DR. LIA MONTERROSA had not inherited the seafaring, adventurous spirit of her Portuguese ancestors. But she talked a good game.
None of her traveling companions appeared to be any more sprightly than she was after the long, arduous journey. Each lugged modest amounts of luggage down the pristine, shiny corridors of the brand-new Antarctic research station where they’d just arrived, no spring in any thick-booted step. All of them were carrying what would see them through the long months of a dark Antarctic winter.
She’d heard various reasons for coming—once-in-a-lifetime experience, work they wanted to do and could best accomplish locked up for eight solid months with fifty strangers. For her, that was the upside of her trip—being surrounded by people who didn’t know her, and therefore had no expectations about how she should behave. She didn’t have to be the strongest person on the planet, and she didn’t have to be the most docile, polite one, either.
But her ex-fiancé was who she’d come to find. To ask why he was her ex. What had happened during the four days she’d been gone, home in Portugal, that had made him decide he didn’t love her anymore, didn’t want to marry her? To ask why he’d been cold enough to also go missing while she was filing paperwork with the Polícia Judiciária to locate her missing father.
He hadn’t left a message. Hadn’t scribbled his farewell on a sticky note affixed to the bathroom mirror. He’d just stopped answering her calls, and three days before her wedding, when she’d had a moment free to go back to London and look for him, as well, she’d found his flat vacated, job vacated, mobile phone canceled. He’d left her with the beautiful ring they’d painstakingly designed together, and a hole in her chest so big a truck could pass through.
But she would see him today, the end of too many months of torture. If fate was with her, he’d provide answers. Closure, if that was a real thing that actually happened, and not just some psychobabble placebo. Closure, no closure—it didn’t really matter. The end was coming. The final end. The official end that had been denied her when she’d come home to find him gone.
Right on cue, her stomach plummeted—a sensation she should’ve become immune to by now, but which still had the ability to wrench away brief control of her extremities. Her booted foot scuffed the floor, but she didn’t fall—walking was a little easier to recover from than errant hand-twitches in surgery when a slight wrong move could end a life. Knowing what had ended them would help, even if it was just another case of her not being enough. No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t fix whatever she’d done wrong if she didn’t know what it was.
“Dr. Monterrosa, you’re in Pod C,” her guide said, jerking her from her thousandth thought-spiral of this trip, and gesturing to a nondescript door with a circular window at head height—the kind peppering the station, and which reminded her of doors on boats.
The group all stopped long enough for the woman to add, “With you lot arriving at the end of summer, you’re getting stacked where there is an open cabin.”
And she was the only one in C, which would practically become a ghost town in little more than a week when she could probably have her pick of rooms. After Jordan and Zeke left. After West…
Lia opened her mouth to ask the number, but her fatigue was starting to show. The guide answered before she even formed the first sluggish word.
“Last door on the left, end of the hall.”
With a soft, tired grunt, Lia hoisted one of her two meager bags onto her shoulder and entered without another word. Through the door and into a much dimmer hallway, somewhere obviously designed for sleeping through the twenty-four-hour days of summer.
She had about three seconds to see it as the door swung closed and the bright light from the corridor dissipated, but all she really saw was beige. Walls. Low-static carpeting. White doors dotting both sides of the hall. Snow blind, she waited only long enough for general shapes to form in her vision, allowing her to navigate without bumping into walls or running over strangers in the hallway.
Dr. Weston MacIntyre would never know what had hit him. She had the upper hand, and she needed it. He’d expect her to come at him with guns blazing, and that method had its own appeal. It might help her hide the hole and all the raw-hamburger emotions lining the inside.
Jordan knew she was coming. Her best friend from medical school and almost maid of honor had been the one to call Lia the day West had shown up at Fletcher Station, the person she’d gone to for help shutting down a wedding when hope was finally lost, but she hadn’t even known if he was alive. She’d had months to prepare herself for this confrontation, to script every word and every motion in her head, compose the best emasculating zingers and lists of all the ways she would never, and had never, missed him. But with the starting gun ready to sound, the idea of actually saying any of those things left her cold. Colder than the balmy ten below that she’d walked through from the bus to the station. No one who went halfway around the world to find another person could honestly say she hadn’t missed him. Hadn’t worried. But it felt better to pretend. Lies could comfort.
She made a sharp right bend in the hallway and kept walking. Halfway to the end, her vision had cleared enough to see a tall, broad man with a black knit hat and an equally black beard standing outside the last two doors, keys in hand, staring in her direction.
In another couple of meters, her stomach did that dropping thing again and this time when her limb control faltered, the only thing that saved her from further humiliation was the meager stability offered by the suitcase rolling beside her.
West.
It was West.
Her polished, ever-immaculate fiancé. Former fiancé. But far scruffier.
Her whole world slowed down, and the remaining length of the hallway grew longer than the thousands of kilometers she’d traveled to reach this hallway with this man.
Instead of a tirade, her mind filled with all the times she’d walked toward him. Right back to that first time they’d met in a London hospital, when a newly minted general surgeon had required an assist and been told to pull one of the not-busy neurosurgical fellows. Her. And the way he’d watched her approaching after having her paged, down the hallway to where he loitered at the nurses’ station, his eyes broadcasting bold, open interest until he’d heard her name. How she’d pretended not to notice the looks, how she’d managed to ignore her own attraction for three whole days before she’d asked him out.
London Lia did those things. London Lia was fearless. At least on the outside. Because it was what everyone expected of her.
Lifting her chin, Lia held his gaze now, struggling to ignore the burst of other memories. All the church aisles they’d tried on looking for the perfect church for their wedding. When he’d looked at her with the promise of a long future dancing in his eyes, the future he delighted in planning and dreaming into existence with her.
Time sped back up. Her heart squeezed hard once, then began stomping a chula around her sternum, fast enough she’d have been silencing alarms on her fitness monitor if the battery hadn’t died on the trip down. And her stomach, which had been lurching and freefalling for the duration of the trip, went hollow, and cold. Then the nausea hit.
He didn’t speak or look away, just stared. There was an intensity in his gaze, but nothing