Phoebe giggles. “He snuck away from me.”

The sound of the shower turning on drifts into the kitchen, and I feel like I’ve just been given a game-show challenge with a buzzer counting down: Get out of the house in the next two minutes!

I pour Phoebe’s cereal, jog into the bedroom, pull on a clean set of scrubs, pour my coffee, yank my shoes on, and plant one more kiss on Phoebe’s head before I’m out the door.

It’s crazy—at least it makes me sound crazy—but if Sean asked me about my day yesterday, I know without a doubt it would all come tumbling out.

I saw Elliot Petropoulos yesterday for the first time in almost exactly eleven years and I realized that I’m still in love with him and probably always will be.

Still want to marry me?

Unfortunately, a couple of days of distance doesn’t appear to be in the cards: Elliot is waiting outside the hospital when I walk up the hill from the bus stop.

It isn’t accurate to say that my heart stops, because really I feel its existence intensely, a phantom limb. My heart pinches in, and then roars to life, brutally punching me from the inside out. I slow my steps and try to figure out what to say. Irritation flares in me. He can’t be faulted for showing up at Saul’s when I happened to be there yesterday, but today is all him.

“Elliot.”

He turns when I call his name, and his posture deflates a little in relief. “I was hoping you’d show up early today.”

Early?

I look at him as I approach, eyes narrowed. Stopping a few feet from where he stands, hands deep in the pockets of his black jeans, I ask, “How did you know where and what time I was supposed to work?”

Guilt drains the color from his cheeks. “George’s wife works in reception there.” He lifts his chin, indicating the woman who is sitting just inside the sliding doors, and whom I’ve seen every morning for the past few months.

“Her name is Liz,” I confirm flatly, remembering the three letters etched into her blue plastic name tag.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Liz Petropoulos.”

I laugh incredulously. Under no other circumstances can I imagine a hospital administrative employee giving out information about a physician’s work schedule. People turn pretty unreasonable when a loved one gets sick. Make that loved one a child and forget about it. Even in the short time I’ve been working here, I’ve seen parents go after doctors who failed to cure their kid.

Elliot stares at me, unblinking. “Liz knows I’m not dangerous, Macy.”

“She could be fired. I’m a physician in critical pediatrics. She can’t just give out my information, not even if it’s her own family.”

“Okay, shit. I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, genuinely contrite. “Look. I work at ten. I . . .” Squinting past me down Mariposa, he says, “I was hoping we would have time to talk a little before then.” When I don’t say anything in reply, he bends to meet my gaze, pressing, “Do you have time?”