Chapter 5 #2
“Arjun. I am asking you a direct question, and I am asking it as your mentor, not as your Chief. How long?”
I hold his gaze. The corridor is empty. The porter is long gone.
It is just us, standing by the cold grey windows, and Gabriel is looking at me with an expression that I have only seen once before, when I was a second-year fellow and I lost my first patient on the table and he found me in the stairwell at two in the morning with my hands shaking so badly I couldn't hold a cup of water.
He had sat down on the step beside me and said nothing for twenty minutes, and then he had said, “Grief is not weakness, Arjun. It is the tax you pay for caring. And you care. That is why you will be extraordinary.”
“Eight months,” I say. The lie tastes clinical and precise and entirely hollow.
“Eight months.” He nods slowly. “And you kept it hidden from everyone. From me.”
“I value my privacy.”
“You value your control. There's a difference, and I've spent years trying to teach you that.” He sighs, a real sigh, not a theatrical one, and rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Casey Welling. The golden retriever.”
“Please do not call him that.”
“I call him that because it's accurate. The man has the emotional openness of a labrador and the physical proportions of a Canadian lumberjack. He walks through my ER like a ray of sunshine in dinosaur scrubs, and every single person on this floor adores him.” Gabriel's voice is steady, precise.
“He is also, beneath all that exterior noise, one of the most instinctively compassionate clinicians I have ever employed. He has an innate gift with children that cannot be taught. It can only be born into someone.”
I say nothing. My throat has constricted in a way that I am choosing to attribute to the dry hospital air.
“So let me be clear,” Gabriel continues, and now the theatrical warmth has been stripped away entirely, leaving something underneath that is as cold and precise as anything I have ever produced.
“If this engagement is real, then I am genuinely, sincerely happy for you both, and I will personally ensure that the hospital accommodates whatever schedule adjustments you need. If it is real, then you have somehow, against astronomical odds, found the one person in this building who might actually be capable of reaching you.”
He pauses. The pause is long. It fills the corridor like anaesthetic gas; impossible to breathe through.
“And if it is not real,” he says, very quietly, “then you need to be extremely careful with that man, Arjun.
Because Casey Welling does not do things halfway.
He does not perform. He does not strategize.
He walks into burning buildings because it doesn't occur to him not to. And if you are playing a game with his heart, even for the most logical, most defensible, most clinically justifiable reasons you can construct, you will destroy something that does not grow back.”
The fluorescent lights buzz in the silence between us. My pulse, which I have controlled through twelve-hour surgeries and life-threatening complications and my mother's most devastating tactical strikes, is hammering so hard I can feel it in my fingertips behind my back.
“It is not a game,” I say, and I do not know, standing in this grey corridor with my mentor's eyes cutting through every wall I have ever built, whether I am talking about the lie or the truth underneath it.
Gabriel holds my gaze for three more seconds. Then something in his expression shifts. The clinical sharpness softens, just fractionally, into something that is not quite approval and not quite worry but lives somewhere in the complicated territory between the two.
“Well then,” he says, and the theatrical warmth floods back in, smooth and practiced as a costume change. “Go sign your paperwork. Have a wonderful trip. Try not to give your mother a stroke.” He turns, his white coat swirling behind him like a cape, and begins walking away down the corridor.
He stops after five steps.
“Arjun.”
I look up.
He glances over his shoulder. His dark eyes catch the flat February light, and for a moment he looks tired, and old, and deeply, fiercely fond, all at the same time.
“He asked about you, you know. Casey. About a year ago.
He came to my office after a consult case you'd worked together, and he asked me—very casually, as if it didn't matter, which of course meant it mattered enormously—whether you were seeing anyone.” Gabriel smiles, and it is small, and it is real, and it is nothing like the brilliant, performative smiles he deploys for patients and administrators.
“I told him it was none of his business.
And then I went home and told my husband that the most oblivious man in North America had somehow acquired a six-foot-three admirer in cartoon dinosaur scrubs and didn't even know it.”
My lungs have stopped functioning. I am standing in a hospital corridor, and I am not breathing, and Gabriel Moretti has just told me that Casey Welling asked about me a year ago, which means Casey was already... that he was...
“Breathe, Arjun,” Gabriel says. “And do take care of him. He’s more fragile than you’d think.”
He turns the corner and is gone, his footsteps clicking into silence, and I am alone in the corridor with the buzzing lights and the cold grey windows and a piece of information that has just rearranged the entire architecture of my understanding.
Casey asked about me.
A year ago, before the supply closet, before the lie, before any of this, Casey Welling walked into Gabriel’s office and asked about me. Not about a case. Not about a consult. About me. Whether I was seeing anyone.
I press my back against the cold glass of the window.
I close my eyes. My hands are trembling again, but it is a different kind of tremor this time.
It is not exhaustion, nor is it post-surgical fatigue.
It is something I do not have a medical term for, something warm and terrifying that is expanding in my chest like a fracture line spreading through bone, and I do not know how to classify it, and I do not know how to stop it, and for the first time in my very controlled, very structured, very managed life, I am not entirely certain I want to.
I stand in the corridor for two full minutes. Then I straighten my coat, clasp my hands behind my back, and walk to Human Resources to sign my forms.
The paperwork takes eleven minutes. I sign each document with my usual precision, review the coverage schedule Dr. Patel has prepared for my patients, and leave the post-operative instructions for the three active cases that require monitoring.
I am thorough, meticulous, and am operating on professional autopilot while the rest of my brain is a smouldering, Gabriel-detonated ruin.
Casey asked about me.
I push through the south atrium doors and step out into the freezing February afternoon.
The cold hits my face like a slap, sharp and clarifying.
The parking lot is a landscape of grey slush and exhaust fumes.
My car, a sensible, obsessively maintained black Audi wagon, is parked in my reserved spot near the entrance.
I sit in the driver's seat. I do not start the engine. I pull out my phone.
I have one new text message. Casey:
Hey Doc. Got my suit sorted, just in case Tarun falls through.
Little tailor shop on Spadina, the guy measured me like he was engineering a bridge.
Also, I've memorized sections 1 through 3 of the dossier, and I have a question about your Auntie Sunita's threat level.
Is “red” like, Code Red, or more of a general vibe?
I look at the text for a long time. I look at the way he writes, the easy, rambling run of words, the complete absence of formality, and the fact that he texted me about my family's threat levels while casually mentioning that he found a tailor who could handle his impossible shoulders.
Inside my chest, something loosens. Something that had been clenched so tightly for so long that I had forgotten it was there.
I type a response.
Code Red implies imminent danger. Auntie Sunita is a persistent, low-grade threat. Think of her less as an active combatant and more as a surveillance network with an unlimited data plan.
So she's the NSA of Aunties.
That is a surprisingly accurate analogy.
I'm full of surprises, Doc. See you tonight. Plane leaves at 7. I'll bring the Uncrustables.
Please do not bring Uncrustables on an international flight.
Too late. Already packed. Grape AND strawberry. We're going first class on snacks.
I put the phone down on the passenger seat. I press my forehead against the steering wheel. The leather is cold against my skin.
Tonight, I will be on a plane to Rajasthan, sitting next to a man who asked about me a year ago, flying toward a deception that is becoming more complicated with every passing hour, and I have no contingency plan for the way my heart rate accelerates every time his name appears on my phone screen.
Gabriel's voice, quiet and real and stripped of all performance, echoes through my perfectly organized, yet rapidly deteriorating mind: He does not do things halfway.
Neither, it appears, do I.