Chapter 1 - Thirty-Two Unopened Letters
On my first day as a surgical resident, the man I had loved since I was nineteen called my name across the marble lobby of St. Catherine Medical Center.
I knew his voice before I even turned around.
Fifteen years had changed almost everything else about my life.
Those years had put faint lines around my eyes, left a jagged surgical scar across my mother’s abdomen, stacked thirty thousand dollars of student debt in my name, and worked enough graveyard shifts into my bones that I could fall asleep sitting upright beneath fluorescent lights.
Yet fifteen years had not changed the deep, steady timbre of that voice.
“Megan?”
My hand tightened around my metal clipboard until the sharp edge bit into my palm while residents in navy scrubs hurried past me toward the elevators.
The lobby smelled of lemon disinfectant, burnt dark-roast coffee, and the cold September rain people had tracked through the revolving doors.
I had imagined this morning for half my life, fighting through night school and nursing shifts to earn my white coat, but I had never imagined Grant Walker standing in the middle of it.
Keeping my back to him, I forced my voice to remain flat.
“Not today, Grant.”
Silence hung between us for a heartbeat before his leather dress shoes crossed the terrazzo floor.
“Megan, wait.”
“I waited long enough for this day,” I said quietly, turning around to face him at last.
The reckless twenty-three-year-old boy I remembered with dark curls falling into his eyes was gone.
The man standing in front of me was thirty-eight, broader in the shoulders beneath his tailored white coat, with silver threading his temples and tired hollows beneath eyes that had lost their easy smile.
Pinned to his breast pocket was a gold-plated badge that read DR. GRANT WALKER, CHIEF OF GENERAL SURGERY.
For one ridiculous second, I thought I might laugh at the cruelty of the universe waiting until I finally clawed my way into a surgical residency at thirty-four only to place my former fiancé directly over my head.
His gaze dropped to the fresh plastic badge clipped to my lapel.
“Dr. Carter,” he murmured, stunned.
“That’s right.”
“You’re in the first-year residency program?”
“I am,” I replied, hating how much it hurt when he whispered that I had actually become a doctor.
In the bottom drawer of my dresser at home still sat the faded blue stethoscope he had bought secondhand for me when I was nineteen, though I would have died before admitting I had kept it.
When the residency coordinator called the interns into the auditorium, Grant brushed my forearm with his fingertips to stop me, and my entire body remembered the heat of his touch before I pulled sharply away.
Ten minutes later, I sat frozen in the third row as Grant walked onto the stage to lecture twenty-three new residents on discipline and the sacred weight of holding a human life in our hands without looking at me once.
Throughout afternoon rounds, he was agonizingly fair, quizzing me on falling potassium levels and differential diagnoses just like every other intern, until an eighty-two-year-old cardiac patient named Mrs. Donnelly looked between the two of us and remarked that time covers old wounds without ever erasing them.
After eating the meatloaf lunch my mother had packed with a shaky handwritten note reading God bless you, Doctor, I walked out through the lobby at dusk and froze beneath the oil portrait of Grant’s father, Clinical Director Dr. Arthur Walker.
“Those portraits always make a man look more important than he is,” a cold, familiar voice said from behind me.
I turned to find Arthur Walker leaning on a polished wooden cane ten feet away, his silver hair thinner than it had been fifteen years ago when he sat across from my trembling nineteen-year-old self in his private study and tore my life apart.
“We had an agreement, Nancy’s daughter,” Arthur said softly, his eyes hardening as they swept over my resident badge.
“That agreement ended fifteen years ago, and I’m not nineteen anymore,” I told him before walking out into the cold evening rain.
Grant was waiting for me beneath the streetlight by the city bus stop, stepping directly into my path as traffic hissed across the wet pavement.
“Why did you never answer my letters, Megan?” Grant asked, his voice cracking with fifteen years of buried agony.
“I sent thirty-two letters—the first twenty-six came back unopened, and the last six came back months later with nothing inside, until I finally believed you hated me.”
May you like
Unable to look at the pain in his eyes without breaking the oath that had kept my mother alive, I stepped onto the arriving bus just as he called out behind me, asking what had happened to me all those years ago.
Twenty minutes later, I unlocked the front door of my cramped two-bedroom apartment expecting the smell of my mother’s chamomile tea, only to find my mother lying unconscious on the linoleum kitchen floor beside a shattered teacup and a fresh envelope stamped with the personal seal of Dr. Arthur Walker.
