Page 8 of Never Quite Gone

There was something else. Something in the way he carried himself, like a warrior wearing Armani instead of armor. Something in those ancient eyes that saw right through my professional bullshit, straight through six years of carefully built walls.

“Doctor Monroe.” His voice reached across the table and grabbed me by the spine. “I've heard impressive things about your work here.”

“Mister Rothschild.” My voice stayed steady through sheer fucking willpower. “I wasn't aware you had taken an interest in our hospital.”

“Please,” he smiled, and something deep in my chest ached like a badly healed wound, “call me Alex.”

The meeting lurched forward with fake normalcy. Vale worked his silver-tongued magic about the neurosurgery unit, smooth as expensive scotch. I fired back with my arsenal of data and survival rates. Our usual dance, but today the music was all wrong.

Alex commanded the room like he'd been born to it. His voice carried something ancient and electric as he laid out the Rothschild Development Project like a general planning a campaign. Modern medical buildings, better roads, special ambulance routes. His eyes locked onto mine at that last bit, sending another impossible jolt through my system.

“Of course,” he continued, voice hitting notes that made my spine tingle, “we want to make sure our plans help rather than hurt hospital operations. Which is why I'd like a complete tour of the Emergency Department.” Those blue eyes pinned me like butterflies in a display case. “From you, Doctor Monroe, if you're willing.”

The room went dead quiet. Even Vale's plastic smile cracked around the edges.

I met Alex's gaze across the boardroom battlefield, knowing with bone-deep certainty that my carefully constructed world was about to go up in flames.

“Of course,” I heard myself say, words dropping into that charged silence like stones in a still pond. “It would be my pleasure.”

Sofia was going to rip me a new one.

The meeting dissolved into a blur of paperwork and fake smiles. I gathered my shit with robot precision, my skin crawling with awareness of Alex across the room. He worked the crowd like a pro, but his attention felt like a laser sight between my shoulder blades.

“Eli.” Vale's honey-poisoned voice caught me at the door. “A moment?”

I turned, professionalism holding on by its fingernails. “Doctor Vale?”

“I trust you'll give Mister Rothschild a... thorough understanding of our space constraints.” His grey eyes glittered like a snake's before it strikes. “We wouldn't want him to underestimate our need for expansion.”

“I always aim for thoroughness,” I kept my voice flat as Kansas. “If you'll excuse me, I have patients waiting.”

I escaped into the hallway, but not before catching Alex's slight smile. The bastard hadn't missed a word.

Walking back to my office felt like crossing a minefield in tap shoes. Each step brought me closer to whateverimpossible thing had started when those blue eyes found mine through the observation window.

Three seconds. That was my rule for memories and mayhem.

But somehow I knew this wasn't about the past anymore. This was something else. Something new. Something that felt dangerously like hope.

CHAPTER 2

The Man Who Knew

Manhattan sprawled out like a half-finished painting, its razor edges cutting into the bruised dawn sky. My hand pressed against the cold glass of my office window, trying to anchor myself in the present while my mind kept rewinding to yesterday's moment of impossible recognition.

Sleep had given me the middle finger - how could I rest when his voice kept echoing in my head?

“Of course, Mr. Rothschild. It would be my pleasure.”

The words had been pure corporate bullshit, but I'd seen it - that crack in his perfect doctor facade when our eyes met, that flash of something he couldn't quite bury. Even wrapped in grief and professional distance like armor, he was unmistakable. That pull between us, familiar as my own fucking heartbeat, confirmed what I'd known since tracking him to Presbyterian.

I'd finally found him.

My reflection looked like hammered shit, but different somehow. Hope had carved new lines around my eyes, softened the perpetual clench of my jaw.

Marcus droned on about permits and timelines somewhere behind me, but his words blurred into white noise. The memorieshit like a tidal wave - not just yesterday's, but echoes from lives I shouldn't remember but did.

Renaissance Italy bloomed behind my eyes like fresh paint: Eli's laugh bouncing off studio walls while he fixed my terrible attempt at painting, those steady hands guiding the brush. The same hands that now moved with identical precision, trading art for emergency medicine.

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