Page 5 of Here We Go Again

Maybe he’s changed, but it feels more like he was trying to avoid the question. And the way his face shifted right before he spoke⁠—

“What are you watching?” Mia says over my shoulder, and I startle, darkening my screen before tossing my phone onto the table where it lands with a gentle thud.

I pull out my AirPods. “What is wrong with you? Why are you sneaking up on me?”

She drops into the chair across from me and reaches for the diet soda I’ve barely begun to drink. “I wasn’t sneaking,” she says. “I walked up like a completely normal person. Was that a hockey video?”

“It was nothing,” I quickly say. “Just something that popped up on my feed.”

She gives me a look. “Then why do you seem so cagey?”

I roll my eyes. “I’m not cagey. It was nothing. How was the delivery?”

She brightens the slightest bit. “A perfect baby girl. Things got a little tense when the baby’s heart rate kept dropping, but we rolled Mom onto her hands and knees, and that did the trick. Baby was born five minutes later.”

“Good work.” I study her closely, then clear my throat. “Who was the OB?”

Her eyebrows lift. “Um … I can’t remember.”

“You can’t remember the doctor you just worked with for hours to deliver a baby?”

She shrugs like it’s no big deal, then takes a long swig of my soda. “What? There are a lot of doctors. We aren’t all on a first-name basis.”

I shoot her a pointed look. “So you don’t know if it was Dr. Rivera.”

She freezes, then slowly lowers the soda to the table, shoulders dropping in resignation. “Who told you?”

“Emily heard it from Caroline who heard it from Vivian who saw the two of you in the stairwell.”

“Well, that sounds like a sentence directly out of middle school. What, are we twelve now?”

“You’re the one who was making out in the stairwell.”

“We weren’t making out. We were talking.”

“Vivian said you looked very cozy.”

“Vivian has had a crush on him for weeks and is just jealous he wanted to talk to me about his clinical research instead of her.”

I fold my arms over my chest, still not convinced. “What kind of clinical research?”

Mia mirrors my pose like she’s more than ready for this interrogation. “Long-term cardiovascular outcomes in patients who experience preeclampsia.”

I pause. She’s good. Almost too good.

“Interesting. Is he IRB-approved already, or is he still at the proposal stage?”

She leans forward, a challenge in her eyes. “Approved by the Institutional Review Board and fully funded by a grant from the March of Dimes.”

“What’s his sample size?”

“Six hundred patients over a ten-year period,” she says without missing a beat.

“Interesting. And does he consult with all the OB nurses in the stairwell? Or just you?”

Her lips twitch, and I can tell she’s about to crack. “Fine!” she finally says. “But we were not making out. It was one kiss. Barely a kiss.”

“You little sneak! Why haven’t you told me about this?”