CHAPTER ONE
BECCA
I felt… calm.
I thought.
Is that what being pleasantly drunk was? I had always been such a teetotaler. I hardly ever drank—in case of an emergency, I told myself, but really, I didn’t like the idea of throwing up, and I had always been a lightweight.
I tapped on the bar and the bartender came up to me again. He was a young man in his early twenties with a bun that was made entirely out of dreadlocks. I could’ve kept looking at him for ages, especially because now there appeared to be two of him.
“A screwdriver,” I said. “Make it a double, please.”
“Of course, honey,” he said, winking at me.
My heart fluttered. I didn’t think he was flirting with me, exactly, but at least he was being nice to me. It felt like it had been so long since a man had been nice to me. Since anyone had been nice to me, really. Estella had gone off to get married or something in what was supposed to be my divorce celebration. Scott and I had officially split up and everything was in motion for me to get my life back.
Yeah, right.
As if, I told myself as I tipped the glass back and felt the ice coating my tongue. I was drunk. I would’ve never done anything like that if I had been sober, I told myself.
At least I wasn’t making a fool of myself in front of anybody I knew. I had kept it together at the hospital, even when it felt like I wanted to jump at Scott and claw his eyes out. I couldn’t believe that, after what he had done to me, everyone was pretending that things were normal.
I understood that there were more important things. Our patients were more important than our personal drama. But we couldn’t operate together, and being unable to work with one another had hindered the hospital.
Of course, Scott had put it all on me.
I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone about what Scott had done. I didn’t want to tell them about the late nights when he would arrive home stinking of alcohol and with lipstick marks all over his collar. I didn’t want to tell them about the texts I found on his phone, from women who were saved under contact names like Dr. Panama and Dr. South Korea. It was clear that they weren’t doctors, that they were sex workers he had met on one of his many nightly escapades, and since he couldn’t remember their names, he would just save them in his phone as their nationality.
It was insulting. Probably a little racist.
If I had told anyone what Scott was doing, then they might lose respect for him at the hospital. I didn’t want that to happen. Despite all his personal failings, his shortcomings as a husband, and his inability to be faithful, he was a wonderful and dedicated surgeon with a better success rate than most surgeons in our state.
Hell, in our hospital.
I hadn’t wanted our staff to respect him less, and I knew the office staff was immediately going to cling to any little bit of gossip about Dr. Noble and Dr. Baker. The Ken and Barbie of our hospital, people thought about us the way they thought about a homecoming king and queen.
It was terrible.
I hated it.
It was an ideal neither one of us could live up to and I didn’t even want to try. But I had fallen into it, rather unexpectedly, because Scott was popular and I was his wife, and I couldn’t escape his influence.
He looked like the kind of man who should play a surgeon on TV, rather than an actual surgeon. Hell, he probably would have, if it hadn’t been for his mother’s overbearing influence.
And I had always liked looking at him.
If nothing else, eventually.
But I had also liked how respected he was, and respect and his ability to be a good doctor, were, as far as I could see, tied to each other. So I kept my mouth shut even as he announced—without telling me beforehand—that we were separating.
When people asked him why, he painted me as unreasonable and jealous, and though I gritted my teeth, I felt like strangling him every time.
The patients came first, I told myself, even as I saw the twinkle in his eyes. Maybe he did see himself as a victim, I thought, feeling a little sick to my stomach.
I turned to my side, trying to keep myself upright on the bar, and saw a handsome man sitting to my left. I stumbled down on the stool when I tried to find my footing and he extended his arm and caught me before I could fall face first on the floor.
He laughed, a deep sound that stirred butterflies in my stomach.
Maybe it was the drink.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you okay there?”
I nodded, licking my lips and trying to sit my ass on the stool again. “Fine,” I said. “Just having… woo. Balancing problems.”
“Not a gymnast, then?”
I laughed. “Nothing that glamorous.”
He looked me up and down. His eyes were dark, or maybe it was just the lack of light in the bar, but damn, he was intense. He wouldn’t stop staring at me.
“Can I guess?”
“Please don’t,” I said. “If you guess anything about my life, and you’re right, I’m gonna hate myself forever.”
He laughed again. It sounded so sincere. I could’ve kept listening to him forever. There was something familiar about him, too, like I had heard him before,
