“This is the shits,” she finally said one night, after he'd had a particularly bad day at work, with absolutely nothing to do except baby-sit a four-year-old whose mother was having a baby. “You hate your job. I hate the commute.”

“And we're starting to hate each other,” he finished for her.

“I didn't say that.”

“No, but it's written all over you. You're pissed off when you come home every night, and you take it out on me. What's happened to you?” But she couldn't tell him what had happened. The truth was that she was missing Cal, and the adjustment to living with Steve again had been harder than she'd ever dreamed it could be. Five and a half months of living alone, and two and a half of it with Cal had somehow changed her. She didn't feel like the same person she had been when they lived in New York together. And now everything about Steve grated on her.

“I just hate camping out and sleeping on the floor,” she admitted, “and the commute to Palo Alto every morning.”

“And I hate my job and this apartment,” he added. “The question is, what do we like about each other? There used to be a lot of things I liked about you, Merrie. Your brains, your looks, your patience, your sense of humor. You're so damned unhappy these days, you just ooze poison.” It was true, and she felt guilty as soon as he said it.

“I'm sorry, Steve. It'll get better, I promise.”

But the problem was, it didn't. And when Cal got back from Europe after four weeks, it got worse again. He treated her like an enemy and a stranger. It was as though in the past four weeks, he had closed the door on her forever. She had hoped they could be friends, the way they had been in the beginning. But she realized now that too much had happened between them. Too much love and hope and loss and disappointment. And Cal was obviously angry at her for the way it had ended. For him, disappointment had turned to fury. And he had spent the four weeks in Europe seething about it. It was almost a relief to him to take it out on her every day. He seemed to enjoy it. He picked on her constantly, asked for reports and projections ten times a day, and quarreled with all of her conclusions and opinions. They almost had an open fight in one of the board meetings, which had never happened to them before, and she gave him hell about it later, and felt like a shrew when she said it.

“I don't give a damn if you disagree with me, Cal. You can discuss it with me privately, you don't have to humiliate me in public.”

“You're overreacting, Meredith,” he said curtly, and stormed out of her office. But so was he. That much was obvious to everyone. Their colleagues didn't know why, but they were beginning to wonder if he was going to fire her, and so was she. He seemed to have a vendetta against her. The real vendetta he had was with himself for not asking her to marry him earlier, but he had been too afraid of commitment to do that, and so grateful to just let the affair roll along. He doubted now if it would have changed anything for her because of her loyalty to Steve, but he wondered if he would have felt better. And more than anything, he hated losing.

“You look like you're in a great mood,” Steve commented to her sarcastically when she got home that night, and it was just one straw too many on the proverbial camel's back, and the dam broke before she put down her briefcase.

“Actually, I'm not,” she said nastily. “I had a fucking awful day today. I hate my life. And I had a flat tire on the goddamn freeway. How was your day?”

“Better than that. But not much. I treated hemorrhoids today, took a wad of gum out of a kid's ear, and put a splint on a broken finger. I figure I might get the Nobel Prize for it.” He was on his fifth beer, and their furniture had been delayed for the last two weeks by flash floods in Oklahoma.

“Why don't we move to a hotel till it arrives?” she suggested when Steve told her.

“Because that makes us spoiled brats, if we can't sleep on the floor for a few weeks. You know, there was life before beds and couches.”

“I'm tired of camping out here.” She just wasn't in the mood to do it. Not with him, or anyone else for that matter. And she was furious with Cal for the way he was behaving. He was being petulant and childish, and he was making life miserable for her at the office. There was no place in her life that was going smoothly at the moment.

“I'm tired of your attitude,” Steve looked back at her, and she looked at him with total frustration.

“I'm sorry, Steve. I just can't do better than this right now. I'm trying. But it's tough. That damned commute is going to kill me. Why don't we look at houses in Palo Alto?”

“Because the whole fucking world does not revolve around your job, Meredith. If I ever get a decent job here, I need to be close to the hospital. I can't travel an hour in traffic to get to my patients.”

“I'd say a kid with a wad of gum in his ear could wait a day or two for you to get there.” It was a put-down that was uncharacteristic of her, and a few minutes later, Steve stormed out of the apartment, and when he came back he was drunk, on more than just beer. He had had three tequilas, and a brandy chaser. But she didn't say a word to him. She was lying on the futon he'd bought, and pretended to be sleeping. But she'd been crying since he left the apartment. This wasn't the way she wanted to live. There was no camaraderie, no compassion, and no friendship left between them. They hardly made love anymore, and when they did, it was like making love to a stranger. They'd both had better more recently, but fortunately, neither of them said it. They just lay in lonely misery, as the walls between them grew higher and higher. The only thing worse than April was May. Despite good weather, their lives seemed to be filled with storm clouds. And they spent most of their time avoiding each other.

And when their furniture finally arrived, it was small comfort. It was like a relic of a lost world, and none of it seemed to fit right in the apartment. And as far as Meredith was concerned, the place looked dismal.

By late May, they were ready to kill each other, and she was thinking of quitting her job. It was becoming more and more impossible for her to work with Callan.

“What do you want from me?” Steve asked one night. “I came out here to save our marriage. I took a job I hated, because I wanted to be with you. I gave up everything I cared about in New York. And you've been pissed off at me since the day I got here. What is it that you hate so much about me, Merrie?” The tragedy was that what she hated about him was the fact that he wasn't Callan. And the truth was that she didn't hate him. She just didn't love him anymore, and she couldn't bear to face it. She was angry at everyone, and mostly herself, for what had happened. But time had swept them away down a raging river, and she could no longer find him. All she could find when she looked around was the debris of their marriage.

“I don't hate you, Steve,” she said quietly for once. “I'm just unhappy.”

“So am I,” he said sadly. The next day, he was waiting for her when she came home from work. And just like the old days, he had cooked her dinner. And as he poured her a glass of wine at the end of the meal, he told her what he had decided. “I'm leaving, Merrie,” he said gently, and sounded more like the man she remembered. She hadn't seen him like this in two months. They had been savages to each other. But there was just too much distance and disappointment.

“Leaving for where?” She looked confused. But he no longer did. He had finally come to a decision, and he wasn't happy about it, but he felt better.

“I'm going back to New York.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Why?” She looked dumbstruck.

“Because it's over. We both know it, and neither of us had the guts to do anything about it. This doesn't work, for either of us. I don't know what you're going to do about your job. That's up to you, if it's not working out. But I can't stay here anymore. And we can't stay married.”

“Are you serious?” She was stunned. She had been beating on him like a punching bag, but it actually hadn't occurred to her that he would leave her.

“I'm very serious.”

“What about your job?”

“I quit this morning. I'd be more useful rolling bandages for the Red Cross. Believe me, they won't miss me.”

“Are you going back to the trauma unit?”

“I don't think so. I called some people in New York today. I want to look into doing some pro bono stuff for a while, maybe in underdeveloped countries, or in this country somewhere, like Appalachia. I don't know yet. I'll talk to them when I get back, and see where they could use me.”

“You hate that kind of stuff,” she reminded him, and he smiled sadly at her. She was still so beautiful, but she wasn't his any longer. He had lost her when she left New York, and he never knew it. But he knew it now. And he was finally willing to face it. He had to.

“I think I've grown up,” he said quietly. “I think I'd like to do that kind of work for a while, and feel like I'm putting something back into the human race, and not just patching up broken bodies.”

“But what about us?”

“I don't think there is an ‘us’ anymore. In fact, I'm sure of it. That's why I'm going.”

“I don't want you to go,” she said, as tears started to roll down her cheeks, and she reached out to him with a look of panic. He was all she had in the world, she had no family, and no friends here. And she didn't have Cal anymore. She had no one. She had Steve, and he was telling her it was over. It was a terrifying feeling.

“I can't stay here, Merrie. It's not good for either of us.”

“Do you want me to quit my job and come with you?” she asked and he shook his head.