Chapter 27
Itexted him first.
I'm coming over.
Read receipt. No response.
I went anyway.
Nathan's building. His floor. His door.
I knocked.
Footsteps. A pause slightly longer than usual. Then the door opened.
Nathan was dressed, which was not what I'd been bracing for, but I was already talking before I'd fully processed that.
"You didn't text me back," I said, stepping past him into his apartment.
"Four days, Nathan. I've been on a couch for four days with a grade-three concussion and Dylan doing the talk to you later thing which is somehow worse and my mother asking me twice a day to make sure I'm eating and I am eating, by the way.
She stocked my entire fridge, but the point is—"
"Wesley—"
"And I missed you. Okay? I've been on a couch for days, and I missed you and you didn't text me back and I just—I really wanted to kiss you and you weren't there and I know that's—"
"Wesley."
"I'm not done—"
"Wesley."
Something in his voice made me stop.
I was in the middle of his living room. I had been gesturing. Leo was sitting on the back of the couch watching me with the expression of a cat who had seen things.
I turned around.
Nathan was still at the door, holding it, his face doing something I couldn't read.
And from the kitchen, because of course, because this was apparently how this was going, two people had emerged carrying tea cups.
They looked just like Nathan.
That was the first thing. Both of them, unmistakably, looked like Nathan.
The man was taller, silver-haired, pale, with blue eyes that were the same shade as Nathan's and a jaw that had the same set to it. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his shoulders square and his chin slightly up.
The woman was smaller, dark-haired. She had a cup of tea in both hands and her head tilted at a slight angle, and her eyes were moving, from me, to Nathan at the door, to the space between us, back to me, like she was assembling a picture.
They were both very still.
"Wesley Morrison," Nathan said, from behind me, like he had been trying to prevent exactly this and had not been fast enough. "These are my parents. My father, Dr. Richard Cross. My mother, Dr. Elizabeth Cross."
Both doctors.
Awesome.
Richard Cross already knew who I was. I could tell from the way he was looking at me. His eyes moved from me to Nathan and back like he was doing arithmetic.
His mother's mouth had gone slightly open. Just slightly.
"Wesley," she said. "Hello."
Richard Cross said nothing. His head tilted a fraction, the same angle Nathan used when he was deciding whether something was worth responding to, and his eyes moved from me to Nathan and back again.
"You were saying," he said. Not a question. The words landing flat and even, leaving space for me to continue if I wanted.
"I. . . was. . ."
Leo jumped off the couch and sat on my feet. I briefly considered faking another concussion.
"I was just in the neighborhood," I said.
Nobody moved.
"Let’s all sit down, please," Elizabeth said, already turning back toward the kitchen. "There's tea."
The tea was good, I guess? I couldn’t taste it.
I was too busy sitting in Nathan's apartment with Nathan's parents and Nathan's cat on my feet to drink tea. I tried to recalibrate, which was difficult because I had arrived with four days anger at someone who had not texted, and none of that had anywhere to go right now.
Nobody asked how I knew Nathan. They already knew how I knew Nathan.
I was not a surprise to either of them.
I was, I was beginning to understand, the reason Nathan's parents were in his apartment.
Elizabeth set her cup down carefully.
"We heard you come in," she said. To me. Still pleasant. Her expression had shifted into something that was working hard. "You were saying something about—not texting?"
"Elizabeth," Richard said.
"I'm just—" She stopped. Started again. Then, to Nathan, with the careful precision of a woman revising something: "Is. . . Is Wesley your—"
"Yes," Nathan said.
One word. Flat and certain and not leaving room for the sentence to finish in any other direction.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Elizabeth looked at Nathan for a long moment.
Not the noticing expression. Something more complicated than that.
Something that was doing the math on thirty-five years of dinners she'd mentioned and friends' daughters she'd suggested and phone calls where Nathan had said there's no one and she had believed him.
Richard said nothing. He was looking at his tea.
"I see," Elizabeth said finally.
Her voice was even. Careful.
She picked her cup back up.
"What's the timeline?" Richard asked. "For the investigation."
I turned to Nathan.
Nathan didn't turn back.
Investigation, I thought. Timeline.
I put my tea down.
"Three months minimum," Nathan said. "Then reassessment."
Three months. Holy shit.
I had not known that. Nobody had told me that.
Knox's text had said fired and Dylan had said administrative things and I had spent four days on a couch thinking about a lanyard and apparently the actual shape of it was three months minimum and a committee and a reinstatement process that had already started without me knowing any of it.
"And the committee—have they indicated which direction they're leaning?" his father asked.
"It's preliminary."
"But you've spoken to them."
"Once. Briefly."
Richard nodded. Processing. Filing. Moving to the next item. "The board at Mass General has a sports medicine consultancy that's been looking to expand. I know the chair. If the reinstatement doesn't—if the review goes the other way— it's worth a conversation."
The review going the other way. I understood what that meant. If three months minimum became something longer. If Nathan Cross didn't come back to the Wardens at all.
"I appreciate that," Nathan said.
"It wouldn't be a step back," Richard said. "Necessarily. The consultancy work is respected. It's just"—he moved his hand—"a different trajectory."
"I understand," Nathan said.
I was watching Nathan's face.
The precision of it. The economy. Giving his father exactly what his father was asking for and nothing else—no feeling, no context, no this is why it happened or I'm okay or any of the things that would require his father to receive something he didn't have a framework for.
Just the facts. Just the timeline. Just I appreciate that when what had just been offered was a contingency plan for the end of his career, delivered with the same tone you'd use to discuss a scheduling conflict.
He had been doing this his whole life.
I could see it. Suddenly and clearly, sitting in Nathan's apartment with Nathan's cat on my feet, I could see the whole shape of it—thirty-five years of translation, of taking the real thing and converting it into something his father could process, of leaving everything out that didn't fit. The discipline of it. The cost.
"The optics are not ideal," Richard said. "A leave of absence at this stage—it raises questions. But managed correctly, it doesn't have to define the trajectory."
Nathan's jaw moved. The smallest possible movement.
"Thank you, Father," he said.
That was it. Thank you, Father. Precise, appropriate, the correct response. Nathan Cross at thirty-something years old sitting across from his father and saying thank you for being told that the worst professional moment of his life was a setback that could be managed.
Something in my chest did something.
"What I don't understand," Richard said, "is the decision itself. Clearing a player with a symptomatic assessment. That's not like you. That's not"—he moved his hand—"that's not what I taught you."
The apartment was very quiet.
What the hell was even happening? Why was Nathan not standing up for himself? Why wasn’t he explaining how I had pushed him to make the call in the first place?
He wasn't going to explain. I understood that suddenly.
He wasn't going to tell his father about the tunnel or my parents in section 112 or what it meant that I'd said it's Dylan and he'd understood.
He was going to sit here and take it because taking it was the system and the system was the only thing his father knew how to offer.
I put my tea down.
"He didn't make a medical decision," I finally said.
Richard's head turned toward me. Unhurried. The full weight of his attention arriving like something being redirected.
"He made a human one," I said. "Which is different.
My parents were in the stands. My brother had just scored to fix a mistake I made.
And I looked at Nathan in that tunnel and I said—" I stopped.
Started again. "I said things that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the fact that he knew me and understood me and I knew he'd understand. And he did."
Richard said nothing. His expression gave nothing back. The blue eyes were level and completely unreadable in the way Nathan's eyes were almost never unreadable anymore.
"That's not a failure of training,” I added. “That's a failure of—of the idea that you can know someone and not let it matter. That you can care about a person and still treat them like a variable."
Elizabeth had her tea cup halfway to her mouth and had stopped.
"I'm not a doctor," I said. "I don't know how the medicine is supposed to work. But I know that Nathan Cross has been not failing me for two years and one call in a tunnel in Toronto is not the whole picture. And—"
I stopped. Looked at Nathan. Nathan was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on Nathan Cross's face before, something that was open and wrecked and completely unmanaged.
"I just think," I said, slightly more quietly, "that the idea that you can do this job correctly by not letting anything matter is—" I paused. "I think that costs things. I think it's cost him things. And I think he's worth more than a philosophy that treats him like a variable too."
Nobody said anything.
Richard’s eyes moved to his tea cup.
Elizabeth had gone very still. Her eyes met mine briefly.
"Well," Elizabeth said, after a moment. Into the silence, with the warmth that was mostly real. "That's—" She stopped. Picked up her tea cup. Put it down. "That's very clear," she said.
Richard stood.
He was tall, and he had the same quality of occupying space deliberately that Nathan had.
He looked at Nathan for a moment with an expression that was complicated, the expression of a man who had built a philosophy and was encountering something that didn't fit in it and was choosing not to examine that right now.
"We'll let you rest," he said. To Nathan. Like I wasn't there. Then, slightly, like it cost him something: "The review will conclude. These things—they run their course."
I had a feeling it was the most Richard Cross had ever said that wasn't about professional performance, which I understood immediately, and Nathan, from the slight change in his jaw, understood too.
Elizabeth squeezed Nathan's arm. She looked at me with the noticing expression, the one that had been noticing things since I walked in.
"It was very nice to meet you, Wesley," she said.
"You too," I said.
She held my gaze for a moment.
Then, quieter—low enough that Richard, who was getting his coat, couldn't hear:
"He's never brought anyone home," she said. Not an accusation. Just a fact she was handing me, carefully, the way you handed someone something fragile. "In thirty-five years. Not once."
I didn't say anything.
"I didn't know," she said. "That there was—I didn't know."
I thought about a phone call in a Toronto hotel room. There's no one. Said into a phone while I was three feet away. Said in the voice of a man who had been saying it for so long it had become its own kind of true.
"I know you didn't," I said.
Something moved through her expression. Not quite guilt. Something more tired than guilt.
"He's very private," she said.
"Yes," I said. "He is."
She looked at me for one more moment. Then at Nathan, who was standing at the kitchen island, watching this exchange.
"Good," she said. Quietly. To me. Like she'd arrived at something.
Then she was getting her coat. Then they were at the door. Then the door clicked shut and it was just us and the tea and Leo on my feet and Nathan standing in the middle of his apartment.
Had I overstepped?
Was he about to kick me out?
Would I have to share an elevator with his parents?
I stayed where I was, waiting. Leo was still on my feet.
Nathan exhaled.
"You didn't have to do that," Nathan said.
"I know," I said.
"He means well," Nathan said. "He's always meant well."
"Okay.”
"He doesn't—" Nathan stopped. "He doesn't have the language for it. He never did."
"I know," I said again.
"What you said—"
"Nathan."
"I've never had anyone—" He stopped again. The walls were down and the thing underneath them was right there, visible, and he was trying to say it and not quite getting there and I was watching him try.
"You have someone now," I said.
He looked at me.
"You have someone now," I said again. "Okay?"
A long pause.
"Okay," he said.
I crossed the kitchen.
I didn't say anything else. I just stood next to him, close enough that our arms were touching.
Nathan didn't move away.
After a while his shoulder dropped slightly against mine. Just slightly. Just enough.
"My father—"
"Is not here," I said. "And I am. So."
He sat down at the kitchen island.
Not with his usual precision. Just sat, the way you sat when something had been holding you up and had temporarily stopped.
“Wesley. Let’s talk.”