"Already on your desk." She paused. "Along with the entire floor's best wishes."
He did not respond to that.
The janitor was next. The older man had been mopping the corridor outside the radiology wing, and he actually parked hiscleaning cart to one side and leaned against it with the grin of a man who had been waiting all afternoon for this exact moment.
"I heard the good news."
"There is no good news."
"Whatever you say, Doc." The grin did not diminish by so much as a millimeter. "Whatever you say."
Kazeyuki made it through two patient consultations, one post-op check, and a brief conversation with a colleague about a complex spinal case. Somewhere between the second consultation and the post-op, he passed the lobby co-working space on the ground floor, and his gaze went to the window-facing seat before he could stop it. Her seat. The one she claimed every time, laptop open, client briefs spread across the small table, because it had a clear sightline to the entrance he used every morning, which meant she could see him arriving before he could see her pretending she was not watching for him.
The seat was empty.
He kept walking.
He was coming around the corner toward the vending machines on the fourth floor when Mrs. Clinton materialized. His patient's mother's best friend, a woman who had appointed herself the unofficial social director of the entire hospital and who treated the lobby co-working space like her personal salon. She was turning away from the vending machine with a cup of coffee in her hand when she spotted him, and the beam that broke across her face could have powered the building.
"I told you, didn't I?"
"Mrs. Clinton—"
"I knew from the moment I saw you two together." She was advancing now, coffee sloshing dangerously. "I told her so, too, but she didn't believe me. Well, now she'll know I was right all along. You've always been in love with Kitty—"
Crash.
Kazeyuki frowned. Had someone dropped something behind—
"D-Doctor Collington?"
Fuck.
"Is t-that true?"
He had been hoping he had just imagined hearing it, or that he was wrong, and the voice belonged to someone else.
"A-Are you in love with me?"
Kazeyuki slowly turned, and there she was.
She had just stepped out of the elevator, and the shattered pieces of what looked like a snow globe were scattered across the floor at her feet, the water still pooling, still spreading. Her red hair was down, her green eyes were enormous, and she was looking at him the way she had looked at him two years ago in that hospital bed, when she had asked him if he was dating anyone and he had answered her, and he still did not know why he had answered her.
He knew he had to tell her the truth.
But when he finally heard himself speak—
"Yes."
He just fucking couldn't risk it.
"I am."
Because he would never survive if another girl died because of him.
Chapter Two
I THINK HE WAS PRESSURED.