Page 24

Chapter twenty-four

D amien

The scrub room smelled like antiseptic and nerves.

I rolled up my sleeves, lathered my arms, and let the water run hot. Not scalding, but near enough to remind me I was still alive. The hum of fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and behind me, two young nurses whispered about me like I couldn’t hear.

“That’s Dr. Damien Cole,” one said. “He used to run cardio at St. Jude’s.”

“He’s the one who diagnosed the Hawthorne girl in under five minutes,” the other replied, almost reverent.

I shut off the faucet and turned to face the mirror.

The man staring back had the same storm-gray eyes. The same razor-sharp jaw. The same scar on his brow from a reckless teenage fight. But something was different. Like I’d aged a decade in the last two hours and worn every second on my shoulders.

The OR doors swung open.

“Dr. Cole,” a surgical tech called. “We’re prepped.”

I nodded once, grabbed my gloves, and stepped through.

The lights were too bright. The monitors beeped in a too-perfect rhythm. The surgical tools gleamed like silver soldiers in formation.

Everything was new—streamlined, state-of-the-art. But sterile. Almost soulless.

The patient was a teenage girl—sixteen, maybe. Skin pale as linen. Tubes in her nose. IV taped to her arm. Her heart monitor blipped irregularly, dangerously close to the edge.

I didn’t need the attending’s rundown. I’d reviewed her scans. Her congenital defect had gone unnoticed until today, and if we didn’t intervene fast, she wouldn’t see next week.

“Ready when you are,” the anesthesiologist said.

I took a breath, lowered my mask, and murmured, “Let’s begin.”

The room fell into silence as I made the first incision.

My hands didn’t shake. They moved like they used to—fluid, exact.

Muscle memory carried me through suture and bypass, clamp and stitch.

My mind silenced every thought that wasn’t about the girl on the table.

No Ruby. No job offer. Just arteries, valves, and blood flow.

The kind of silence I used to live for.

We worked for hours.

And then, just like that, it was over.

“Heart rhythm stable,” someone said.

“She’s gonna make it,” another added, awed.

The team clapped softly, not the boisterous kind, but the kind born of shared relief.

The attending surgeon—Dr. Liu, maybe ten years my junior—stepped closer and clapped me on the back.

“Still got it, Cole,” he said, his eyes lit with admiration. “You just pulled off a miracle.”

I nodded, pulling off my gloves. My knuckles ached, the skin around them red and raw. “Thanks.”

“You sure you won’t consider staying?” he asked. “A guy like you—your skill, your instincts? We need more like you in this city.”

I gave a tight smile, but it didn’t reach my eyes. “Appreciate it.”

He patted my shoulder once and walked off to debrief the family.

I stood alone for a moment longer, staring at the monitor’s soft blips. A living heartbeat. My work. My hands.

Still got it.

But the phrase rang hollow. Like a tune I used to love that now felt off-key.

Because when I’d saved lives before, it had filled something in me. A craving. A need.

Today?

Today it felt like muscle. Not magic.

It felt like going through the motions while my heart—ironically—was miles away in a quiet garden beneath string lights and lavender wind.

I stripped off my gown and pushed through the locker room doors.

Ruby’s voice echoed in my mind. That voice note I hadn’t had the courage to answer yet.

“I believe in us. In this. In whatever we’re building.”

The problem was, I wasn’t sure what I was building anymore.

I glanced at my phone. Still no messages from her. Probably busy planning events, planting things, being exactly the force of nature, I’d fallen for.

I should’ve been there.

Not here in steel and glass and glowing screens.

I should’ve been with her.

I sat on the bench, phone in one hand, the job offer still flagged in my inbox.

All the things I once chased—prestige, excellence, legacy—they were right here. On a silver platter.

But they didn’t feel like home anymore.

Not without the girl who taught me how to hold wildflowers without crushing them.

And for the first time in years, I didn’t feel proud of what I’d done in the OR.

I just felt… hollow.

The hallway smelled like too many different kinds of hope—some old, some fading, some desperate.

I stood outside Room 218 for a long moment before finally lifting my hand to knock.

The door opened before I even touched it.

A woman with tear-swollen eyes and a crumpled cardigan blinked up at me. “Dr. Cole?”

“Yes, ma’am.” My voice came out quiet. Steady. The way I’d trained it to be.

Her face collapsed with emotion as she stepped aside, giving me a clear view of her daughter—pale, hooked to machines, but breathing. Alive.

She turned to me and gripped my hands like they were life rafts. “She’s everything I have,” she choked out. “Everything. I lost her father to a stroke two years ago. And today—” Her voice broke. “I thought I was going to lose her too.”

I didn’t speak. There was nothing to say that could carry the weight of a mother’s fear or the fragile relief now stretched across her expression.

She squeezed harder. “You gave her back to me. Thank you. Thank you for not giving up.”

My throat tightened.

This moment—it should’ve lit me up inside. Years ago, it would’ve. This was the kind of moment I used to live for. The reason I chased medicine down every endless corridor. The applause. The gratitude. The miracle.

But all I could feel was the echoing silence of someone else’s absence.

Ruby.

I gave the woman’s hand a small, reassuring squeeze, then stepped away. “She’s strong. And lucky to have you,” I said gently.

She nodded, then turned back to her daughter, brushing a strand of hair off the girl’s forehead with a tenderness that stung behind my eyes.

I left quietly, the soft beeping of monitors fading behind me.

By the time I pushed through the exit doors into the cool night, I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

The air hit me like a wall. Damp with drizzle and heavy with city noise.

I walked past the staff lot, down to the far corner where no one parks, and leaned against a light post, palms flat against my knees.

And then I broke.

No warning. No buildup. Just a sudden, uncontrollable flood.

I sank to the curb and let the tears come—hot, blinding, confusing.

Not because I failed.

But because saving a life didn’t feel like living mine.

I’d just pulled a girl back from the brink.

A medical win most doctors wouldn’t even attempt.

And still... all I could think about was a small shop in Cedar Springs.

A woman who arranged blooms like they were pieces of her soul.

A garden built by two mismatched hearts trying to grow something together.

And how I wasn’t there.

I scrubbed a hand over my face, the cold biting at my skin.

I used to believe purpose came with a scalpel and a title.

But standing here in a deserted parking lot, tears leaking down my cheeks, I realized something I hadn’t let myself admit until now.

I didn’t want this life anymore.

Not like this.

Not at the cost of late-night garden walks. Not in exchange for Ruby’s laughter echoing down the hall. Not if it meant missing birthdays, bonfires, and the unremarkable moments that had somehow become everything.

I opened my phone.

Her name sat at the top of my missed calls.

And then, right under it, a message. Her voice. Light and soft.

“Hey, Doc. I know you’re probably saving the world again, but just in case you forgot… I’m rooting for you. Always.”

A shaky laugh escaped me.

Of course she’d say that.

Of course, she’d send light into a moment I didn’t even realize was dark.

I pulled out the letter I’d started writing her that morning—creased and unfinished in my coat pocket. The words ended mid-sentence.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I folded it slowly and slid it back into my pocket. Not because I was giving up.

But because maybe I didn’t need to write the ending yet.

Maybe it was time to live it instead.

I sat in my car for over an hour before I worked up the courage to make the call.

The keys dangled from the ignition. My overnight bag was in the back seat, half-zipped, hospital ID badge clipped to the handle. I stared at my phone until the screen dimmed, then lit it up again. Still no new messages.

But this wasn’t about waiting for a sign. It was about finally doing what I should’ve done days ago.

I pressed Ruby’s name and held the phone to my ear, pulse stuttering like a teenage boy about to ask someone to prom.

It rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

Then—

“Hello?”

Her voice.

Soft, tired, hopeful—and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe for a second.

“Hey,” I said, and even that felt too small for how much I meant it.

There was a pause. “Hey.”

“I saved someone today.” My voice cracked down the center. “Teenage girl. Cardiac arrest. I was the only one who could help.”

Another pause. Then Ruby’s whisper, “Is she okay?”

“She’s going to be. I did everything right. The team applauded when it was over.” I let out a breath that trembled at the edges. “And I thought… I thought that would make everything clear. Like it used to. Like it was supposed to.”

The silence stretched between us, thick with everything we hadn’t said in days.

I closed my eyes and rested my head back against the seat.

“But all I wanted,” I said quietly, “was to come home to you.”

There was a breath—sharp, caught. Then a sound I hadn’t realized I missed until just now: Ruby’s voice, breaking around the truth.

“Then do. Please, Damien. Because I can’t keep waiting for the version of you that only exists in an operating room.”

That hit me like a defibrillator straight to the chest.

“I know,” I said, barely audible. “You’ve been loving me through a shadow. A version of me that left his real self behind in a sterile room with no windows.”

“And I’ve been trying,” she whispered. “I really have. To understand. To give you space. But Damien, I don’t want to be the thing you come back to after you’ve given all of yourself away. I want to be the place where you begin. The person you choose—first.”

“I know,” I said again. “And you deserve that. You always have.”

I could hear her breathing on the other end. Slow. Uneven. Like she was holding back tears.

“Then come home.”

I swallowed hard, my throat thick. “I am. But not just for you, Ruby.”

Another pause.

“I’m coming home for me.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty—it was full of everything we’d needed to hear.

“You mean that?” she asked.

“I do. I’ve been chasing the wrong thing for so long, I forgot what it felt like to be… whole. And I didn’t even know how broken I was until you showed me what real healing looks like.”

There was a soft laugh from her—relieved, trembling.

“Do you still have it?” she asked suddenly.

I blinked. “Have what?”

“The daisy. The first one I tucked behind your ear after that awful fundraiser. You called yourself ‘a daisy in disguise.’”

A smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. I reached into my coat pocket, fingers brushing the waxy paper where I’d carefully pressed it weeks ago.

“I have it right here.”

She laughed again, quieter now. “Of course you do.”

“I’m turning in my badge tomorrow morning,” I said. “Not because I’m quitting medicine. But because I’m finally choosing how I want to practice it.”

“You’re choosing Cedar Springs?”

“I’m choosing peace. I’m choosing that old man I walked through the garden with last week. I’m choosing the little girl I saved and the community I want to keep whole. And I’m choosing the woman who built a life from petals and purpose.”

I could hear her sniffle. “You always did have a way with words when you weren’t using them to be a stubborn mule.”

I chuckled, finally feeling the air move cleanly through my lungs.

“Ruby?”

“Yeah?”

“Save a spot for me in the garden.”

She exhaled. “Always.”

The call ended, but the moment didn’t. I sat there for a long time, holding the phone to my heart and the daisy between my fingers.

Then I drove to the hospital one last time.

Inside, the lights buzzed sterile and bright. My steps echoed through the corridors that used to feel like home. At the front desk, I handed over my ID badge.

The nurse behind the counter looked surprised. “You sure?”

I nodded. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

As I turned to leave, I slipped the daisy back into my pocket, pressing it close to the place that had finally started to bloom.