Page 108 of Once Upon A Second Chance

“Okay,” I reply, stepping inside.

We sit down side by side on the closed toilet lid and the edge of the bathtub, the test sitting on the sink behind us like a bomb we’re pretending not to see.

At first, the silence is stiff. But then she breathes out through her nose and shakes her head. “You know what’s stupid?”

“Tell me.”

“I once went on a terrible family trip to Hawaii. It was supposed to be relaxing, a grief thing—just me, my dad, and Jesse, two years after Mom died. But Jesse got food poisoning, my dad lost his wallet on day two, and I got sunburned so badly I had to wear a hotel robe the entire flight home.”

I snort before I can stop myself. “Sounds like a dream.”

“Oh, it was a nightmare. But weirdly? I still had fun. We drank coconut water from a stranger’s cooler on a hiking trail, played cards on the hotel balcony with stolen mini bottles from the mini-bar, and laughed so hard one night that a neighbor actually knocked on our wall and told us to shut up.”

Her voice softens. “I think sometimes when things go wrong, the best parts still find a way through.”

I look at her for a moment. “You’re kind of brilliant, you know that?”

She smirks. “Tell me something Idon’t know.”

“Okay,” I say, leaning my elbow on the edge of the tub. “Once, during my third year at the New York hospital, we had this ridiculous string of disasters. One power outage, two interns locked in the stairwell, a crash cart that literally rolled away during a code. Total chaos.”

“Sounds about right,” she says, bumping her shoulder into mine.

“And somehow, in the middle of all that, this guy came in—he’d been in a car accident no one expected him to survive. And because the elevator was down, they routed him to my floor by mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be in surgery that night, but I was the only one left scrubbed in.”

“You saved him,” she says.

“We saved him,” I correct. “The wrong floor, the right time. The nurses were amazing. And afterward I sat in the locker room for half an hour just... laughing. Hysterically. Because none of it made sense, and it all worked out anyway.”

We fall quiet again, leaning a little into each other, heads bowed just slightly like the weight of the moment is drawing us closer.

“I was so scared to call you today,” she admits, voice low.

“I know.”

“I wanted this to be mine first. Mine before it became yours, or ours, or something everyone had an opinion about.”

“I would’ve wanted that too,” I say. “But I’m still glad you called.”

“I knew Jesse was going to be an ass about it, but I didn’t think he’d sprint out of a Walgreens like a one-man cavalry charge.”

“Definitely dramatic,” I say, and that gets a small laugh out of her.

The timer on her phone buzzes.

We both freeze.

She turns it off without looking at the screen.

For a second, we just sit there.

Not moving.

Not speaking.

“Do you want to looktogether?” I ask.

She swallows. “Yeah. I think I do.”