“Eight months.” He nods slowly. “And you kept it hidden from everyone. From me.”
“I value my privacy.”
“You value your control. There's a difference, and I've spent years trying to teach you that.” He sighs, a real sigh, not a theatrical one, and rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Casey Welling. The golden retriever.”
“Please do not call him that.”
“I call him that because it's accurate. The man has the emotional openness of a labrador and the physical proportions of a Canadian lumberjack. He walks through my ER like a ray of sunshine in dinosaur scrubs, and every single person on this floor adores him.” Gabriel's voice is steady, precise. “He is also, beneath all that exterior noise, one of the most instinctively compassionate clinicians I have ever employed. He has an innate gift with children that cannot be taught. It can only be born into someone.”
I say nothing. My throat has constricted in a way that I am choosing to attribute to the dry hospital air.
“So let me be clear,” Gabriel continues, and now the theatrical warmth has been stripped away entirely, leaving something underneath that is as cold and precise as anything I have ever produced. “If this engagement is real, then I am genuinely, sincerely happy for you both, and I will personally ensure that the hospital accommodates whatever schedule adjustments you need. If it is real, then you have somehow, against astronomical odds, found the one person in this building who might actually be capable of reaching you.”
He pauses. The pause is long. It fills the corridor like anaesthetic gas; impossible to breathe through.
“And if it is not real,” he says, very quietly, “then you need to be extremely careful with that man, Arjun. Because Casey Welling does not do things halfway. He does not perform. He does not strategize. He walks into burning buildings because it doesn't occur to him not to. And if you are playing a game with his heart, even for the most logical, most defensible, most clinicallyjustifiable reasons you can construct, you will destroy something that does not grow back.”
The fluorescent lights buzz in the silence between us. My pulse, which I have controlled through twelve-hour surgeries and life-threatening complications and my mother's most devastating tactical strikes, is hammering so hard I can feel it in my fingertips behind my back.
“It is not a game,” I say, and I do not know, standing in this grey corridor with my mentor's eyes cutting through every wall I have ever built, whether I am talking about the lie or the truth underneath it.
Gabriel holds my gaze for three more seconds. Then something in his expression shifts. The clinical sharpness softens, just fractionally, into something that is not quite approval and not quite worry but lives somewhere in the complicated territory between the two.
“Well then,” he says, and the theatrical warmth floods back in, smooth and practiced as a costume change. “Go sign your paperwork. Have a wonderful trip. Try not to give your mother a stroke.” He turns, his white coat swirling behind him like a cape, and begins walking away down the corridor.
He stops after five steps.
“Arjun.”
I look up.
He glances over his shoulder. His dark eyes catch the flat February light, and for a moment he looks tired, and old, and deeply, fiercely fond, all at the same time.
“He asked about you, you know. Casey. About a year ago. He came to my office after a consult case you'd worked together, and he asked me—very casually, as if it didn't matter, which of course meant it mattered enormously—whether you were seeing anyone.” Gabriel smiles, and it is small, and it is real, and it is nothing like the brilliant, performative smiles he deploys for patients and administrators. “I told him it was none of his business. And then I went home and told my husband that the mostoblivious man in North America had somehow acquired a six-foot-three admirer in cartoon dinosaur scrubs and didn't even know it.”
My lungs have stopped functioning. I am standing in a hospital corridor, and I am not breathing, and Gabriel Moretti has just told me that Casey Welling asked about me a year ago, which means Casey was already... that he was...
“Breathe, Arjun,” Gabriel says. “And do take care of him. He’s more fragile than you’d think.”
He turns the corner and is gone, his footsteps clicking into silence, and I am alone in the corridor with the buzzing lights and the cold grey windows and a piece of information that has just rearranged the entire architecture of my understanding.
Casey asked about me.
A year ago, before the supply closet, before the lie, before any of this, Casey Welling walked into Gabriel’s office and asked about me. Not about a case. Not about a consult. About me. Whether I was seeing anyone.
I press my back against the cold glass of the window. I close my eyes. My hands are trembling again, but it is a different kind of tremor this time. It is not exhaustion, nor is it post-surgical fatigue. It is something I do not have a medical term for, something warm and terrifying that is expanding in my chest like a fracture line spreading through bone, and I do not know how to classify it, and I do not know how to stop it, and for the first time in my very controlled, very structured, very managed life, I am not entirely certain I want to.
I stand in the corridor for two full minutes. Then I straighten my coat, clasp my hands behind my back, and walk to Human Resources to sign my forms.
The paperwork takes eleven minutes. I sign each document with my usual precision, review the coverage schedule Dr. Patel has prepared for my patients, and leave the post-operative instructions for the three active cases that require monitoring. I am thorough, meticulous, and am operating on professional autopilotwhile the rest of my brain is a smouldering, Gabriel-detonated ruin.
Casey asked about me.
I push through the south atrium doors and step out into the freezing February afternoon. The cold hits my face like a slap, sharp and clarifying. The parking lot is a landscape of grey slush and exhaust fumes. My car, a sensible, obsessively maintained black Audi wagon, is parked in my reserved spot near the entrance.
I sit in the driver's seat. I do not start the engine. I pull out my phone.
I have one new text message. Casey: