I haven’t let myself think about the pale orange and red freckles that dot Chloe’s cheeks when she’s in the sun too long, how her hair curls around her face at the base of her neck when it’s hot outside, or how good she looked in a bikini the summer of her senior year. She visited her grandparents the first half of the summer and came back a cup size bigger, but I wasn’t distracted with her breasts or her hourglass figure. Nope. Not at all.

Just like how she hasn’t haunted me over the years, despite me refusing to believe in ghosts. Chloe is always there, in the back of my mind. Taunting. Teasing. Reminding me how much I fucked up.

“Sam?” Mom asks, in a tone that lets me know she’s called my name before. We’re all seated in the formal dining room, the large table and chairs rarely used unless we’re all here together. We were never allowed in here as kids, with Mom saying she wanted at least one nice, clean room in the house when people came over. The dining room is one of the first rooms you see when you walk in the house, opposite a small sitting room. The day Mom ordered ivory-colored couches and a pale pink area rug was the day Jacob, Mason, and I were banned from going in it.

“Yeah?” I ask, realizing my fork is hovering in the air, a bite of grilled chicken halfway between the plate and my mouth. I can feel everyone exchange glances, aware I wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to whatever was being said.

“Are you all right, honey?” Mom goes on.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I shove the chicken into my mouth, buying some time before I have to speak again.

“Mason said he put potato flakes in his bloody cut,” Rory says slowly, brows pinched together. “Like the ones from the box.”

“Why?” I ask, still chewing my chicken.

“I looked it up online and it said it would stop the bleeding.” Mason holds out his arm, showing off a nasty-looking scar on the inside of his left arm. I know enough from working in trauma to recognize a knife wound when I see one.

“Please tell me you’re joking.” I set my fork down and reach for my glass of water.

“It worked.” Mason runs a finger over the dark line on his arm.

“And it didn’t get infected?” I ask incredulously.

“I didn’t say that.” Mason raises his eyebrows and we laugh.

“You know you could have—”

“Called, yes, I know,” Mason huffs.

“Even I can get you antibiotics,” Jacob goes on. “My patients are animals, so you’d fit right in.”

“Hilarious,” Mason spits, and Rory looks at me, silently laughing. It’s a bit of a running joke between the four of us. Rory is a nurse, I’m an anesthesiologist, and Jacob is a vet. Mason is the only one of us who didn’t go into medicine, and we love to give him hell over it.

“Got any good OR stories?” I ask Rory, winking. With us being the only two in human medicine, and both working primarily in operating room settings, it’s easy for us to dominate the conversation with our most recent war story, dealing with difficult patients or going into the very real topic of losing patients, which is something you’re never quite ready for, no matter how much they prep you for it in school.

When I was working general surgery, we had more success stories than not, but now that I’m in trauma, our “success stories” might mean someone pulling through but with life-changing injuries that require months if not years of therapy to get back to just a slice of normalcy.

“Oh, I do!” Rory cuts into her chicken, laughing at the thought of whatever she’s about to tell us. “It was our first scheduled surgery of the day, so we had the guy come in at five AM. He showed up half an hour late and smelled like alcohol so strong I felt drunk just standing next to him. He had dried vomit on his chin and shirt, and when we asked if he’d been drinking, he flat-out denied it. Then his wife showed up demanding we go through with the surgery because they already put a deposit down or something that didn’t even make sense. She was screaming, like literally screaming at the poor intake nurse.”

“Gotta love when family members get involved like that,” I say with a laugh.

“They’re the best.” Rory rolls her eyes. “So Dr. Jones came out and tried to talk some sense into them, explaining why he won’t operate on someone who was clearly drinking right before surgery due to safety concerns, and the woman lost it even more. She threw a decorative vase from the end table in the waiting room at Dr. Jones, and we had to get security to escort her out. The drunk patient—who really needs his gallbladder removed—stumbled along behind her and then threw up all over the hallway right outside the OR waiting room.”

“Lovely,” Mom says with a grimace. “God bless you two for going into your line of work. You know I don’t even like the sight of blood.”

“You’d hate my job then,” Mason quips. He’s can’t say much about his current case, but we know he’s dealing with some sort of child sex trafficking ring. It takes a lot to unnerve me, but things dealing with violence against children gets to me, just like the two children we treated whose own parents were responsible for what happened.

“What about you?” Rory asks me. “You don’t get too many crazy people anymore, do you?”

I shake my head. “A good majority of the people brought into the trauma center aren’t even conscious. Family members can be irate, but it’s usually because they’re in shock and don’t want to accept what happened to their loved one. Their misplaced anger is understood. We had an older man a few weeks ago lose it when we said he had to respect the wishes of his wife’s advanced directive, which had DNR orders.”

“That’s tragic,” Mom says, shaking her head.

“And you wonder why I chose to work with animals,” Jacob grumbles.

“You’ve had some interesting owners to deal with, haven’t you?” Dean asks. “Rory told me about someone getting pissed you couldn’t reverse-neuter their dog.”

Dad laughs. “That crazy lady still leaves one-star reviews all over Facebook.” We all laugh and continue laughing over stories of difficult or just plain stupid people we’ve dealt with over the years, but my mind shifts back to Chloe.

I should have asked Rory what else she heard, but it’s too late now to bring her back up into the conversation without it being obvious. Is Chloe in town with anyone? She was reportedly dating Charles Baldwin, a famous actor who stars as the main character in Chloe’s book-to-TV-show series.

And why is she here? To get away from the flashing cameras and prying eyes in LA? To bring home a guy to meet her father? But more importantly…why the fuck does that last question make me feel uncomfortable?

I don’t care. Not anymore. Chloe isn’t mine. She never was. I’m happy with how things are going in my life, and now that Stacey and I are officially over, I was looking forward to casual sex with a different woman every night. No strings, no obligation, no chance of getting involved and ultimately hurt.

And the best part is then I won’t hurt anyone. I’ve been upfront with anyone I take home, making sure they have no expectations. I won’t leave them broken and alone, too naive to admit I was running from myself and my own insecurities at the time.