She turned and walked away. I watched her until she reached the corner and disappeared from view, her gray coat swallowed by the crowd.
Alone, I stood on the sidewalk, breathing heavily as I allowed myself to absorb reality. When I calmed down, I drove to the hospital and pulled into my usual spot, turned off the engine, and sat there in silence.
Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. I lost track.
Tears rushed down my face and I didn’t bother to swallow them. I cried the same way, if not worse, than I did when my father died. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just pure grief, pouring out of me in waves I couldn't control.
My chest hurt, my eyes burned, and there was nothing left inside me but exhaustion. When they stopped coming, I wipedmy face, checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, and went inside.
Riven found me in the locker room. He didn't say anything for a long while. He just leaned against the wall and watched me pull on my scrubs. He wasn't the type for unnecessary words. He just observed, assessed, and waited for the right moment.
"You okay?" he asked finally.
"We signed the papers."
He paused. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be." I tied my scrub pants, focusing on the simple action. "It's done. We both agreed it was the right thing."
"You really think so?"
I didn't answer. I didn't know if I'd ever be able to answer that question.
Riven pushed off the wall and crossed to where I was standing. He squeezed my shoulder, the closest he ever came to physical affection.
"If you need anything," he said. "I'm here."
"I know."
He nodded and left me alone with my grief.
I threw myself into work. Surgeries, consults, patient rounds. I stayed until midnight and too exhausted to think, with only caffeine keeping me upright.
When I went home, darkness welcomed me. I left in a hurry that morning, too anxious about the meeting to think about turning on lights or opening curtains. Now the shadows crowded the room and the silence was too loud.
Calla's things were mostly gone. She moved them out over the past two weeks, a gradual evacuation that left the apartment bare. But traces of her remained, scattered evidence of a life we shared.
Her coffee mug still sat in the cabinet. A hair tie was coiled on the bathroom counter, her deep red strands of hair still caught in the elastic. One of her medical journals was still on the bookshelf, a page dog-eared in the middle of an article she never finished reading.
I gathered them carefully, handling each item like a fragile and precious relic, and placed them in a box and set them in the closet. Out of sight but not gone, the same way Calla would exist in my life from now on.
I sat on the couch we picked out together. We argued about it for three hours. She wanted gray and I wanted blue. So we compromised on something in between—navy blue. I stared at the walls we painted one weekend when we both had rare time off, a warm cream color that she insisted would make the space feel bigger.
Indeed, the place felt enormous.
And empty.
And nothing like home.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CALLA
I lastedtwo days before the avoidance became its own kind of torture. I volunteered for every surgery that came through the door for the past two days. I ate lunch in my office with the blinds drawn. I would check in the hallway before I walked anywhere, my body on constant alert for the sound of Cassian’s footsteps or the cadence of his voice.
It was cowardly.
It was obvious.
