Chapter 2: The Scent of Leather and Cedar
The interior was warm. That was the first thing she noticed. Warm and quiet and soft in a way the hospital never was. The seats were made of rich leather that seemed to wrap around her the moment she sat down. The air carried a faint, expensive scent of cedar and clean cologne.
Olivia let out a breath she felt like she had been holding for hours. Her heavy work bag slipped from her shoulder and hit the floorboard with a dull thud. She leaned her head against the cool window glass. Her eyes closed before the door even clicked shut behind her.
She was asleep in less than ten seconds.
In the front of the car, Alexander Langford was in the middle of a business call he had stopped caring about twenty minutes earlier. He was discussing numbers and timelines with someone in London when the back door opened and a woman in wrinkled blue scrubs basically fell into his car.
She wasn’t dramatic about it.
She was simply heavy with exhaustion — the kind of deep, complete tiredness that comes when a person has used up every last reserve they have.
Alexander stopped speaking mid-sentence.
He was a man who acted, fixed, and negotiated for a living. He solved problems before most people finished explaining them. But this time he did not move. He simply watched her in the soft light of the car’s interior.
May you like
Her cheek pressed against the glass.
One hand lay open and loose in her lap.
A stethoscope dangled half-off her shoulder.
A small blue ink mark was smeared across the inside of her wrist, the kind nurses make when they write notes on their own skin because there is no time for paper.
She looked like someone who had been holding the world together for far too long and had finally, for a few stolen seconds, put it down.
