Chapter 42

The next morning, I was cooking breakfast when Sean walked in from taking Shep out.

“I’m taking omelet requests,” I said. He didn’t answer, and I looked up to find him frowning at his phone. “Sean? Something wrong?”

“Denver,” he said. I blinked at him. “My omelet.”

I turned to get some ham from the fridge. “You okay?”

“I think my roommate situation just worked out. I’ll be out of your hair soon.”

“You’re not in my hair, but that’s great news. When are you moving?’

“Uhh…”

Something about the way he said it made me look up from the eggs I was cracking. “Are you about to tell me it’s going to be like a year or something? Because then maybe you’ll be getting in my hair.” A text sounded on my phone, but I ignored it while I waited for his answer.

“You should probably get that,” he said.

“Can’t.” I wiggled my fingers covered in egg.

He unhooked Shep’s leash, walked over to me, and gently steered me to the sink. “You really need to answer your phone,” he said and ran water over my fingers.

I washed and dried them while he headed down the hall, calling Ranée’s name.

“You’re being weird!” I called after him.

“Answer your phone,” he called back.

I picked it up as another text came in.

It was from Jack.

Even though I’d dried my hands, my fingers became impossibly slippery as I fumbled the phone trying to unlock it.

It was a selfie, showing only Jack’s flannel-clad torso—which I’d know anywhere by now—and his hand holding a cup of coffee and a small bag of Cheetos. But it was the background that dominated everything, because it was the front of my apartment building.

Before I could fully process what that meant, my phone vibrated with another text and a picture of Transcendent Seagull appeared. It said only, “You should buzz Jack up.”

I ran to the door and did exactly that, then turned and yelled Sean’s name down the hall, with a big, fat question mark behind it.

“Sorry, trying to keep Ranée barricaded in here,” he yelled back, muffled by her door. There were some thumps and a few Ranée curses.

A knock sounded at the door, and I flung it open to find Jack standing there. But it was Jack like I’d never seen him. The shirt and jeans were familiar, and so was the smile. Devastatingly so. But…

My hand flew to my mouth. “Your hair.”

He reached up to touch it, but there wasn’t much left. He’d cut it much shorter, trimmed around his ears and collar. “Linda did it for me. She wanted to leave some length in front, but I figured it would get in the way of the microscope.”

“You look…” Incredible. He looked even better than in my constant daydreams by a factor of infinity. “It looks really good. Linda must have loved it when you walked in.”

“She did. There was enough to send it to Wigs for Kids.” He shifted and cleared his throat. “Can I come in?”

“Of course. Let me just…” I took the Cheetos and coffee and set them on the table. “Um, should we sit?”

“Sure, great.”

It was such a stilted conversation, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around what it meant that he was here. We settled onto the sofa facing each other.

“So I—”

“Why are you—”

We said at the same time.

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “You go ahead.”

I curled my hands into fists to keep them from fidgeting. “Why are you here, Jack?”

“When you called me last night, I was already in the city. I’d been hoping you’d see me today, but then you called...”

“And you told me I had bad timing.” The realization was dawning on me. “But not because you think we’re over?”

He smiled. “No. Because you ruined my surprise.”

I gave him a smaller smile in return. “Sorry about that. But I’m glad you’re here. There are things I need to say to you in person. More apologies I should have made a while ago.”

His expression grew serious, and he shook his head. “When you left Featherton, I was pretty upset. I thought I was mad at you, which is why I didn’t text you or call you. I figured you didn’t understand anything about me, that I’d read you all wrong, that I was better off without you.”

“Jack, I—”

“No, it’s okay. Because then you sent that text about how you started volunteering. And it turned everything upside down for me. You’ve tied me in so many knots since we met that I don’t know what’s up with anything anymore, even things I thought I knew for absolute truth.”

My hands relaxed. “I know how that feels.”

“The fact that you were willing to do something that hard, it shook me. Out of complacency. Out of self-righteousness.” He reached up to brush back hair that wasn’t there anymore, and his hand drifted to his lap as if he was uncertain what to do with it. “Most importantly, it shook me out of self-pity. I realized that I wasn’t mad at you when you left. I was mad at myself.”

I looked down at my lap. “I still shouldn’t have said what I said.”

He sighed. “Maybe you should have. You were wrong about me needing to go back to practicing, but you were right about me hiding. I didn’t realize how much I’d isolated myself until you came along. You shook me up in ways I needed.”

I rested my hand on his knee. “If it’s any consolation, you did the same thing to me.”

He covered my hand with his, toying with my fingers. “Yeah?”

I swallowed as little currents ran up my arm from every place he touched me. “I had a perfect life figured out for myself. A plan for my career. For a relationship. Five years, ten years, I saw it all laid out in front of me, clear and simple. You were nowhere in there. And yet…”

“And yet there’s no version of the future where I don’t see you. How did that happen, Em?”

“I don’t know. But it happened to me too.”

“That’s what I came here to tell you. And then you ruined it with that call last night.” Another smile twitched at the corner of his lips.

A warm tendril of hope had unfurled inside me when he’d walked through my door, and now it grew and stretched. “I have faith in you to fix this, doctor.”

“Good, because it’s my turn to do the fixing,” he said. “You took a risk and came up to see me. As happy as that made me, I didn’t understand what a huge gamble that was until I packed my life into my car to drive down here to you.”

“Your life into your car?” The tendril of hope grew to a flame fueled by wonder. He had done that for me?

He threaded his fingers through mine and met my eyes. “When you told me last night that you were willing to work on this long-distance, and to do whatever it took…” His voice trailed off. He shook his head with an air of disbelief. “I promise you, I planned this grand entrance into your life before you even called. Ask Sean. I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon.”

“A grand entrance into my life,” I repeated. “Is that also why you cut your hair?” I touched the close-cropped strands near his temple. Then I remembered something he’d said when he first walked in. “Wait. You said you packed your life into your car. And when you came in you said something about cutting your hair for a microscope?”

“Yeah.” He brushed his lips across my knuckles and this time heat shot straight up my arm. “Sean mentioned he needed a roommate, so I figured I’d help him out and move to San Francisco. It kind of worked out since the UC San Francisco School of Medicine offered me a teaching and research position.” He watched my face closely, but he didn’t need to. He could have seen my jaw drop from the top of Coit Tower, and he smiled at my reaction. “I can’t go back to treating patients, but I can work on the problem from a different direction. Have to keep this out of the way of the microscope.” He brushed a hand over his hair, clearly still not used to it. “It was time.”

Suddenly I was every romance novel cliché at once: pounding heart, sweaty palms, and there was no way my knees would support me if I had to stand. But luckily—so luckily, as Jack reached over to slide his hand around the back of my neck—I didn’t have to go anywhere.

“I’m here. I can’t go back to the work I did, but I’m not quitting anymore. Not medicine, and not you.” He leaned forward, gently touching his forehead to mine. “I love you, Emily.”

I slid my arms around his neck, thrilling at the brush of the soft, short bristles of his hair against my fingers. “Jack?” I whispered, a hairsbreadth from his lips.

“Yeah?”

“I love you too. Now shut up and kiss me.”

And neither of us paid any attention at all as Ranée and Sean spilled into the hall cheering.