Chase was looking for a way out.
Three years working as a diagnostics fellow under Dr. Gregory House had taught Allison Cameron two things: first, that a fiercely ethical person doesn't necessarily have to be truthful or likeable, and second, that a person who says he's seeking honest answers is always lying.
"I didn't mean to ask you about House in front of everyone," Chase said when they were home in their apartment in Princeton. "I'd been in surgery all morning, it was a long day …"
"It really is none of your business," she insisted flatly.
"Of course its my –"
"Robert." She leaned towards him and gently buried her long fingers in his hair, pressing herself against his thin frame. "He doesn't have syphilis. He doesn't have anything. It was a trap he set up for the new kids. Okay?"
He gnashed his teeth a bit. "Okay."
"Besides," she said, "you bowl with him."
"There are no known STDs that can be transmitted through bowling."
"I mean that you wouldn't bowl with a man who you thought had once had boss-employee sex with your fiancée."
"No, I wouldn't," he conceded. Chase was reliable in that he always conceded.
"We do also have a minor problem that we need to deal with," she said, her voice taking on the matter-of-fact tone she often used to conceal sadness or worry.
Chase raised an eyebrow. "What's that?"
She narrated the story as though she were reporting a patient history: three days earlier, she'd realized that her long hours in the windowless ER during the nurses' strike had caused her to lose track of time. The timestamps on the admissions reports said Friday, but she'd thought it was Sunday. Immediately she'd examined her pack of birth control pills and noticed several one- to two-day gaps, meaning that she might have ovulated – and gotten pregnant – at any time that month.
Now her period was two days late and Chase was, for some reason obviously unrelated to the pregnancy scare he'd just learned about, looking for a way out.
"What do you want to do?" she asked.
"We said we'd consider having children right after we got married, so why not now? If you want to, that is."
She let down her guard. "I think … I might."
"I wouldn't mind having a go at being a better father than mine was," he told her.
Cameron smiled, relieved, wondering if she had perhaps been overly paranoid.
That night, her period came. She told Chase that she wasn't pregnant after all.
Four days later, Chase admitted that for the last month, he'd been seeing his ex-girlfriend from Melbourne. She'd recently moved to Philadelphia on an H-1 visa to start a surgical position at a hospital there. After she looked him up and they'd had a few late-night dinners, he realized that he'd always loved her. He had loved Cameron too, of course, but still, it was over.
He showed up at the apartment the next week to pick up his clothes. "You are no better than your father," she said, knowing that it was what would hurt him most.