight these past weeks. I'd noticed but hadn't said anything, too consumed by my own turmoil to address his.
"I don't know how to do this anymore," he said.
"Do what?"
"This. Us." He wrapped his hands around his cold coffee cup, knuckles pale. "The constant negotiating. The feeling like I have to choose between supporting you and building something that matters to me. The way we keep circling the same argument without ever finding solid ground." He ran a hand through his hair, and I noticed it was unwashed. Cassian, who showered every morning without fail. "I'm tired, Calla."
My throat closed around the words I wanted to say. "So am I."
"I don't want to be the reason you turn down the fellowship. But I also don't want to spend two years on different continents pretending the distance isn't slowly killing us."
"What are you saying?"
Cassian met my eyes. His were red-rimmed, the green dulled by sleeplessness. By grief, I realized. He was already grieving.
"I'm saying maybe we're trying to force something that doesn't fit anymore."
I wanted to argue. To fight. To prove him wrong with logic and passion and the sheer force of my will. But the words died before they reached my mouth. Because somewhere deep down, in the place I'd been avoiding for weeks, I'd been thinking the same thing.
"I love you," I said. My voice cracked on the last word, splitting open like a wound.
"I know." His face contorted briefly before he pulled it back under control. "I love you too. That's not the problem."
"Then what is?"
"Timing. Geography. The fact that we're both trying to build careers that don't leave room for compromise." He reached across the table and took my hand. His fingers were cold, trembling slightly. "We're drowning, Calla. And I don't know how to save us."
My hand sat limp in his. I should squeeze back, should offer comfort, should do something. But my body had stopped responding to commands. Everything felt numb, like I was watching this conversation happen to someone else.
"What do we do?" I whispered.
"I don't know."
