I Confirmed the Deployment That Broke Him Chapter 06

I Confirmed the Deployment That Broke Him Chapter 06

The flight took off before dawn. Once we landed at the airstrip, a Red Cross convoy would take us to the

frontline stations at the border.

I leaned against the window and watched the city lights fall away and disappear into the clouds. My phone was full of unread messages – colleagues checking in, senior colleagues offering their well wishes, my mother telling me to be careful.

I worked through them one by one, saving Leo’s last message for the end.

[You’d rather go to a warzone and die than stay with me. Stella, did you ever even love me?]

I stared at it for a long time, then typed back slowly, one word at a time.

[I once put you above everything else, even my own calling. Now I’m going to save the people who actually need me.]

I sent it and turned off the phone. The plane broke through the clouds into dawn, and golden light flooded the

cabin.

In the warzone, time was measured in seconds. Explosions were just background noise. The wounded never stopped coming, and the medicine was never enough.

And yet I had never been so clear-headed. Every debridement, every suture, every surgery performed under the flicker of a diesel generator reminded me why I’d become a doctor.

When my two-year term ended, I signed on for a third year. In the autumn of that third year, I applied to return.

home a month early.

The PTSD symptoms had started creeping in – jolting awake at the sound of car engines in the night, my hands shaking when I smelled blood. I could still keep it under control.

The night I landed, jet lag and the ringing in my ears kept me awake. At three in the morning I stood at the window, looking out at a city that felt like somewhere I’d known in another life.

New hospital buildings had gone up. Subway lines I didn’t recognize.

Hannah called when dawn broke.

“Stella, Leo called asking if you were actually back. I told him you got in yesterday, but he didn’t believe me –

he thinks you’re hiding from him.”

Hannah had him on speaker, and Leo’s voice came through clear.

“Hannah, put Stella on. I know she’s angry, but after everything, just let me see her once.”

“I’m leading an international medical collaboration, and I need someone with field experience.” His voice had

shifted all business now.

Hannah sighed. “Stella really is back. She was at my clinic just yesterday for a psychological evaluation.”

“She came back yesterday?” Leo went quiet for a second. “Where is she? I’ll go to her.”

“Don’t. She’s at a hotel right now, sleeping off the jet lag.”

“Which hotel?”

Hannah didn’t answer that. “Mr. Vance, Stella has already accepted a position at Northwood Medical

University Hospital. She’s joining the War Trauma Research Center next month.”

Silence on the other end. I ended the call.

There was a one-month adjustment period before I started the new position. I went to the rehabilitation center every day for counseling – learning, again, how to exist somewhere that wasn’t a warzone.

The warzone had grown into me like scar tissue. It couldn’t be removed, and I’d stopped wanting it to be.

Leo found me anyway, catching me at the café below the rehabilitation center, deep, bruised shadows under

his eyes.

“Why Northwood?” His voice was hoarse.

I looked at my watch. “I have an appointment in twenty minutes.”

He moved in front of the door. “Because of one joke? Because I gave her a pen?”

“Stella, are you really going to throw everything away over something this small?”

I stopped and looked at him the way I used to when we were working through a difficult case together. But

whatever had once passed between us in a look like that, it was gone now.