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He waits for me to respond, giving me the same patience I offered him when he mentioned his failed engagement.
“That’s the problem. No one ever told me I had to earn anything. My dad has always loved me loudly enough for both of my parents since my mom died.”
His breath catches, but he doesn’t cover my loss with an apology before I can finish.
“She had cancer, and by the time anyone knew how sick she was, there wasn’t much they could do.” My fingers find the ring on my pinkie and twist it once around the joint. “I decided I was going to become a doctor so I could find the answers for other people before it was too late.”
He looks at my hand, following the movement of the ring without asking about it. “How long have you been carrying that responsibility on your shoulders?”
“Long enough that I don’t know who I’d be if I put it down.”
Understanding crosses his face instead of sympathy. Sympathy, I could dismiss. Understanding makes me feel seen.
“You asked what I thought my life would look like. I thought I’d be in medical school already. I thought I’d be moving forward instead of going home with nothing to show for the last four years of hard work and sacrifice because I failed the MCAT.”
His expression doesn’t change the way I expected. He only watches me more closely.
“Twice,” I add, because the first failure is forgivable, and the second is the one I’ve been hiding. “I took it last year and didn’t get the score I needed, so I studied harder and took it again. The result came today.”
“That’s why you were at the bar.”
“My dad thinks I’m moving home because taking a year off before medical school is the responsible choice.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know whether I need another year or whether I’ve spent my whole life chasing something I was never good enough to reach.”
“Don’t allow those scores to turn into proof that you were wrong about yourself.” His bottle touches the counter with enough force to make me look up. “You got hurt, went back, and did the thing that hurt you again because it mattered. That tells me more about you than any number.”
“You make me sound brave.” I stare at him across the island, furious with the calm certainty in his voice because some part of me wants to believe him badly enough to make the rest of me defensive. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know you walked into a bar on one of the worst nights of your life and still made room for mine.”
“I wasn’t trying to take care of you.”
“I know. That’s why it mattered.”
My fingers still press against my ring. He looks at me as though failing hasn’t made me smaller, and before I can lose my nerve, I ask.
“What did the person you almost married need from you?”
His attention drops between us, and for one second, I think I’ve crossed the boundary he trusted me to respect. Then he answers. “Everything I was good at giving.”
The simplicity of his answer hurts more than an explanation of what he meant would.
“And what did she give you?”
His mouth opens, but he hesitates as though he’s deciding whether to give me an answer.
“I don’t know,” he admits as I push off the counter and come around the island, stopping a few feet away, close enough to see the strain at the corners of his eyes.
“Maybe being wrong about her doesn’t mean you were wrong about wanting the rest.”
He looks at me then, fully and without defense. “Maybe failing your test twice doesn’t mean you were wrong about wanting to be a doctor.”
I don’t know what to do with that. No one has ever looked at the worst thing I’ve ever thought about myself and questioned the conclusion instead of agreeing with it. I went to the bar hoping for a few hours where I didn’t have to think about the score waiting on my laptop. For the first time all day, I’ve stopped thinking about it.
Tomorrow, he’ll still be leaving Houston, and I’ll still go home to Charlotte with a score I can’t change. Admitting what we wanted doesn’t rebuild either of our lives, but maybe neither of us ever stopped wanting those futures. Maybe we only stopped believing we deserved them.
