I love you too.
I looked up to find everyone staring at me again.
“What?”
“You’re texting,” Fitz said.
“I’m aware.”
“During a meeting.”
“Yes.”
“You, Julien Darcy, are texting during a professional meeting.”
“It was my wife.”
“You once confiscated my phone,” Nathan said, “because I checked a text during a meeting.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“It was from your bookie.”
“It was important information!”
“About a football game.”
“A very important football game!”
I slipped my phone back into my pocket. “Shall we continue?”
Hayden was laughing now. “Yes. Let’s continue. Before Julien does anything else unprecedented.”
“I’m not that different,” I protested.
Six voices responded in unison: “Yes, you are.”
And they were right.
I was different. Completely, utterly, cosmically different. I was late to meetings and wearing sneakers and texting my wife, and genuinely unbothered by any of it. I was in love with a woman who believed in destiny and talked non-stop and had somehow convinced me that chaos wasn’t the enemy.
I was happy.
For the first time in my carefully controlled, precisely ordered life, I was genuinely, completely happy.
The universe knows what it’s doing.
And I was done fighting it.
“Right,” I said, pulling out my own notes. “The sixty-two-year-old cardiac patient. What’s the proposed approach?”
Hayden launched into the case details, and we fell into the familiar rhythm of medical discussion.
But I was still smiling.
And I didn’t even try to stop.
