THE LOVE WE LOST

Chapter 3: What the Charts Don't Say

Elena hadn't meant to walk fast enough that her shift ended twenty minutes early, but her feet had other plans, and by the time she reached the break room, her hands were still not entirely steady. She poured herself a glass of water she didn't drink and stared at the vending machine like it might have answers.

Maya was already there, two coffees in hand, sliding one across the table without being asked. She'd always been able to read Elena's face before Elena could put words to what was on it. "You look like you saw a ghost."

"I treated one." Elena wrapped both hands around the cup, grateful for the heat seeping into her palms. "He asked if it was an accident."

"Was it?"

"Witnesses say someone forced him off the road." Elena stared into her coffee like it might tell her something the chart hadn't. "Solomon's opening an investigation."

Maya was quiet for a moment, turning her own cup slowly between her palms, the way she did when she was deciding how honest to be. "You know I love you. And you know I'm going to say this because I love you, not because I want to make things harder."

"Here we go."

"Don't let him back into your life like nothing happened, Elena. Five years is a long time to build a wall, and it took you every single one of them. I watched you do it. Some nights literally, you and a bottle of wine and a legal pad, writing down every reason you didn't need him." Maya softened, just slightly. "I'm not saying don't treat him. I'm saying don't let one bad night undo five good years of you finally being okay."

"I'm his doctor. That's all this is."

Maya's look said she didn't believe a word of it, but she let it go, because she had her own life waiting for her outside these walls. A boyfriend who'd been asking her to move in for two months now, a decision she still hadn't made and wasn't ready to discuss even with Elena, not tonight, not with everything else in the air. "Fine. Doctor. But watch yourself. I mean it."

Elena's phone buzzed on the table between them. A text from the charge nurse. James Whitfield still with patient in 204. Says he needs a word with you before he leaves.

She left her coffee half finished and found James pacing the hallway outside Nathaniel's room, phone pressed to his ear, voice low and urgent in a way that made two passing nurses glance at him twice. He ended the call the moment he saw her, sliding the phone into his pocket like he didn't want her to see who he'd been talking to.

"Dr. Morgan. Elena." He said her first name carefully, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to use it, like the last five years had left him uncertain of what he owed her. "Do you have five minutes?"

"I have three."

"Nathaniel's going to ask you to keep an eye on something, and I wanted to get to you first." James glanced back toward the closed door, lowering his voice further. "There are financial irregularities at Brooks Holdings. Old ones. Five years old, to be specific. I found them while I was trying to figure out who might have wanted him dead."

Elena felt her pulse pick up in a way that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with a number she'd been trying not to think about since the moment Maya said his name in the ER. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you were married to him when whatever this is happened. And because someone just tried to kill him, and I don't believe in coincidences." James held her gaze, steady, serious. "If anyone reaches out to you, anyone asking questions about the divorce, about that time, I need you to tell me. Immediately. Not after you've thought it over."

"Why would anyone..."

"I don't know yet," James said, and something in his voice told her he wasn't lying, just withholding. "But I intend to find out. And when I do, you're going to want to have heard it from me first."

Elena watched him go, an uneasy feeling settling into her chest, a shape she recognized from five years ago and had hoped never to feel again. The sense of standing just outside a door someone else had already opened, unable to see what was on the other side, knowing only that whatever was in that room concerned her more than anyone was telling her.

She thought of the folder that had ended her marriage. A folder no one had ever shown her in full. A folder she'd never once been allowed to question, because by the time she'd found out it existed, Nathaniel had already made up his mind, already signed the papers, already looked at her like she was someone he used to know.

Five years.

The coincidence sat wrong in her stomach the whole walk home, and stayed there long after she'd locked her front door behind her.

She made tea she didn't drink and sat at her kitchen table with her laptop open, the cursor blinking in an empty search bar, her fingers hovering without typing anything. What was she even looking for? Nathaniel's name would bring up a hundred thousand results. Press releases, shareholder reports, gossip columns speculating about his love life in the years since their divorce, none of which she'd ever let herself read. She closed the laptop before she could talk herself into it.

Instead she found the shoebox at the back of her closet, the one she hadn't opened since she'd moved into this apartment three years ago. Photographs. A pressed flower from their wedding. A hospital bracelet from the night she'd broken her wrist skiing and he'd sat up with her in the ER until four in the morning, trading his coat for a blanket because she was cold and he couldn't find a nurse fast enough. She hadn't been the one wearing the white coat back then. She'd just been his wife, scared and laughing through the pain because he kept making terrible jokes to distract her.

She put the box away before the ache in her chest could turn into something she didn't have the strength to feel tonight, and told herself, unconvincingly, that she'd sleep.