Page 28 of Once Upon A Second Chance (Once Upon A Time…To Happily Ever After #2)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Richard

I hear Jesse before I see him.

The heavy slam of a truck door. Fast, angry footsteps across the gravel lot outside the clinic.

The door flies open just as I’m finishing with my last patient of the day, and he strides in like a man on a mission, barely registering the startled glances from staff and the wide eyes of the elderly woman checking out at the front desk.

He spots me and locks in.

“Out here,” he says, jerking his head toward the parking lot.

I exhale slowly, already knowing what this is about.

Penny’s call only came twenty minutes ago. She sounded furious—trembling-on-the-edge-of-snapping furious—but underneath that was something else. Uncertainty. Fear. And a flicker of something fragile I haven’t dared to name yet.

I nod, hand my chart off to Lena, who gives me a tight, knowing look, and follow Jesse outside.

The air is sticky with late afternoon heat, the sky already turning amber along the edges. Jesse doesn’t wait. As soon as we’re out of earshot, he rounds on me.

“She’s buying a pregnancy test,” he snaps. “Did you know that? Did she tell you?”

“She did,” I say, even, calm, hands in my pockets. “Just now. Because you forced her to.”

Jesse scoffs, pacing two short steps before spinning back around. “Don’t turn this on me. You think I’m gonna just watch this happen again? Watch you waltz back into her life, knock her up, and leave when things get hard?”

My jaw tightens, but I don’t rise to the bait.

“She’s not even sure yet, Jesse,” I say. “And for the record? I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”

“You said that before,” he spits. “You said it when she was twenty-one and everyone told her you were bad news, and she still picked you. She backed you then, too. And you left.”

I flinch, barely.

But Jesse sees it. Presses harder.

“You know who never forgave you for that?” he asks, voice dropping, deadly quiet. “Our mom. She watched Penny fall apart over you. And she died thinking you were the one man who’d never come back for her. I’m not going to stand by and let you prove her right.”

For a moment, the words hit me harder than I expect. I feel them in my chest like a stone dropping, deep and heavy.

Penny’s mom had always been kind to me. Stern, sure—but kind. She’d seen the worst in people early in life and raised Penny like the world might try to take her away piece by piece unless she was strong enough to fight back.

And I had walked away. No matter how I rationalized it later, the truth was that I’d left.

I draw a slow breath, steady myself. I think about the woman lying beside me last night, the way she smiled at dinner, the way her voice shook on the phone when she said this wasn’t how she wanted me to find out.

“I’m not the same man I was back then,” I say finally. “And Penny’s not the same girl. She’s stronger now. And I know exactly what I lost before. I’m not going to lose her again—not because of fear, not because of pride, and not because you think I don’t deserve her.”

Jesse’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t interrupt.

I meet his eyes head-on. “If she’s pregnant, we’ll handle it together. If she’s not, we’ll keep moving forward. Either way? It’s not your decision to make. It’s ours.”

We stand there a beat longer in tense silence.

Eventually, Jesse looks away. Just for a second. Then back at me. “She’d better not cry over you again.”

“She won’t,” I say. “At least not because I made her.”

He gives me one last, unreadable look, then turns and walks off without another word.

I stand there in the still heat of the evening for a long moment after he’s gone, staring down the road where his truck disappears from view.

My chest still aches from what he said—She died thinking you were the one man who’d never come back for her—but I don’t let it unravel me.

Not this time.

Instead, I reach for my phone and keys.

Because there’s only one person I want to see tonight.

And she’s the one who deserves to hear what I didn’t get to say before.

The lights are on in her living room, but the house is quiet when I knock.

No footsteps, no Bijou barking, no movement at all.

I knock again, softer. “Penny?”

After a beat, I hear it—the creak of floorboards, the faint pad of bare feet across tile. She opens the door slowly, robe cinched tight, hair pulled up, face bare.

She looks tired. Not just end-of-a-long-day tired. This is bone-deep, soul-level weariness.

“I came,” I say, and immediately feel like an idiot for stating the obvious.

But she nods, stepping back to let me in.

“I didn’t take it yet,” she murmurs, voice barely louder than the rain starting to tap against the porch roof outside. “I was waiting for you.”

The words hit me harder than they should.

Not because I earned them.

Because she said them anyway.

We walk to the back of the house in silence, past the hallway where pictures of her family line the walls—her mother smiling in every one of them, like she knew how to capture joy before it slipped through.

The bathroom door is already open, the little white test box sitting on the edge of the sink.

She picks it up, turns it over once, and then holds it in her hand like it’s heavier than it looks.

“I don’t want to do this alone,” she says, not looking at me. “But I hate that I don’t get to know first. I wanted—God, I don’t know—just a minute to sit with it before anyone else had a claim on what it meant.”

“You still do,” I say quietly. “I’m not here to take that from you. I’m just... here.”

After a beat, she nods again and disappears behind the door. I hear the rustle of the plastic wrapper, the sound of water running, then the click of the test being set on the counter.

She opens the door again, eyes wide, cheeks flushed.

“Three minutes,” she says.

“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 I don’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 look together?” I ask.

She swallows. “Yeah. I think I do.”

We stand slowly, close enough that our shoulders touch, and step to the sink.

Her hand reaches for mine.

And whatever it says—whatever it means—it’ll be ours now.