St. Caroline's was supposed to feel like coming home.
The familiar antiseptic smell, the rhythmic beeping of monitors, the particular squeak of rubber soles on polished floors—these were the sounds and sensations that had anchored me through medical school, through my internship, through the slow construction of a life that finally felt like mine.
Now the corridors felt like a trap.
Every corner potentially hid Xavier. Every page over the intercom made my shoulders tense, my breath catch, my body brace for impact. I moved through my shift like a soldier navigating hostile territory, hyperaware of exits and sightlines.
The morning passed in a blur of patient rounds and chart updates. I kept my head down, stayed busy, made myself useful in ways that didn't require me to linger in any one place too long.
Priya covered for me twice when I spotted Xavier's white coat at the end of a hallway—steering me toward supply closets and stairwells with the practiced ease of someone who'd been watching me self-destruct for weeks.
"You can't avoid him forever," she'd muttered during the second escape. "This hospital isn't that big."
She was right, but forever wasn't what I needed—I just needed today. One shift at a time, until I figured out how to exist in the same building as the man who'd dismantled everything I thought I knew about us.
The staff break room was empty when I slipped inside during a rare quiet moment. Then the door clicked shut behind me, and I knew it was him before I turned around. That particular weight of his presence in the air that I now experienced as suffocation.
Xavier looked exhausted—dark circles carved shadows beneath his eyes, his usually pristine white coat slightly wrinkled, his composure frayed at edges I'd never seen exposed before.
He stood between me and the door with the deliberate positioning of someone who'd learned I would run if given the chance.
"Summer." My name in his mouth sounded like a plea. "We need to talk. You can't just block me everywhere and pretend six months meant nothing."
"I'm not pretending anything." I kept my voice flat, clinical—the same tone I used with difficult patients. "I'm processing information you chose to hide from me."
"I explained why I—"
"You explained why you lied. That's not the same as making the lie acceptable."
I crossed my arms, creating a barrier between us that felt pathetically inadequate.
"You made the choice to hide a wife, Xavier. To build whatever we had on a foundation of deception. Whatever we were died the moment she walked into this hospital looking for her husband."
The words landed exactly where I aimed them, and I watched him absorb the impact. His jaw tightened, his hands flexed at his sides, but he didn't retreat.
"The marriage was over long before you," he said quietly. "I told you that. I meant it."
"And yet you were still wearing no ring so I wouldn't ask questions, still going home to her while telling me to be patient." The anger felt clean, righteous—easier than the complicated grief underneath. "I shouldn't have believed any of it. Especially not after I found out she was pregnant."
The exhaustion in Xavier's expression cracked, and beneath it I glimpsed something raw—desperate in a way I'd never seen from him before. His composure, that unshakeable calm I'd once found so reassuring, seemed to dissolve entirely.
"Summer, I can't have children."
The words landed like a physical blow. I stared at him, my rehearsed arguments dying in my throat. Whatever I'd expected him to say, it wasn't this.
"I've been infertile since my twenties," he continued, his voice stripped of its usual measured cadence. "A complication from an illness in college—it doesn't matter now. What matters is that the pregnancy Camille announced... it can't be mine. Medically, biologically impossible."
The break room seemed to shrink around us. I couldn't look away from his face, from the naked vulnerability he was offering like evidence in his own defense.
"She cheated on me, Summer. Then she lied about paternity, hoping I'd never question it. I only discovered the truth when I demanded a paternity discussion and she broke down completely. Admitted everything—the affair, the deception, all of it."
It was supposed to change everything. He was betrayed too, manipulated by a wife who'd used a fabricated pregnancy to keep him trapped in a marriage he'd been trying to escape. The narrative restructured itself in my mind: Xavier as victim, as fellow casualty of someone else's lies.
Part of me softened. The part that remembered his steady hands during my first surgery observation, his patient explanations, the way he'd made me feel capable and seen when everyone else made me feel small.
But another part—the part that had learned to survive by calculating odds and questioning motives—felt sick.
If Camille was so certain the child was Xavier's, she must have believed it, or at least had to be sure the lie sounds plausible.
Which meant Xavier had been sleeping with his wife while he was sleeping with me. While he was whispering promises in the dark, while he was calling me sunshine and telling me I was the only woman he wanted.
The infertility didn't erase that, it just added another layer to the deception—another truth he'd hidden while asking me to trust him completely.
"You were still with her." The words came out quiet, devastating. "This whole time you were coming to me, and then going home to her."
"It wasn't like that." He stepped closer, and I could smell his cologne—that familiar woodsy scent that used to make me feel safe. "Camille and I, we shared a house, but we haven't been intimate in over a year. She must have gotten pregnant during the affair and assumed I wouldn't do the math, wouldn't question—"
"But you didn't tell me any of this! Not infertility, not the separation, not the truth about your marriage." I held my ground even as my resolve wavered. "You let me believe I was the only secret. You let me think I was special when really I was just one more thing you were hiding."
His hand reached for my face—an old gesture, achingly familiar. The gentle cup of my cheek, the thumb brushing across my cheekbone. A touch that used to make me feel chosen, protected, cherished in ways my father had never managed.
My body betrayed me. I leaned into the warmth for just a moment—muscle memory, six months of conditioning, the desperate human need for comfort when everything hurt.
His palm was warm against my skin, and for one heartbeat I let myself remember what it felt like to believe in us.
Then I caught myself. "Don't."
The single word cost me more than I expected. It scraped against my throat like broken glass, carrying with it the death of something I'd wanted so badly to be real.
Xavier's hand fell away. The loss of contact felt like a small death.
"Summer, please." His voice cracked on my name. "I know I handled this wrong. I know I should have told you everything from the beginning. But what we have—what we had—that was real. You can't tell me you didn't feel it."
"I felt it." The admission came out raw, honest in a way I couldn't afford. "That's the problem. I felt all of it, and now I don't know which parts were true and which parts were just me wanting something that was never really there."
He opened his mouth to respond, but I shook my head.
"I need you to leave. I need time to think, and I can't do that with you standing here looking at me like I'm the answer to everything wrong in your life."
For a long moment, he didn't move. His dark eyes searched my face for something—forgiveness, maybe, or at least a crack in my defenses he could exploit later. Then his shoulders dropped, defeat settling into the lines of his body, and he turned toward the door.
"I'm not giving up on us," he said without looking back. "I'll wait as long as you need, but I won't pretend we're over when we're not."
The door clicked shut behind him. I sank into the nearest chair, my legs suddenly unable to support my weight.
Xavier with his broken promises and complicated truths. His infertility revelation had been meant to exonerate him, to shift blame onto a cheating wife, to paint himself as a victim rather than a villain. And maybe he was a victim, but the lies didn't cancel each other out.
And then there was Jay. Jay with his sudden interest in a face he'd never noticed before, with his reckless charm and his dangerous almost-kisses and his fiancée who haunted my nightmares.
The boy who'd looked through me for four years now claiming he couldn't stop thinking about me—but was it me he wanted, or just the pretty shell I'd built around the broken girl inside?
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