Chapter 5
Gabriel Knows Everything
Arjun
Ireturn to the hospital on Wednesday morning for one reason and one reason only: to sign the paperwork for my leave of absence.
That is the plan. It is a clean, efficient, surgically definite plan.
I will enter through the south atrium to avoid the main lobby.
I will take the service elevator to the administrative floor.
I will sign the forms that Human Resources has prepared, deliver the stack of post-operative monitoring instructions I left for Dr. Patel, who is covering my cases, and exit the building in under thirty minutes.
I will not go near the paediatric floor.
I will not look through any windows. I will not think about supply closets.
The plan fails in approximately ninety seconds.
I am halfway across the south atrium, my leather satchel over my shoulder and my cashmere coat buttoned to the throat, when I hear the sharp, percussive click of Italian leather shoes on hospital tile.
The sound is distinctive, rhythmic, and approaching at a velocity that suggests its owner has spotted prey.
“Dr. Kapoor.”
I consider, briefly, the feasibility of pretending I have not heard him. The south atrium has two exits. If I increase my pace by approximately fifteen percent, I can reach the service corridor before he closes the distance. I am younger. I am taller. My legs are longer.
“Arjun. I can see you calculating escape routes. Stop walking.”
I stop walking. I turn around with the measured composure of a man who is absolutely not fleeing from his own mentor in a hospital corridor.
Dr. Gabriel Moretti is standing twenty feet away, one hand in the pocket of his suit trousers, the other holding a ceramic espresso cup so small it looks like a prop.
He is wearing a three-piece suit in charcoal grey with a burgundy pocket square, while his white coat is draped over his shoulders like a cloak.
His dark hair is immaculate and his posture radiates the coiled, theatrical authority of a man who has been running a paediatric department for fifteen years and has never once lost a power struggle.
He takes a sip of his espresso. His eyes do not leave my face.
“You look different,” he says.
“I don’t know what you mean; I look the same as I always look.”
“No. Something has changed.” He tilts his head, studying me with the focused intensity of a diagnostician examining an anomalous lab result.
“You're wearing the same coat. The same shoes.
The same expression of glacial indifference.
But something underneath all of that has shifted.
It's extremely subtle, and I find it suspicious.”
“Gabriel, I am here to sign leave paperwork. That is all.”
“Mmm.” He takes another sip of espresso, his dark eyes narrowing over the rim. “Walk with me.”
It is not a request. Gabriel does not make requests. Gabriel issues directives with the serene confidence of a man who has never once considered the possibility that he might be refused, and he does it while wearing suits that cost more than some surgical instruments.
I fall into step beside him. We walk in silence through the south corridor, past the radiology department, past the pharmacy window where a tech watches us go by with the wary expression of a rabbit spotting two hawks.
Gabriel's shoes click in perfect rhythm.
My own footsteps are silent, which is deliberate and has been since my residency.
A surgeon who announces his arrival loses the element of control.
“Two weeks,” Gabriel says, as if tasting the words.
“You have never taken two consecutive weeks off in the three years since I gave you your own OR.
You once came in with a hundred-and-two-degree fever and performed an eight-hour tumour resection because you didn't trust anyone else with the case. You have accrued so much unused leave time that Human Resources has sent me four separate emails asking me to intervene.”
“I took your advice. You told me to find a man to thaw me out.”
“I told you to drink a glass of wine and try to remember how to interact with living humans. I did not tell you to vanish to the other side of the planet for a fortnight.” He stops walking.
We are standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the hospital's interior courtyard, a small, landscaped square of dormant shrubs and frozen stone benches.
The February light is flat and grey through the glass. “Where are you going, Arjun?”
“India. A family obligation.”
“What kind of family obligation?”
“The personal kind.”
Gabriel turns to face me fully. He is a full head shorter than I am, and it makes absolutely no difference.
He could be three feet tall and wearing a paper bag, and he would still command more physical presence than anyone in this building.
His dark eyes lock onto mine with a rigour that is, frankly, surgical.
“You are being evasive,” he says. “You are never evasive. You are many unfortunate things, Arjun, including emotionally constipated and socially catastrophic, but evasive is not one of them. You state facts. You recite data. You deliver uncomfortable truths with the warmth of a refrigerated morgue. So the fact that you are currently dancing around a simple question tells me that whatever is happening is either deeply personal, deeply foolish, or most likely both.”
“It is a family engagement event. That is all.”
“Whose engagement?”
The pause is fractional. It is the smallest pause in the history of pauses, a gap between heartbeats, a silence so brief that it would be imperceptible to anyone without Gabriel Moretti's almost supernaturally attuned observational skills.
He catches it. Of course he catches it.
His espresso cup lowers. His eyebrows rise. Slowly. Theatrically. With the deliberate, ascending arc of a curtain going up on an opera.
“Whose engagement, Arjun?” he repeats, and his voice has dropped into the register he reserves for extracting confessions from residents who have made catastrophic medication errors. Quiet. Patient. Absolutely inescapable.
“Mine.”
The word emerges with the sharp accuracy of a scalpel.
Gabriel stares at me.
I stare at Gabriel.
A porter pushes a gurney past us, wheels squeaking on the linoleum. Somewhere on the floor above, a pager goes off with a shrill, insistent beep. The fluorescent lights buzz their endless, institutional hum.
“Yours,” Gabriel says. The word is flat. Neutral. The kind of neutral that a bomb disposal expert uses right before deciding which wire to cut.
“Yes.”
“You are engaged.”
“That is what I said.”
“You. Arjun Kapoor. The man who has not been on a date in three years.
The man who once told me that romantic attachment was 'an inefficient allocation of cognitive resources.
' The man whose idea of personal intimacy is allowing someone to sit in the same room as him without being actively dismissed. That man is engaged.”
“People change, Gabriel.”
“People change. Yes. Glaciers also change. They simply do it over the course of millennia, and you, my darling boy, are the most magnificent glacier I have ever trained.” He sets his espresso cup on the window ledge with a soft clink and folds his arms across his chest. “Who is it?”
“I don't believe that information is relevant to my leave request.”
“Everything about your personal life is relevant to me because you don't have one, and the sudden, inexplicable appearance of one is a statistical anomaly that requires immediate investigation.” He leans forward. “Is it someone I know?”
“Gabriel.”
“Is it someone at this hospital?”
“I am not going to—”
“It's someone at this hospital.” His eyes widen.
Not with surprise. With the sharp, glittering delight of a man who has just turned over a card he's been waiting to see.
“Oh, this is spectacular. Who? One of the attendings?
A resident? Please tell me it's not a resident, Arjun, the paperwork alone would give me an aneurysm.”
“It is not a resident.”
“A fellow? A nurse? A visiting consultant?” He is pacing now, his shoes clicking in tight, excited circles on the linoleum, his hands gesturing with the dramatic flourish of a conductor approaching a crescendo.
“I want a name. I want details. I want to know how the most emotionally inaccessible man in Canadian medicine managed to form a romantic attachment without my knowledge, because I am the Chief of this department and I know everything that happens on my floor. That this eluded my attention is a personal affront.”
“Gabriel, I have forms to sign.”
He abruptly stops pacing, and stands still.
His head tilts to the left by approximately seven degrees, and his dark eyes go sharp and quiet in a way that I recognize immediately, because I have seen him do it a thousand times during case presentations.
It is the moment Gabriel stops performing and starts seeing.
“It's Welling,” he says.
My face does not change. My posture does not shift. My hands, clasped behind my back, do not tighten. I give him nothing. I am a neurosurgeon. I have spent my entire career cultivating an exterior so controlled that my own pulse rate is a choice.
But Gabriel has been reading me since I was a young fellowship candidate who showed up at his door with a perfect CV and the interpersonal warmth of a block of surgical steel, and he has never once needed me to confirm anything.
“It's Casey Welling,” he says again, and this time his voice is different. The theatrical delight has quieted. Something underneath it surfaces, something careful and almost gentle, which is a word I do not typically associate with Gabriel Moretti.
“I would prefer not to discuss this further,” I say evenly.
“I'm sure you would.” He picks his espresso cup back up and takes a slow, measured sip. “How long?”
“Gabriel.”