Chapter 16 Anatomy Lab
The first thing I remember about med school wasn’t the smell of formaldehyde, though everyone claims it lingers in their memory like a ghost.
For me, it was the weight of possibility.
Back then, I was Selene Ward—bright-eyed, hungry, foolishly convinced the world was a fair place. I walked onto the campus of Ravenwood Medical College with a backpack full of textbooks and a heart full of certainty. Certainty that hard work would be enough. Certainty that brilliance would protect me. Certainty that the man who would soon slice my life open was someone I could trust.
The irony, of course, is almost surgical.
It started on the first day of Anatomy Lab.
The room was freezing, the kind of cold that wormed under your clothes and made you aware of every breath. Stainless steel tables gleamed beneath harsh fluorescent light. Cadavers lay under white sheets like secrets waiting to be unwrapped. Students whispered, nervous laughter bouncing off the tiled walls.
I tightened my gloves, pretending my hands weren’t shaking.
And then I heard the voice I would come to fear, love, hate, and grieve—sometimes all in the same breath.
“Is this table taken?”
I looked up.
Meta Vale.
Twenty-one years old, already wearing confidence like a custom-fit surgical gown. Dark hair pushed back carelessly. Eyes too sharp to be innocent. A smirk that said he knew exactly how much gravity he carried.
He wasn’t beautiful. He was alarming.
I didn’t know then that the most dangerous people are the ones who can look at you like you’re both a question and an answer.
I nodded stiffly. “Yeah—well, no. I mean, you can join.”
He slid into place across from me, pulling on gloves with the easy grace of someone born for this. “Selene Ward, right?”
I blinked. “How do you know my name?”
“You answered half the questions in orientation. Hard not to notice.”
I felt heat crawl up my neck. I had always been the type to raise my hand—not out of arrogance, but out of certainty that knowledge was the one thing no one could take from me.
Funny how wrong I turned out to be.
Our professor, Dr. Arden, swept into the room shortly after, her voice slicing through the chatter. “Remove the sheets. Begin with superficial dissection of the thoracic cavity. Work in pairs.”
Meta lifted the corner of the sheet on our table and murmured, “Ready?”
No. I wasn’t ready for any of it. Not for the cadaver. Not for him. Not for the future he would carve out of my life.
But back then, I believed I could handle anything.
I nodded.
We peeled the sheet back together, the cold skin beneath catching the light. Some students gagged. Others whispered prayers. Meta looked fascinated.
“This is incredible,” he said, leaning forward. “Imagine everything this person lived through. Everything their body held.”
His voice was soft, reverent.
It was the first time I saw the Meta Vale that could have existed—the one who might have loved medicine the way I did. Before ambition hollowed him out.
We made the first incision together.
He guided my hand gently, his gloved fingers brushing mine. “Start slow. Let the scalpel do the work.”
Our blades moved in parallel lines, opening what had once been a human life. My breath steadied. My pulse slowed. The room dimmed around the edges until there was only the table, the cadaver, and Meta’s voice murmuring instructions that felt strangely intimate.
Later, I would realize this was our first act of complicity—cutting open a body side by side. A foreshadowing wrapped in flesh and bone.
“You’re good at this,” Meta said quietly.
“So are you.”
He flashed a smile that shouldn’t have mattered but did. “Maybe we’ll end up in the same specialty.”
“Maybe.”
I wanted cardiothoracic surgery even then. I didn’t know his dream was the same. I didn’t know it would put us on a collision course neither of us could escape.
Dr. Arden moved between tables, observing. She paused behind us. “Excellent teamwork, Ward. Vale.”
Meta shot me a triumphant look.
And just like that, we were a pair.
It happened slowly at first—shared study sessions, exchanged notes, long hours hunched over textbooks in the library. But the thing about proximity is that it makes intimacy inevitable. By the third week, we were finishing each other’s sentences. By the fifth, we were inseparable.
Meta had a way of making the world feel smaller, tighter, more intense. When he looked at you, it felt like being chosen. And when he wasn’t looking, it felt like suffocating.
But in those early days, I didn’t see the danger. I saw brilliance. Drive. A future.
A future that would never belong to both of us.
On the last day of the first anatomy module, we stood outside the lab, washing the smell of formaldehyde off our hands.
“You know,” Meta said, rolling up his sleeves, “we make a good team.”
I smiled without thinking. “We do.”
“Maybe we could… I don’t know. Team up for more than just class?”
My heart lurched. “Are you asking me to study with you or—”
“Both,” he said, stepping closer. “If you want.”
I should have walked away. I should have chosen my career, my sanity, my future.
But I was nineteen. And he was Meta Vale.
And that was the beginning of the end.
Later, I would write in my journal:
We entered the anatomy lab as strangers.
We left as a pair of hearts beating in sync—
already preparing to cut each other open.
But back then, I only felt the glow of possibility.
I didn’t know the body remembers everything—
every incision, every bruise, every betrayal.
And so did I.