“Maybe,” he says slowly, “we should hold off on going to each other’s places for a little while.”
The whiplash almost strains my neck.
“Wait, what?” I blurt out, bewildered. “Sorry, but why?”
Julian gives me a plaintive, puppy-dog look, the same one I get from Onix when I catch him going through the trash.
“Because we get carried away,” he says. “We should be taking things slow. Getting to know each other properly. It’s hard to do that, with what we get up to whenever we’re alone.”
I almost retort that I think I know him plenty well enough already, and that being within the public eye has so far not stopped us from getting handsy with each other, but I can’t afford to entertain his contradictions. I have to go andnow.
“Let’s finish this conversation later,” I tell him, throwing the car door open. “Call me? Tomorrow?”
Julian nods, but his mouth is still set tight.
“Hope it goes well,” he says.
I try not to let his chilliness bother me. Men being intrigued bymy career in theory but spooked by it in practice is par for the course. Knowing that neither stops the twinge of disappointment from turning my stomach nor the panic from squeezing my chest—Did I tell him too much tonight? Overwhelm him with details? Does Julian suddenly want to take things slow because now that he’s had a minute to process my baggage, he’s realized he doesn’t actually want to carry it?
The thoughts plague me as I rush into the hospital, change into my scrubs, and throw on my lead. The case is straightforward but deadly—a blockage in the left anterior descending artery that pops open with the first inflation of our small balloon. We get a stent in quick, and my annoyance at being interrupted fades as my patient goes from sweating through his gown and cursing us all out to comfortable and apologetic in just under half an hour. There’s peace and purpose in the catheterization lab, a regimented process that involves minute, fine movements. It feels like art, twirling micron-thick wires into millimeter-wide arteries, calmly directing my fellow to adjust the X-ray arms, pull the table, flush the sheath.
I take a Lyft home afterward. Onix is sleeping when I make it, and I hear him shaking awake as I turn the key in my apartment. He plods wearily to the door, nudging it open with his snout, then gives me a scathing look like a parent who has just caught their delinquent daughter sneaking back into the house after curfew.
“I would have been back early enough tomorrow to take you out,” I assure him. He releases a long-suffering sigh, like he pays rent, then hobbles back into my room and flops onto his mattress at the foot of my bed.
It’s late, and the drastic swing of emotions from anticipation and excitement to dread and careful concentration has left me drained. I send Julian a quick text letting him know I made it home as I brushmy teeth, then collapse gracelessly into bed. My descent into sleep is precipitous; one second I am staring up at my ceiling, and the next I have slipped into darkness.
When I wake up the next morning, I feel like death warmed over.
I spend all the next day in bed. Onix is thankfully gracious about his delayed, abbreviated walks, and in return I let him lie next to me under the covers, shivering against his body heat. I take five flu and COVID tests and they all come back negative. In my symptom journal, I write:Jittery. Nauseous. Extreme fatigue. Body aches.
When I tell Winona that my symptoms are back, she forces me to reach out to my primary care doctor, Dr. Steinbeck. He orders a few tests: blood counts to see if I have an infection, inflammatory markers to assess whether my body is attacking itself, a chemistry panel to check my organs and electrolytes, a respiratory viral panel to make sure we aren’t missing a strain that wouldn’t show up on my home tests.
Everything comes back normal. I am, by Dr. Steinbeck’s estimations, the picture of health.
“Maybe it’s just a really bad cold,” he tells me over the phone.
But it doesn’t feel like a cold. It feels like being hit by a monster truck. I suspect, glumly, that I may just be suffering from a contused heart, because days after we swapped traumas over the keys of his ostentatiously fancy piano, Julian still hasn’t called. Worse, my check-in text, the totally neutral, definitely even-keeled request for him to let me know if he still wanted to talk, has been left unanswered, but because his read receipts are on, not unseen. Surely, I think, the rapid oscillations in my heart rate and blood pressure whenever my phonedings with a text from someone who is inevitably not him can’t be good for me.
Regardless, no positive tests and no clear infection means that I have to go in to work.
“Don’t be a pussy, Sullivan,” Krause, who is officially the head of the cath lab and unofficially the king of unpunished Title IX violations, says, when I ask him if he or any of our other interventional cardiologists can cover my day in the lab. “Just wear an N95 and do your job like the rest of us.”
I try each of my colleagues directly to see if any of them are willing to cover me, but they’re all either on vacation, out of town giving talks, or, in Haoran’s case, on after-school pickup duty this week.
Brandon is insufficiently apologetic.
“I promise I’ll pay you back,” he says. “It just might take a while. I’ve picked up some extra shifts, so the schedule is pretty outrageous right now. Sorry you aren’t feeling well.”
Sorry that you’re useless, I want to say, but I have neither the energy nor the desire for another fruitless confrontation with yet another man who destroyed my belief in love and loyalty. So I drag myself in and manage to get myself through my cases without passing out into my sterile field.
In some ways, I am happy for the work. It distracts me from perseverating 24/7 on the fact that Julian still hasn’t reached out. It’s hard to sink into despair when someone else’s life is on the line, to dwell on the tragic coincidence that his disappearance coincides with my decision to confide in him about the fallout of my last relationship. In the lab, I am the cool, precise Dr. Sullivan, jamming to my playlist of nineties R & B while I give my patients their second leases on life. The moment I step outside it, I collapse into a pathetic pile of achy goo whocan’t go longer than five minutes without checking her phone for a missive from a man who, at this point, has made it abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with me.
It doesn’t help that I still see him every night. He’s different in my dreams too, distant—a passerby in a crowd, a stranger standing opposite me on a darkened train platform. When I call his name, he averts his eyes, and in this space in which my hold on my emotions is tenuous at best, his dismissal feels like torture.
Through the force of sheer will alone, I make it to my girls’ date with Sophie. I’m about 99.99 percent sure that I’m not contagious, but my appetite is shot and I don’t want to get my goddaughter sick, so I wear a mask, push the menu at our favorite ramen spot to her, and tell her to go hog wild.
Go wild she does. Sophie orders a pork tonkotsu ramen with all the fixings, karaage, and a green tea red bean crepe for dessert. She nibbles through her feast like a mouse sampling its way through a pantry all while regaling me with the latest in middle school drama—Peter Rindell, the boy most of the seventh-grade girls have a crush on, was apparently caught with a strawberry-kiwi vape behind the bleachers and gave all the tween girls the ick. I listen to her chatter with amusement. Kids her age are a clash of contradictions; Sophie still ties a remnant of her blankie around the arm of her backpack, is scared of the dark, and crawls into her mom’s bed during thunderstorms. But she can also have a surprisingly coherent discussion about gender (“It’s weird that they don’t like him because they think strawberry-kiwi is a girly flavor instead of because being addicted to nicotine at thirteen is lame”), her future job prospects (“I hate when people ask me what I want to be when I grow up when no one pays enough to live anymore”), and the ethics of brachycephalic dog breeds (“How do people think pug snorts are cute? You’re literally hearingthe sound of them suffocating with every breath”). I’m glad to see her in good spirits. I almost don’t want to bring up her dad, but I know from my own days as an occasionally troubled preteen that kids Sophie’s age can be remarkably good at normalizing the abnormal. I’m thinking through ways to start the conversation:So, how are you liking spending time with Leila, how was last weekend at your dad’s, how are you doing with the split, when Sophie jumps in for me.