All Chapters of MY GYNECOLOGIST : Chapter 11 - Chapter 15

SCARLET ♠️Clara refilled my mug and sat back down and folded her hands on the table and looked at me with the particular patience of a woman who had been waiting for this conversation longer than I had realized.“I have nowhere to be,” she said again. “And you have been carrying something for two weeks that is getting heavier every day I can see it on your face. So.” She nodded at the phone, face down between us, Ray’s name no longer lit but somehow still present in the room like a word said out loud that hasn’t finished landing yet. “Start wherever you need to start.”I picked up my mug. Put it down. Picked it up again.“His name is Ray Lionel,” I said. “And before I tell you anything else about what is happening right now I need to tell you who he was first. Because it matters. The order of it matters.”Clara nodded. Said nothing. Waited.So I told her.I told her about being twenty-two and meeting Ray at a point in my life when I was still becoming whoever I was going to be, before

SCARLET ♠️I told Noah I had a client consultation.It was Tuesday, plausible, specific, the kind of lie that has enough texture to it that it doesn’t require elaboration. A client in Midtown, a design review, it might run long, don’t wait on dinner. I said it at breakfast with my coffee in one hand and my phone in the other and my eyes on the schedule I had pulled up on screen, and Noah looked up from his newspaper and said of course, let me know if you need the car and went back to reading.I stood at the kitchen counter and thought about the woman I was becoming and whether she was someone I recognized and concluded that she was, more than I had been in years, actually, which was its own complicated thing to sit with.Ray had sent the address at nine PM the night before. A hotel bar in Midtown, the kind of place with low lighting and high-backed booths and enough ambient noise to have a private conversation without being private in a way that meant anything. Public and quiet at th

SCARLET ♠️I was home by two-thirty.Noah was asleep, I could tell from the quality of the house’s silence before I even reached the bedroom, the specific stillness of a space that has been unoccupied and undisturbed for hours. I stood in the doorway for a moment. His shape under the covers, the even breathing, the arranged side of the bed. The familiar landscape of a man completely at rest.I went to the bathroom. Closed the door softly. I turned on the shower.I stood under the water for a long time. Not scrubbing anything away, I want to be clear about that. I was not standing under the shower trying to wash Ray off me or erase the evening or perform any kind of ritual cleansing that would have implied regret I did not feel. I stood under the water because I needed to think and I thought better in the shower than anywhere else and I had a significant amount of thinking to do.Here was what I knew.I had spent the night with Ray Lionel in a hotel room on the fourteenth floor of a