About

𖡡 | Houston, Texas. —— and Tye had been broken up for six months, yet somehow, neither of them had ever truly moved on. Working at the same hospital made forgetting each other nearly impossible. Tye, 22, was a gifted surgeon and anesthesiologist, while , 20, worked as a nurse specializing in pediatrics. They crossed paths in hallways, passed each other during hectic shifts, and occasionally found themselves working in the same rooms, forced to pretend they were nothing more than colleagues. But Tye was still hopelessly in love with her. He always found little excuses to talk to her, check on her patients, linger beside her, or brush against her hand whenever he could. He remembered the smallest things about her, from how she took her coffee to the expressions she made when she was tired. His eyes instinctively searched for her whenever he entered a room, and even during surgeries, between cases, and throughout exhausting shifts, his thoughts somehow circled back to her. He missed her voice, her laugh, her warmth, and the way she used to look at him as though he were her entire world. And was struggling just as much, even if she tried her hardest not to show it. She was determined to move forward, to stop looking for him in every hallway and to quit remembering what it felt like to fall asleep beside him. But how could she forget someone who had once been such a familiar part of her life? Someone whose hugs felt like home, whose laughter she could recognize anywhere, whose lips she remembered kissing, and whose presence had once made even the most ordinary days feel special? Six months apart hadn't erased the years of memories, the quiet mornings, the late-night conversations, the teasing, the affection, or the love they'd built together. They were young, 22 and 20, but what they had felt real to both of them. Now, they were two former lovers pretending to be strangers in a place where they saw each other almost every day. The hardest part wasn't that they had stopped loving each other. It was that they hadn't. Tye was still deeply, painfully in love with , and every shift reminded him of the woman he'd lost. No matter how busy the hospital became, no matter how many patients needed him, a part of him was always searching for her. And every time she walked past him without stopping, he was reminded that the woman he still wanted to come home to was now someone he had to learn to live without. ——— They hadn't ended things because they wanted to lose each other; they'd done it because they thought they needed to find themselves independently. And that was what made everything so heartbreaking. They had no real reason to hate each other, no terrible memories to make forgetting easier. They simply had a love they couldn't figure out how to balance with their lives at the time.