Page 90 of Seven Minutes
But it wasn’t okay. I heard it. Felt it. Watched the familiar ghost settle in his shoulders.
I touched his cheek. “Hey. Look at me.”
He didn’t.
I panicked quietly. Subtly. “I’ll be right back. I promise.”
He still wouldn’t look at me.
My heart split clean down the center as I walkedout the door.
I’d only been gonetwo hours, but the hospital had a way of stretching time until it felt as if I’d never left. It was too easy to slip back into the grind, to let the pace swallow me whole. It almost happened, too, until the alarm on my phone went off. And this time, I didn’t ignore it. I didn’t postpone it. I listened, and I left.
On the drive back, I swung through Eli’s favorite coffee place. The kid at the window tried to flirt with me—painfully, adorably—but I barely registered it. All I could think about was Eli in that bed, pretending he wasn’t counting the minutes.
But he wasn’t in bed. He’d shuffled into the living room, showered and dressed, and settled on the couch to review case law on his laptop.
“Iced mocha, half-sweet,” I said, setting the cup on the coffee table.
Eli’s shoulders loosened a fraction. He tried to drown the relief with a shrug. “Thanks.”
It was ridiculous how much I wanted to pull him in and sayI’m not going anywhere.Even more ridiculous is how much I didn’t trust myself to say it right.
“Can you grab that extra charger from the bedroom?” he asked, voice a touch too casual.
“Yeah, of course.”
I headed down the hall, still half in doctor-mode, replaying the consult in my head. I’d been confident there—sure, decisive. With Eli, though… I was a man walking a high wire made of all our mistakes.
His nightstand drawer stuck for a second before sliding open. The charger sat tangled beneath a couple of pens and afolded stack of papers. I reached for the cord, but my fingers brushed the edge of the page, and before I could stop myself, I unfolded them.
Separation papers. Folded and worn at the crease. Legal proof of how far we’d drifted, of how close I’d come to losing him.
My breath left me in a hard, awful gust.
I skimmed the page with shaking fingers. The world blurred. My throat thickened so fast it was humiliating.
Goddamn.
My name. His name. A line for signatures.
The breath punched out of me. I collapsed beside the bed, hard enough that it wobbled. The papers dangled from my hand as a cry broke out of me before I could swallow it back.
I tried to blink back tears, tried to swallow them down—old habits, old armor—but the wound gaped wide open. Everything inside me felt scraped raw—fear, shame, that old, poisonous belief that if I wasn’t fixing someone, I was failing them. The part of me that saves people for a living, the part that tries to outrun my own damage by fixing everyone else’s, finally hit a wall. A real one. The immovable kind.
Footsteps padded up behind me.
“Adrian?” Eli’s voice was wary, soft… scared. “Hey. You good?”
I shook my head. That was all I could manage.
He saw the papers, saw me hunched over them, and everything went quiet. I tried to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t work right.
“Oh,” he whispered.
“I… I thought I lost you,” I choked out. “Not just in the crash. I lost you before that. When I kept choosing work and emergencies and everything else… I kept thinking I was helping people. Being useful. Being who I was supposed to be.”
He crouched in front of me. Eli winced at the movement, but it didn’t stop him, and he rested a hand on my thigh.
