And Casey Welling not finished is a force I have never encountered.
Because Casey Welling finishes things. It is, I have come to understand, the organizing principle of his existence. He finishes shifts that other residents abandon at handover. He finishes conversations with frightened parents at two in the morning, sitting on the floor of the family room until the crying has stopped and the questions have all been answered, even when the on-call schedule has long since released him. He finishes the crossword. He finishes the leftovers. He finished, against all reasonable medical advice, the half-marathon he ran the previous summer with a stress fracture in his right tibia, because he had told a group of paediatric oncology patients that he would, and the patients were going to be at the finish line, and Casey Welling does not fail to appear at finish lines.
He finishes what he starts. He returns the call. He sends the follow-up. He shows up to the thing he said he would show up to, even when showing up is inconvenient, even when showing up is uncomfortable, even when nobody would blame him for not. I have watched him complete every loop he has ever opened, and Ihave understood this about him the way one understands a load-bearing wall: structurally, foundationally, without needing to think about it.
Which means Casey Welling is not someone I can stop by speaking over him. He has opened this loop. He intends to close it. And whatever he is about to say next, he is going to say all of it, in the correct order, until the saying is done.
I close my mouth.
I let him finish.
“And last night, I thought we were finally past it. I thought we were done pretending. I thought the walls were down. And then I walk down a corridor the following day and I hear you on the phone turning everything we are into a compromised operation. Turning me into a variable that exceeded the mission parameters. Even as you debate the merits of your mother’s next candidate.” His blue eyes are bright and wet and furious. “I can't do this, Arjun. I can't be the person who makes you feel safe in the dark and then gets filed away as a surgical complication in the morning.”
“You didn't hear the whole conversation.” My voice is desperate. Thin. “Casey, you heard the beginning. You heard the worst part. If you had stayed...”
“I heard enough.”
Three words. Final. A door slamming shut.
And here is the thing about Casey Welling that I never understood until this moment, standing in a corridor with the ground yawning open beneath my feet: his patience is not infinite. It was never infinite. It was enormous and generous and it held longer than any reasonable person's would, but it had a floor, and I just fell through it, and the man standing in front of me is not the golden retriever. He is a person who has given and given and given, and who has just heard the person he gave everything to reduce all of it to clinical jargon on a phone call, and his patience is gone, and the tenderness is gone, and what is left is a man who is hurt beyond his capacity to be fair about it.
He is not being fair. If he had listened, if he had stayed by the door for even thirty more seconds, he would have heard me break. He would have heard Gabriel tell me that falling in love with Casey was the only honest thing I have done. He would have heard me say his name the way it was meant to be said, not as a variable but as a lifeline. But he did not stay, because his hurt arrived before his patience could hold, and I cannot blame him for that, because I am the one who put the hurt there.
“I'm going to Jaipur,” he says. His voice has gone flat again. Controlled. The anger spent, replaced by something worse: decision. “I'll get a hotel. I need to not be here right now, Arjun. I need to not be in this house where every room has your mother in it and every corridor has your family watching and every wall has doors that don't seal properly.”
“Casey, please.”
He is already walking. Not turning back. Not pausing. Not giving me the chance to say the things I should have said months ago, years ago, in a supply closet when I had his full attention and his open heart and I chose strategy over honesty because I was afraid.
He does not look back.
I stand in the corridor outside my father's library, and I watch him go, and the word that comes to me, the only word, the word that contains everything I am feeling and everything I am afraid of and everything I have done wrong and everything I need to do right, is not a clinical term.
It is his name.
Casey.
I said it in panic, in an office, on a phone, and it started everything.
I said it in moonlight, in a bedroom, against his skin, and it meant everything.
And now I am standing in a corridor watching him walk away, and his name is the only word in my mouth, and I cannot say it, because he asked me for time, and time is the one thing Iowe him, and giving it to him, standing here in silence while he walks away, is the hardest thing I have ever done.
Harder than surgery. Harder than leaving India. Harder than standing in front of my mother and defending his name.
I watch him turn the corner. I listen to his footsteps fade.
Then I go back into the library. I close the door. I sit in my father's chair, behind my father's desk, and I put my face in my hands, and I let myself shatter.
Chapter 28
The Lumberjack Leaves
Casey
The hotel room in Jaipur has white walls and a ceiling fan motor that clicks on every third rotation and a window that looks out onto a street where a vendor is selling marigolds from the back of a scooter.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling fan for forty-seven minutes.