Chapter Twenty-Two The Space Between Two Doors
For the first time since she’d moved into Maple Heights, Jennie found herself dreading Monday mornings.
Not because of Lin Xing — he was, if anything, gentler than usual after the courtyard conversation, careful and considerate in a hundred small ways.
But something had shifted, and Jennie found the shift harder to sit with than she’d expected.
He needs time, she reminded herself, every morning, tying her hair back for another shift.
That’s not a no. That’s the opposite of a no.
Knowing it and feeling easy about it turned out to be two very different things.
The trouble crept in slowly, the way it always did.
A Tuesday morning teaching session, Lin Xing surrounded by a crowd of eager residents, all of them asking questions, one of them handing him a textbook to sign.
Jennie stood at the edge of the corridor, waiting for him to notice her the way he always did — a glance, a small nod, some acknowledgment that she existed in the room.
He didn’t look up. Not once. Fully absorbed in his teaching, fully professional, exactly as he should have been.
It shouldn’t have mattered. It was nothing.
He was doing his job. But something small and unreasonable in Jennie’s chest sank anyway, and she found herself quietly walking away before he ever noticed she’d been standing there at all.
She didn’t mean to withdraw. It happened the way water finds a crack — slowly, then suddenly all at once.
Fewer jokes at rounds. No lingering in the doorway of his office at the end of the day.
When he asked, that evening, if she wanted to grab dinner, she said she was tired, and went straight to her own apartment instead of his.
By Thursday, even Sophia had noticed. “You’ve gone quiet,” she said, cornering Jennie in the break room.
“And I don’t mean tired-quiet. I mean something’s-wrong quiet.
” “I’m fine.” “You are extremely not fine. You haven’t made a single joke in three days.
That’s basically a medical symptom at this point.
” Jennie sighed, setting down her coffee.
“I know he needs time. I told him that was okay. And it is okay. But I keep waiting for a sign that he’s actually — I don’t know.
Still there. Still thinking about it. And every day that passes without one, I feel a little more like I imagined the whole thing.
” “You didn’t imagine it.” “I know that in my head.” Jennie pressed her palms against her eyes. “My heart hasn’t gotten the memo yet.”
She held it together for the rest of that shift, mostly, and made it as far as the supply closet before she didn’t — three days of carefully maintained composure finally giving out all at once, quiet and humiliating, over nothing more dramatic than a box of gauze she couldn’t quite see clearly through the tears.
Emma found her there ten minutes later, looking for cotton swabs.
She didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t ask if Jennie was okay, or need her to explain, or fill the small space with reassurances that would have required Jennie to compose herself enough to answer.
She simply closed the door most of the way, sat down on the floor beside her, and put an arm around her shoulders, letting Jennie cry into the crook of her neck for as long as she needed to.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Emma said eventually, when the worst of it had passed.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Jennie laughed, wet and unsteady, and wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“How did you know not to ask?” “Because sometimes the question is the last thing a person can handle answering.” Emma, squeezed her shoulder once, gently, and reached past her for the cotton swabs she’d actually come in for. “Take your time. I'll tell Sophia you’re finishing inventory.”
Lin Xing noticed the distance before he understood it — noticed that Jennie’s morning greetings had gotten shorter, that she no longer like an offering.
“Can we start again? Just — being us. However that looks, while I figure out the rest.” She placed her hand in his without hesitation.
“Friends.” “Friends,” he agreed, and then, with the faintest returning trace of dry humor: “Does this mean you'll join me for breakfast tomorrow?” Jennie laughed — a real one, the first in days — and felt something in her chest unlock.
“Only if you promise not to complain about the filter coffee.” “I would never dream of it.”
Watching them from the hospital entrance, Sophia nudged Emma with a satisfied grin.
“Look at that,” she said. “Dr. Ice couldn’t survive four days without his sunshine.
” Emma smiled, watching the two of them walk back toward the parking lot together, close but not quite touching, something clearly repaired between them.
“Sometimes,” she said, “distance teaches people exactly what their hearts already knew.” Neither of them had said the word yet.
Watching them walk away, unhurried, easy again, it was hard to imagine they’d need much longer.