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I follow her, with a bad feeling in my stomach.

Chapter Seventeen

DALTON

By noon, I have written Maggie’s name on a whiteboard and erased it twice.

This is not good.

I stand in my office with a marker in my hand, staring at the blank space where her name was, and try to pretend this is a professional exercise. It’s not entirely a lie. There’s a medical question involved. There’s a timeline. There are dates, symptoms, hormones, procedures, an insemination, a positive test, and one night that refuses to stay where I put it.

The problem is that none of those things remain separate anymore.

I keep separate compartments for a reason. Surgery doesn’t come home with me. Patients don’t become private questions. Pleasure, when I allow it, stays where it belongs, with no promises attached and no lingering obligations the next morning.

That has always worked.

Then Maggie texted the wrong number.

Now I’m standing in my office drawing a reproductive timeline like a first-year resident with an anxiety disorder. Biology is rarely polite enough for that. But they don’t rule anything out either, and that’s the part that has been sitting under my ribs all morning.

The door opens without a knock. Marcus walks in, looks at the whiteboard, looks at me, then looks back at the board.

“You erased something guilty,” he says.

“I erased something irrelevant,” I shoot back.

He harrumphs under his breath.

I cap the marker. “Don’t you have rounds?”

“I did rounds. I saved lives. I was charming. Now I’m here to watch you have what appears to be a midlife fertility crisis.”

“I’m forty-five.”

“Exactly. Midlife.”

I give him a look.

He drops into the chair across from my desk with the casual disrespect of a man who has known me too long to be impressed by me. Marcus has been my friend for fifteen years, which means he has earned the right to be irritating with unusual accuracy.

“A real case or a Dalton case?”

“A real case.”

“So a Dalton case.”

I give him a look.

He ignores it and points with his coffee cup. “Why does this say condom failure?”

“Because the condom failed.”

“Helpful. Thank you. I was worried the condom had resigned.”

I erase the words and write barrier failure instead.

Marcus stares at it. “That’s worse.”