It’s going to be okay.
We’re going to be okay.
The universe wouldn’t have brought us together just to tear us apart.
Right?
But as I cleaned up my reading space, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was already in motion. That somewhere, right now, the universe was setting pieces on a board I couldn’t see.
That the test was coming.
Soon.
And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Julien
Three weeks.
It had been three weeks since I’d surrendered to the universe, or at least, since I’d stopped actively fighting it. Baby steps. Very small, very controlled baby steps that wouldn’t give Hayden any more ammunition to have me committed to the psychiatric ward.
I was still me. Still precise. Still punctual...mostly. Still organized.
I just... smiled more now.
Wore sneakers occasionally.
Texted my wife during meetings.
Let her rearrangehercrystals, which were now somehowourcrystals because they lived in our apartment and I’d stopped trying to hide them when colleagues visited.
Small concessions to chaos.
Manageable chaos.
The kind of chaos that made me happy instead of homicidal.
But something felt... off.
I couldn’t explain it—which was infuriating because I was a neurosurgeon and I explained things for a living. I dealt in observable phenomena, measurable outcomes, quantifiable data.
Notfeelings.
Not vague senses of unease that had no logical basis.
And yet... for the past two days, I felt it. A tension in the air. A sense that reality was bracing itself for something. Like the moment before a storm breaks, when the pressure drops and the air goes still and every animal instinct you have screams,“Take cover.”
It made absolutely no sense.
But then again, I’d married a woman who believed the universe had a plan, so perhaps my definition of “sense” had been permanently compromised.
I pushed the thought aside as I stripped off my surgical gown and gloves.
The craniotomy had gone perfectly. Textbook, even. A meningioma resection that had taken four hours but resulted in complete tumor removal with no complications. The patient would wake up with a headache and some temporary weakness, but she would wake up. She would recover. She would live.
That was what mattered.
