My stomach flips over so hard I'm briefly concerned I'm having a medicalevent.
Because Arjun Kapoor doesn't look at me. That's, like, a foundational law of the universe. The Dread Prince of Paediatrics occupies a stratosphere eleven kilometres above the disorganized, Dermabond-covered, dinosaur-scrub-wearing plane of existence I inhabit. We exist in the same hospital. We sometimes work the same cases. He hands me referrals with long, elegant fingers, and I hand him consult notes with my big, clumsy ones. Once, our hands touched during a chart exchange, and I thought about it for three consecutive days like a deranged person.
But he doesn't look at me. Not like this. Not with his face focused on me like I'm the only stable thing in a room that's spinning.
He walks toward me. His stride is precise and deliberate, the way he moves when he's made a surgical decision and nothing on earth is going to stop him from executing it. Nurses part for him like he's Moses in a white coat. An intern physically flattens herself against the wall, squeaking as she sees him push by.
“Dr. Welling,” he says when he reaches me, and his voice is that low controlled murmur that makes every hair on my arms stand up. “I need to speak with you. Privately. Now.”
I blink. “Uh. Yeah. Sure.” Eloquent. Shakespeare would weep. “Let me just finish this chart and?—”
“Now, Dr. Welling.”
His eyes are doing that thing. That laser-focused thing where the green goes so intense it's almost luminous, and if I stare directly into them for over four seconds, I lose the ability to form sentences and become a puddle of unrequited longing.
I put down the fuzzy purple pen. “Okay. Yeah. Now works.”
He turns on his heel and walks, and I follow, because honestly, Arjun Kapoor could walk straight off the edge of the building and I'd follow him down, trying to figure out how to cushion the landing with my body.
He leads me past the nurses' station, past the break room, past the supply corridor, and pushes open the door to a storage closet. A supply closet. The kind with metal shelving units stacked withgauze, saline bags, and boxes of nitrile gloves. It’s roughly the size of a parking space, and I fill approximately seventy percent of it just by existing.
He pulls me inside and shuts the door.
We’re now standing in a closet. Together. His shoulder’s about four inches from my chest. I can smell him, that sharp, expensive citrus soap he uses, cutting through the antiseptic and the faint copper of Brayden's blood on my scrubs. My heart is hammering so loud I'm positive he can hear it, because the man has the auditory sensitivity of a bat and the emotional radar of a Cold War satellite.
“So,” I say, trying very hard to sound like a normal, functional adult man and not someone who is vibrating at a frequency only dogs can detect. “What's up, Doc?”
He closes his eyes. A muscle in his jaw twitches. “Please do not do that.”
“What, the Bugs Bunny thing? Yeah, fair, that one's on me. Bad timing. You okay? You look like you're about to tell me someone died.”
“No one died. I performed a flawless cerebellar resection this morning. The patient is stable. That is not why I'm here.” He opens his eyes, and I see something in them that stops every joke in my throat. It's panic. Real, barely leashed panic, and on a man who operates inside the skulls of children with steady hands and ice water for blood, it’s genuinely terrifying.
“Hey.” I shift, instinctively angling my body so I'm blocking the door, putting myself between him and the rest of the world. I don't even think about it. It's just what I do. “Whatever it is, it's fine. Just talk to me.”
He takes a breath. It's measured, the kind of controlled inhale he probably uses before making his first incision. Then he squares his shoulders, lifts his chin, and looks me dead in the eyes.
“I told my mother that I'm engaged.”
I wait for the rest of the sentence, certain there has to be more.
It doesn't come.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “Congrats? I didn't know you were seeing anyone, but that's... that's great, man. Who's the lucky?—”
“You.”
The word hits me like a clean, open-ice body check. The kind where you don't see it coming and your skates leave the ice and for one long, suspended second, gravity just stops working.
“I'm sorry,” I reply calmly. “What?”
Arjun's composure is hanging by a thread so thin it's practically theoretical. He still clasps his hands behind his back, and I know from prior experience watching him that his knuckles are white. “My mother is attempting to arrange my marriage to a cardiac surgeon from London named Dev. She has hired an astrologer, booked a caterer, and invited eighty members of my extended family to an engagement dinner. I panicked. I told her I was already engaged, and I...” He swallows. “I named you as my fiancé.”
The supply closet is suddenly very small. Or maybe I'm very large. Both of those things are true on a normal day, but right now the walls are actively contracting and all the air in the room has been replaced by the faint scent of citrus soap and the quiet sound of Arjun Kapoor admitting that he panicked.
Arjun Kapoor. The man who once performed an emergency craniotomy on a six-month-old during a Hydro One power outage using a headlamp and didn't raise his pulse above sixty. That Arjun Kapoor panicked, and when his brain reached for a name, it reached for mine.
“You named me,” I repeat, because my mouth is on autopilot while the rest of me is experiencing what I believe my fellow medical professionals would call sudden and traumatic shock.