I am halfway across the south atrium, my leather satchel over my shoulder and my cashmere coat buttoned to the throat, when I hear the sharp, percussive click of Italian leather shoes on hospital tile. The sound is distinctive, rhythmic, and approaching at a velocity that suggests its owner has spotted prey.
“Dr. Kapoor.”
I consider, briefly, the feasibility of pretending I havenot heard him. The south atrium has two exits. If I increase my pace by approximately fifteen percent, I can reach the service corridor before he closes the distance. I am younger. I am taller. My legs are longer.
“Arjun. I can see you calculating escape routes. Stop walking.”
I stop walking. I turn around with the measured composure of a man who is absolutely not fleeing from his own mentor in a hospital corridor.
Dr. Gabriel Moretti is standing twenty feet away, one hand in the pocket of his suit trousers, the other holding a ceramic espresso cup so small it looks like a prop. He is wearing a three-piece suit in charcoal grey with a burgundy pocket square, while his white coat is draped over his shoulders like a cloak. His dark hair is immaculate and his posture radiates the coiled, theatrical authority of a man who has been running a paediatric department for fifteen years and has never once lost a power struggle.
He takes a sip of his espresso. His eyes do not leave my face.
“You look different,” he says.
“I don’t know what you mean; I look the same as I always look.”
“No. Something has changed.” He tilts his head, studying me with the focused intensity of a diagnostician examining an anomalous lab result. “You're wearing the same coat. The same shoes. The same expression of glacial indifference. But something underneath all of that has shifted. It's extremely subtle, and I find it suspicious.”
“Gabriel, I am here to sign leave paperwork. That is all.”
“Mmm.” He takes another sip of espresso, his dark eyes narrowing over the rim. “Walk with me.”
It is not a request. Gabriel does not make requests. Gabriel issues directives with the serene confidence of a man who has never once considered the possibility that he might be refused, and he does it while wearing suits that cost more than some surgical instruments.
I fall into step beside him. We walk in silence through thesouth corridor, past the radiology department, past the pharmacy window where a tech watches us go by with the wary expression of a rabbit spotting two hawks. Gabriel's shoes click in perfect rhythm. My own footsteps are silent, which is deliberate and has been since my residency. A surgeon who announces his arrival loses the element of control.
“Two weeks,” Gabriel says, as if tasting the words. “You have never taken two consecutive weeks off in the three years since I gave you your own OR. You once came in with a hundred-and-two-degree fever and performed an eight-hour tumour resection because you didn't trust anyone else with the case. You have accrued so much unused leave time that Human Resources has sent me four separate emails asking me to intervene.”
“I took your advice. You told me to find a man to thaw me out.”
“I told you to drink a glass of wine and try to remember how to interact with living humans. I did not tell you to vanish to the other side of the planet for a fortnight.” He stops walking. We are standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the hospital's interior courtyard, a small, landscaped square of dormant shrubs and frozen stone benches. The February light is flat and grey through the glass. “Where are you going, Arjun?”
“India. A family obligation.”
“What kind of family obligation?”
“The personal kind.”
Gabriel turns to face me fully. He is a full head shorter than I am, and it makes absolutely no difference. He could be three feet tall and wearing a paper bag, and he would still command more physical presence than anyone in this building. His dark eyes lock onto mine with a rigour that is, frankly, surgical.
“You are being evasive,” he says. “You are never evasive. You are many unfortunate things, Arjun, including emotionally constipated and socially catastrophic, but evasive is not one of them. You state facts. You recite data. You deliver uncomfortable truths with the warmth of a refrigerated morgue. So the fact that you arecurrently dancing around a simple question tells me that whatever is happening is either deeply personal, deeply foolish, or most likely both.”
“It is a family engagement event. That is all.”
“Whose engagement?”
The pause is fractional. It is the smallest pause in the history of pauses, a gap between heartbeats, a silence so brief that it would be imperceptible to anyone without Gabriel Moretti's almost supernaturally attuned observational skills.
He catches it. Of course he catches it.
His espresso cup lowers. His eyebrows rise. Slowly. Theatrically. With the deliberate, ascending arc of a curtain going up on an opera.
“Whose engagement, Arjun?” he repeats, and his voice has dropped into the register he reserves for extracting confessions from residents who have made catastrophic medication errors. Quiet. Patient. Absolutely inescapable.
“Mine.”
The word emerges with the sharp accuracy of a scalpel.