The Cross Between Us
1k Views · Ongoing · Nicole
I still remember the exact weight of his hands.
How they found me in the dark, how they made me forget every reason I had for leaving.
He said my name like a secret and a warning all at once.
I told myself I’d forgotten the way he touched me, the way he waited, the way he made me feel like I was already his.
I lied.
Five years ago, I walked out of Derek Cross's apartment with one unanswered question and didn't look back. No note. No explanation. Just a woman who had finally understood that love, in his world, was something you accepted on his terms — or not at all.
Six weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.
I built a life without him. A career. A daughter. A quiet stability assembled piece by careful piece. I told myself Bellhaven was finished.
I was wrong.
Now I'm Chief Medical Officer at St. Catherine's — and Derek has just been named director of the department I oversee. The man who once asked me to trust him without giving me the truth is now, by every institutional measure, accountable to me. He still believes I left because I didn't love him enough. I've never told him what his mother said to me the night before I disappeared.
Between us: five years of wrong assumptions, a professional authority neither of us can afford to misuse, and a four-year-old girl with my stubbornness and his eyes — who doesn't know yet what she is to him, and neither does he.
The Cross Between Us is a second-chance romance about two people who damaged each other with silence rather than cruelty, and who must now decide — in operating rooms, in darkened corridors, in the particular honesty that only arrives at three in the morning — whether what they withheld can ever be returned.
Some debts aren't paid with apologies. They're paid with staying.
How they found me in the dark, how they made me forget every reason I had for leaving.
He said my name like a secret and a warning all at once.
I told myself I’d forgotten the way he touched me, the way he waited, the way he made me feel like I was already his.
I lied.
Five years ago, I walked out of Derek Cross's apartment with one unanswered question and didn't look back. No note. No explanation. Just a woman who had finally understood that love, in his world, was something you accepted on his terms — or not at all.
Six weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.
I built a life without him. A career. A daughter. A quiet stability assembled piece by careful piece. I told myself Bellhaven was finished.
I was wrong.
Now I'm Chief Medical Officer at St. Catherine's — and Derek has just been named director of the department I oversee. The man who once asked me to trust him without giving me the truth is now, by every institutional measure, accountable to me. He still believes I left because I didn't love him enough. I've never told him what his mother said to me the night before I disappeared.
Between us: five years of wrong assumptions, a professional authority neither of us can afford to misuse, and a four-year-old girl with my stubbornness and his eyes — who doesn't know yet what she is to him, and neither does he.
The Cross Between Us is a second-chance romance about two people who damaged each other with silence rather than cruelty, and who must now decide — in operating rooms, in darkened corridors, in the particular honesty that only arrives at three in the morning — whether what they withheld can ever be returned.
Some debts aren't paid with apologies. They're paid with staying.
