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I glared. “Rook. You don’t have to give me information about when or why she saw you. I just want to know if she did. You can tell me if you have a patient in your system.”

His eyes returned to his computer, more or less dismissing me. “I can’t tell you because I don’t have a patient by that name.”

I frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” he replied calmly, and his voice held all the color of a 1940s film noir. “I have a photo—”

“—photographic memory, yes, I know,” I finished for him, rolling my eyes. “I remember. I’m just making sure because she said she was your patient.”

Knox Rook gave me an implacable look. “Then, she lied.”

So she had. Rook didn’t make mistakes about his patients—he didn’t make mistakes in general. If he said that Ruthwasn’t his patient, then she wasn’t. “Huh.” I chewed on my lower lip, thinking.

“Isn’t this Ms. Coldwell supposed to be your girlfriend?” Knox asked, his eyes back on his screen and his fingers clicking away on the trackpad again.

I started. “How did you kno—where did you hear that?”

“My mother,” he drawled, like it was a fact he’d rather forget. “Your meddling mother and my meddling mother have been talking to a gaggle of other baby-hungry mothers, and there seems to be some kind of conspiracy happening behind our backs to get us all trapped in matrimony.”

“Who is ‘us?’” I asked, horrified. “What do you mean ‘trapped?’”

Rook ticked off names, clicking the magnetic spheres as he thought. “Spencer, Wells, and Frost are the other three whose mothers are in the same reading group, I think.” Our mothers had met at our graduation, and they had connected over the woes of having sons in medical school and residency. They had started a self-help book club, but apparently, from what Rook was saying, it was a twice-monthly scheme session to “nudge” their sons in a certain leg-shackled direction.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I pushed off the door. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

Glacial eyes met mine again. “I wish I was. Your mother spoke to my mother, and when mine called me last night, she hadideas.” Rook had that disgruntled expression that brought to mind a cat watching a dog chase its tail in circles. “I almost wentto find you because you’re to blame for this.”

I flattened my hand against my chest. “My fault? How is that my fault?”

“Because your mishap with the matchmaker gave them saidideas, and now they’re devising things that frankly terrify me.” Rook set the clump of magnetic spheres on the desk with a snap. “The only logical next move is for you to get the fuck away from me and make yourself single again.”

I swept out a hand. “Done, asshat. Ruth and I were never dating. Christ, how do you even have patients? Do you berate them into pushing out their babies?”

Rook lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Get out, Reed.”

“Gladly,” I muttered. I fast-walked back out of his small practice, slapping the elevator button and waiting impatiently for the doors to open.

Well, now what?For one thing, Ruth didn’t appear to have a PCP. Or if she did, she hadn’t wanted me to know who. I bopped my head side to side in thought.Okay, that might make sense. I’m a stranger and she doesn’t want me to know personal information. Fair.But was she sick, or wasn’t she?

I palmed my face. “Reed, snap out of it,” I mumbled out loud. It wasn’t my problem. Ruth was a grown woman—a smart one—who could make her own decisions. And one of her decisions had been to put distance between herself and me, which meant I didn’t get to dig around in her personal life just because I liked her.

Liked her a lot, actually.

The elevator doors ground open with a loud mechanical whir, but as I moved to enter, Rook’s voice halted me. “Reed, wait.”

I turned, but before I could answer, a person slammed open the fire escape door. A small, female form catapulted out of the stairwell with so much momentum, she careened sideways. Her short body skidded and stumbled straight for the office door where Rook was standing. On instinct, I reached to catch her, but I was too far away. In slow motion, I watched as the girl tripped toward Rook with a straight trajectory into his arms, and my fast-firing brain synapses conjured the inevitability that Rook would reach out and stop her before she hit the glass wall.

Instead, he stepped out of the way.

The girl—Gemma, I realized belatedly—slammed into the glass with a loudbong.A muffled “oof,” escaped her, and she crumpled to the ground with a dazed expression on her face. Rook stared down at her, hands in his pockets. “Running is not allowed in the building.”

Gemma rotated an incredulous glare up to him, rubbing a red spot on her forehead. “You…letme hit the wall?”

“I allowed you to carry out your initial momentum. Which,” he added with an icy stare, “wouldn’t have happened if you’d been walking.”

“You—” she spluttered. Her long, blond curls had fallen all around her face in disarray, and she pushed her hair out of the way, struggling to stand in her tight, black pencil skirt. “I could have died, you jerk.”

Knox swept a look from the fire escape door to the glass office entrance six feet away. “Physics would beg to differ.”