CHAPTER TWO

​NAOMI

The rain has turned the Los Angeles sky gray. Sophie and I wait at the bus stop near Griffith Park, her small umbrella tilting in the wind. The smell of wet concrete, roasted peanuts from a nearby vendor, and car exhaust fills the air, sharp, familiar, painfully vivid.

When the 20 bus arrives, we squeeze into a window seat. The city slides by in reflections, shops, headlights, and strangers with umbrellas blurred by the rain. I hold Sophie close and rest my chin lightly on her hair.

My heartbeat still hasn’t steadied. Seven years of distance collapsed into a single look.

He didn’t recognize me.

It shouldn’t hurt. I wanted to be invisible. I built this new life carefully, with a new name, a new body, and new everything. Yet when Peter looked at me like I was a stranger, the old wound split open again.

“Mom,” Sophie says sleepily. “Dr. Hayes was nice.”

“Yes, honey,” I whisper. “He’s one of the best.”

She yawns and leans against me. I stroke her cheek, tracing the curve of her chin. She looks so much like him that sometimes it frightens me. The resemblance isn’t perfect, but it’s there.

I close my eyes, and memories flood back.

Winter at UCLA. Peter, the brilliant, unreachable pre-med student. I am the design major, loud laugh, soft body, easy target. No one understood why he talked to me, why he walked me back to the dorm, why he lent me his umbrella.

For a while, it felt real. Secret meetings behind the art building, whispered conversations, his voice low when he called me “Chloe.”

Until that night.

A party. Too much beer. Someone joked about his “charity.” Peter, drunk, laughed and said the words I’ll never forget: “It’s just for fun. I’m leaving soon.”

I was standing in the doorway, holding the scarf I’d knitted for him all winter.

The sound of his laughter cut through me like glass.

The next morning, I left campus. Three months later, I found out I was pregnant. By then, he was gone.

“Mom?” Sophie’s voice brings me back. The bus slows near Wilshire and Fairfax. “Are you sad?”

I force a smile. “No, sweetheart. Just tired.”

She studies me quietly, then squeezes my hand. “I’ll make you happy when I grow up.”

Tears sting my eyes. “You already do, baby.”

Outside, the traffic lights change. The city moves on wet, glittering, indifferent. I press my forehead to the cool window, watching the lights blur. I tell myself the past is buried.

But the ache in my chest says otherwise.

PETER​

Evening settles over Los Angeles like a soft cloak, the city glowing under scattered streetlights. Neon signs flicker over Wilshire Boulevard, reflections warping across the wet pavement as I walk toward my car.

​

My shoes click sharply against the ground, crisp, rhythmic, yet my mind wanders in chaotic loops.

I cannot stop thinking about her, Naomi.

​

Her name rolls through my thoughts with a strange familiarity, like a melody I’ve heard before but can’t place. She has changed completely, undeniably. Slimmer. Calmer. A quiet elegance around her.

​

But something inside her eyes remains unchanged, something that pricks at my memory with an unsettling insistence.

​

I reach my apartment, keys clattering faintly on the counter. The silence inside feels heavier than usual. I walk to my bookshelf, sliding open a glass door and retrieving a single object I’ve kept hidden for years: a silver pen engraved with the initials C.Q.

Chloe Quinn.

I turn it in my hand slowly, the metal cool against my palm. I shouldn’t still have it. I shouldn't care. But I do. My fingers tighten around it, and my breath catches unexpectedly.

Her laugh used to echo in my head.

​

Her eyes used to follow me everywhere.

.

Her belief in me used to be dangerously pure. Could Naomi be her? Is that why her voice trembled when she said my name?

​Is that why her gaze flicked away the moment our eyes met?

The thought forms and dissolves a dozen times in my mind, making me restless.

I sit down, staring at her daughter’s chart on my laptop.

​

Sophie Wells. Age six.

Mother: Naomi Wells.

No father listed.

​

My chest tightens strangely.

Naomi,

Naomi, with trembling hands.

Naomi with eyes full of history.

​

“Naomi Wells…” I murmur, testing the sound on my tongue like a puzzle piece that refuses to fit.

The name doesn’t spark recognition.

​

But the woman?

The woman pulls at something buried deep.

​

Rain streaks softly against my window, thin rivulets of silver beneath the city lights. I exhale and rest the pen against my chest.

​

The cold metal presses something awake inside me: guilt, longing, and a suffocating, unfamiliar ache. Something about her is not right.

​

Something about her is too familiar, Something about her… refuses to leave me alone.

​

Naomi

​

The bus slows near Downtown LA, where the skyscraper lights blur gold and red through the rain. Sophie shifts against me, her little fingers curling through mine.

​

She’s warm. Solid. Real. The only thing anchoring me while my mind keeps drifting back to Cedars-Sinai… back to him.

​

“Mom?” she asks, head tilting as she looks up at me, eyes wide and honest. “Is that doctor… my daddy?”

​

Everything inside me freezes.

​

Seven years of secrecy, of holding the truth like a fragile glass bowl against my chest, feels suddenly too heavy to balance.

​

The question lands softly, but its impact cracks straight through me. Words lodge in my throat. Breathing becomes a struggle.

​

I sigh shakily, but no sound comes out.

​

Sophie studies my face, unbothered by the weight she has unknowingly dropped on me. There’s no fear or hesitation in her expression. Just curiosity. Innocence. The kind of innocence that should never have to carry complicated truths.

​

I look away. Out the window. At the passing glow of headlights reflected on wet asphalt. I can almost see my own eyes staring back at me in the reflection, red-rimmed, swollen, tired. Not the eyes of a woman ready for this question.

​

The truth is dangerous.

Not for me

but for her.

​

“Mom… why are you crying?” Sophie’s voice is soft, sweet, as if she wants to pet the sadness off my face.

​

I blink quickly and wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand, startled to feel fresh tears. I didn’t even notice when they began falling.

​

“It’s nothing,” I whisper, forcing a smile that feels like cracked glass. “I’m just… really tired.”

The city rolls by, blurred and shimmering. People rush under umbrellas. Cars hiss through puddles. LA feels big tonight, too big, too fast, too unforgiving.

​

I wrap my arms around Sophie, pressing my cheek to the top of her head. Her warmth seeps into me, grounding me just enough to speak. “You’re okay. That’s all that matters.”

But inside, my heart tightens.

Because I know this moment will not be the last time she asks.

And one day… I’ll need an answer.

Across the city, somewhere behind hospital walls bright with fluorescent light, I know Peter Hayes is living his own night, oblivious to the truth that binds us.

My past is no longer sleeping.

And neither am I.

​

Peter​

The rain softens into a quiet drizzle by the time I step onto my balcony, the air cool, carrying the faint scent of eucalyptus from the trees lining the street below.

LA looks washed out, muted city lights reflecting off wet pavement, traffic humming like a distant heartbeat.​

I should be reviewing tomorrow’s surgery schedule or finishing my patient notes, but my mind refuses. It circles back to her. Again, And again, And again.Naomi Wells.

Her name feels strange on my tongue, like a lie trying to disguise itself as truth. I’ve met hundreds of patients, parents, strangers, but none have left their presence lingering in a room like smoke the way she did.

Her voice, quiet but trembling, echoes in my ears. The way she avoided my gaze. The way her fingers recoiled when mine brushed hers. That reaction wasn’t casual. That was recognition.

And fear.​

I lean against the railing, watching a car pass below, headlights splashing golden arcs across the wet street.

My jaw flexes unconsciously. Something deep inside me is picking at the edges of memory, trying to connect dots that refuse to sit still.

Chloe Quinn, Her eyes, Her tears, Her absence.

I sink onto the couch and pick up her daughter’s file again. It’s pointless, but I do it anyway. Sophie Wells. Age six.

Chest tightness. Mild arrhythmia. No father listed on the file. My chest tightens, the kind of pressure that shouldn’t be there.

I try to talk myself down logically. There are many women named Naomi.

There are many little girls with features that resemble a hundred different people.

This is not Chloe. She can’t be Chloe . But logic doesn’t quiet the twisting in my stomach.

I rub my forehead, frustration simmering beneath the surface. “Seven years,” I mutter under my breath. “Why does this suddenly matter now?”  Because something in her eyes told me it does.

Something in her voice trembled like she’d swallowed every unsaid word that night I broke her.

Something in her posture screamed familiarity.

I run my thumb over the engraved letters on the silver pen C.Q.

My chest tightens again. I close my eyes. Could they be the same woman?

Did I let her walk away twice, once in the past, and again today, without realizing it?

The thought is unbearable.

And yet…

I cannot shake it.

The moment the door clicks shut behind me, my knees feel weak, like the floor has tilted. I walk without direction, the hallway stretching in a long tunnel of sterile light. The conversations around me, nurses calling numbers, monitors beeping sound far away, muted, as if I’m underwater.

My pulse is too loud, beating against my ribcage, filling my ears until I can hear nothing else. I thought I was prepared. I told myself I could face him with dignity, pretend he was a stranger, pretend the past didn’t matter.

But seeing him standing there, calm and composed, untouched by what he once meant to me… it breaks something I didn’t know still existed.

It’s like the years between us never passed, like I’m nineteen again, small and always on the verge of disappearing.

​

I remember walking across campus the morning after, clutching the scarf against my chest like I needed something to hold me together. The world looked different, somehow colder, harsher, every building sharper than it had been the day before.

​

People laughed around me, heading to classes, planning weekend trips, spilling coffee, and gossiping. I felt invisible, a ghost moving through a place that had once felt like possibility.

​

I kept replaying his voice in my mind, the casual cruelty of it, wondering how I could have misread everything so badly. Maybe I had mistaken kindness for affection. Maybe I had wanted too much. Or maybe he was simply young and careless, and I was the one who paid the price.

I rest my forehead lightly against the cold glass, watching raindrops chase each other down the window.

The city outside blurs into abstract shapes, lights smearing like watercolor streaks. I whisper that it doesn’t matter because I need it not to matter. Because the past has teeth, and if I let it sink into me again, I’ll unravel in ways I can’t afford. My life is not just mine anymore. Sophie’s safety, Sophie’s stability, Sophie’s smile, these are the only truths that belong to me now. So I repeat the lie. It doesn't matter until the words lose meaning, until they melt on my tongue.

But deep down, beneath layers of denial, I know it matters more than I want to admit.

I press the pen against my palm, the engraved initials imprinted into my skin. The weight of it feels heavier tonight, like the past has finally caught up with me after all these years. I always thought time would soften everything: the mistakes, the words I wish I hadn’t said, the memories I tried to bury.

​

But seeing Naomi stirred something raw and unsteady, something that makes the room feel smaller than it is. It’s unsettling how easily the mind resurrects faces you thought were forgotten. A laugh, a way of tilting the head, the tremble in a voice, small details become ghosts. And now those ghosts are whispering a question I’m not ready to answer:

 What if she’s the one I hurt?