Chapter 3

3.

I signed the transfer agreement.

The HR manager watched me fill out the form, then hesitated.

“This is a move to New York. That’s a big deal. Aren’t you going to talk it over with your boyfriend?”

“No need.”

The last time I was changing jobs, I brought him two different offers to get his opinion. Elias had glanced at them and said, “It’s your life, Chloe. Don’t ask me to make your decisions for you.”

But he spent an entire weekend helping Lily rewrite her personal statement for med school so she could get a spot at the same hospital where he worked.

Elias always said I wasn’t independent enough, that I was too clingy. When I’d try to tell him about my day, he’d put on his headphones to listen to a medical podcast. When I was running late and needed a ride to the airport, he refused, saying his schedule was too tight to be disrupted. When I wanted to go to a party with his friends from med school, he told me I should build my own social circle.

I used to think he was just a cold person. And I thought I would be the exception.

Then Lily showed up.

She claimed to have severe anxiety and panic attacks, and Elias’s parents had asked him to look after her. I thought he’d see it as a burden, but he agreed without a second thought.

She was the exception.

She would text him at 3 a.m. saying her head was full of “bad thoughts,” and he would throw on his coat and leave. When she was an intern at the hospital, he personally introduced her to his colleagues: “This is Lily, she’ll be working with us. Please take good care of her.”

Every time I argued with him about it, he’d just frown.

“I’m looking after her because she’s a risk to herself. You’re jealous of that? Do you have any idea what she almost did―”

He always stopped himself mid-sentence, leaving a heavy, meaningful silence in his wake.

But I never saw Lily on the verge of a breakdown. Her anxiety only ever seemed to flare up at the most convenient times―when Elias and I had a rare date night planned, when I needed him to be there for me, when I finally worked up the courage to tell him I was unhappy.

All the excuses I had made for him―it’s just his personality, he’s too busy with work, he hates clingy people―they all crumbled in the face of the patience and care he showed to someone else.

Fine.

After my surgery tomorrow, after I leave this city, Elias Mercer will be nothing to me.