Dr. Mark, My Mom’s Ex-Husband

6

Mark pov

I didn’t expect to see you again. The words were out of my mouth before I’d fully decided to say them, and I watched them land on her face like something between relief and panic.

She set her bag down slowly. “I didn’t expect it either.”

We stood there in a conference room that suddenly felt much smaller than it had ten minutes earlier, with a hundred pages of budget projections between us and absolutely no idea what to do with the silence.

I should tell you what went through my head in that moment, because it wasn’t what I expected of myself. Some part of me, the part I don’t usually let drive, wanted to walk around that table and finish the conversation we never got to finish. Wanted to ask her real questions this time. Her last name. Her actual number. Whether she still had that necklace, and whether she’d taken it off yet.

But I’ve spent twenty years building a life around discipline, and discipline doesn’t disappear just because a coincidence walks into a conference room wearing a gray suit and carrying a portfolio full of the most thoughtful hospital design I’d seen in a decade.

“This is a complicated situation,” I said, and even to my own ears it sounded like something I’d rehearsed, which I suppose in a way I had, standing there working it out in real time.

“That’s one word for it.” A small, tired smile. She wasn’t making this harder than it needed to be, which I appreciated more than I probably showed.

“You’re leading the design for my hospital’s pediatric wing,” I said. “This project matters. It matters to the kids we treat, and it matters to the board, and it’s going to take months of close collaboration between your firm and my staff. I don’t think either of us can afford for that to be complicated by anything else.”

“Anything else,” she repeated, like she was testing whether I’d actually say the words underneath the words.

I didn’t. Not yet. “I think we should agree to keep this professional. What happened before you knew who I was, and before I knew who you were, doesn’t need to follow us into this building.”

She was quiet for a second, studying me with an expression I couldn’t fully read, though I’d spent an entire night learning her face and some of it still translated. “Agreed,” she said finally. “Professional. That’s smart.”

“It is smart.” I said it like I was convincing myself as much as her.

“Good.” She picked her bag back up, slid it onto her shoulder, squared herself in that way I remembered from the rooftop, the way she had of gathering herself together when she needed to be steadier than she felt. “Then I’ll see you at the walkthrough next week, Dr. Sullivan.”

“You will.”

She left. I stood in that empty conference room for a long time after the door clicked shut, staring at the sketches she’d left projected on the screen behind her, the courtyard, the sky ceiling, the reading nooks, and thought that professional distance was going to be a great deal harder to maintain than I’d just made it sound.

I’ve been divorced once, and before that I was married for six months to a woman I never loved, in a courthouse ceremony that solved a very specific problem for both of us and asked nothing of either of our hearts in return. Since then there’s been almost nothing. A few dinners with women my sister tried to set me up with, none of which went past a second date. Work fills most of the space where a personal life is supposed to go, and for a long time I told myself that was fine, that I’d built something worth the trade.

Then I met a woman on a rooftop who talked about a hospital wing she’d sketched in a notebook like it was the most important thing in the world, and something in me that had been quiet for years woke up and refused to go back to sleep.

I told Patricia at lunch that the pitch had gone well, that Hargrove and Associates was clearly the right choice, and I meant every word of it professionally. I did not mention that I already knew the lead architect, intimately, in a way that had nothing to do with blueprints.

Peter caught it anyway. He always does. He stopped by my office that afternoon under the pretense of discussing a surgical schedule and instead spent most of the visit studying my face like I was a chart he couldn’t quite read.

“You’ve been somewhere else all day,” he said.

“Long meeting this morning.”

“That’s not what I asked.” He settled into the chair across from my desk, the same way he has for fifteen years, ever since we were residents pretending we knew what we were doing. “You’ve had long meetings before. You don’t usually look like this after them.”

I considered lying. Then I considered that Peter has known me long enough to recognize a lie before I’ve even finished telling it. “The architect on the children’s wing project. I met her a few weeks ago. Before I knew who she was.”

His eyebrows went up slowly. “Met her how.”

“It doesn’t matter how.”

“It clearly matters how, given the look on your face right now.” He waited, and when I didn’t offer anything else, he just shook his head, something between amusement and concern. “Mark. You haven’t looked at anyone like this since I’ve known you. Since before I’ve known you, probably.”

“Nothing is going to happen. We agreed to keep this professional. She’s leading a project my hospital depends on. I’m not going to complicate that.”

“I didn’t ask if something was going to happen,” Peter said. “I asked if you wanted it to.”

I didn’t answer that. I picked up the surgical schedule instead and changed the subject, and Peter let me, because he’s known me long enough to understand when to stop pushing.

But the question sat with me the rest of the day, through two consultations and a late dinner alone in my office, and it was still sitting with me that night, long after everyone else had gone home, when I found myself pulling up the design files she’d sent over that morning and looking at that sky-painted ceiling far longer than any professional review required.