Chapter 28
The Lumberjack Leaves
Casey
The hotel room in Jaipur has white walls and a ceiling fan motor that clicks on every third rotation and a window that looks out onto a street where a vendor is selling marigolds from the back of a scooter.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling fan for forty-seven minutes.
I know it’s forty-seven minutes because I looked at my phone when I lay down on the bed, still wearing my shoes, still wearing the kurta I put on this morning when the world was a different shape, when there were marks on a collarbone and a man asleep beside me and a future that felt solid and warm and mine.
That was seven hours ago. Now the kurta is wrinkled and my shoes are still on and the ceiling fan clicks on every third rotation and I’m in a hotel room in Jaipur because I walked away from the best man that ever happened to me without letting him finish his sentence.
I had the right to be angry. I was angry.
In the corridor, with those words ringing in my ears – strategic maneuver, compromised operation, error in judgment – I was angry in a way I’ve never been angry before.
It was the white-hot, bone-deep, detonating anger that I felt after being patient for so long that when the patience broke, it broke nuclear.
I said things that were true and things that were earned and I meant every single one of them, and I didn’t let him speak, and I walked away, and I have been lying on this bed for forty-seven minutes trying to figure out if that makes me brave or if it makes me exactly as afraid as he is.
Because here's the thing I'm not saying, the thing I'm lying on a hotel bed in Jaipur with my shoes on trying not to look at directly, like staring at the sun.
I heard more than I told him I heard.
I didn't just hear “strategic manoeuvre” and “error in judgment.” I heard his voice break.
I heard him make a sound you only make when your composure collapses, that wet, ragged, something-older-than-words sound, and I heard it through a door that doesn't seal properly in a library. And I kept walking.
I kept walking because the clinical words arrived first, and they landed in the exact place where I keep my oldest fear, the fear that I’m a convenience, that I’m the warm body who makes the loneliness stop but who will never be the person someone fights for in the daylight, and the words hit that fear like a fist hitting glass, and I shattered before I could hear what came after.
I heard him tell Gabriel it was never a strategy. I heard that. But I had already decided what I was hearing, because my hurt was faster than my listening, and that’s a sentence I’m going to have to sit with for a long time.
The ceiling fan clicks. The marigold man has moved on.
The light through the window is changing from afternoon gold to the deep amber of early evening, and the room is getting dimmer, and I haven’t turned on a lamp because turning on a lamp would mean committing to being in this room, and I am not ready to commit to being anywhere.
My phone buzzes. I don't look at it. It has buzzed eleven times in the past hour.
Three from Priya. Two from Karan. One from Yash.
Two from numbers I don't recognize that are probably aunties who have obtained my contact information through the WhatsApp intelligence network.
And three from Arjun, which I know without looking because I know the specific, particular rhythm of the buzz he generates, two short vibrations followed by a pause, like a heartbeat, because he sends texts the way he does everything else, in measured, precise intervals.
I haven’t read any of them. I’m not ready to read them.
I’m not ready to see whatever careful, clinical, painstakingly constructed message Dr. Arjun Kapoor has composed on the other side of this silence, because right now I need to be in the silence, I need to sit inside the hurt without someone else's words rearranging it, and that is either self-preservation or selfishness and I genuinely don't know which.
Instead, I call my mom.
She picks up on the first ring, which means it’s still morning in Huntsville and she has been awake and she has somehow already been waiting, because Brenda Welling has the maternal radar of a woman who raised a son alone in cottage country and can sense emotional distress across an ocean.
“Casey James Welling.” Her voice is warm and immediate and so fundamentally, unconditionally safe that my throat closes. “Talk to me.”
“Hey, Ma.”
“Don't you 'hey Ma' me. I've been up since six because my left eye won't stop twitching. You know my left eye only twitches when you're in trouble. What happened?”
I almost laugh. I almost laugh because my mother's left eye has been twitching at my various crises since I was nine and broke my collarbone at a hockey tournament in Gravenhurst and she was somehow already in the car driving to the hospital before the coach called her. She’s an impossible woman, and a miracle.
“I think I messed up, Ma.”
“With the boy?”
“Yeah, with the boy.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I hear the sound of her kitchen, the creak of the old chair at the table by the window, the one that overlooks the lake.
She'll be in her bathrobe. She'll have tea. The dock will be grey in the morning light, and the loons will be doing their morning calls, and Huntsville will be exactly what Huntsville always is, which is the place where things make sense and aren’t complicated.
“Tell me,” she says.
So I tell her. I tell her about the phone call, about the words I heard through a door, about strategic maneuvers and errors in judgment and compromised operations.
I tell her about the corridor. I tell her about the things I said, the two years and the patience and the not pushing, and I tell her that I walked away while he was still trying to explain.
And I tell her about the hotel and the shoes on the bed.
“Did he explain?” she asks.
“He tried to. I didn't let him.”
Silence. The creak of the chair. The loons.
“Casey.”
“I know.”
“You walked away from a man who was trying to explain himself.”
“I know, Ma.”
“You, Casey James Welling, who has sat in emergency rooms with screaming parents for twelve-hour shifts and never once lost your patience, walked away from the man you love without letting him finish talking.”
“I know.”
“Well.” She takes a breath. I can hear the tea. “That's a new one.”
“I was hurt.”
“I know you were hurt, sweetheart. You don't call me from another continent sounding like this because you're having a good day. But being hurt doesn't mean being right, and I know I raised you to know the difference.”
The ceiling fan clicks. The room’s dim. I press the heel of my hand against my eyes, which are doing the inconvenient thing again.
“He said terrible things about what you two have?” she asks.
“He said clinical things. Medical terminology. He described our relationship like it was a surgery that went sideways.”
“And that hurt you because it sounded like you didn't matter.”
“Yes.”
“And did you give him a chance to tell you that you did matter?”
The silence stretches. It stretches across seven thousand kilometres, from a hotel room in Jaipur to a kitchen in Huntsville, and it’s filled with the specific, devastating quality of a mother's question that you already know the answer to but aren’t ready to say out loud.
“No,” I say.
“Casey.” Her voice softens. Not the scolding voice.
The other one. The voice she used when I was twelve and cried after my first hockey loss and she sat on the end of my bed and told me that losing was the price of playing.
“Listen to me. I know what losing your dad did to you, because it did the same thing to me. I know that when someone you love disappears without warning, it rewires something inside you. It makes us brace for the next disappearance. It makes us leave rooms before they can empty.”
My chest constricts. “Ma...”
“Your dad didn't choose to leave us. His heart gave out and he was gone, and neither of us got to say goodbye, and that is a wound that doesn't close all the way.
But sweetheart, you can't treat every person you love like they're about to disappear.
That boy in the palace is not going anywhere.
He tried to explain and you didn't let him. He and his family have sent you several messages. Those are not the actions of a man who is disappearing. Those are the actions of a man who is terrified and bad at words but trying anyway because he loves you.”
The ceiling fan clicks again. Three rotations. The room’s almost dark now.
“You're allowed to be hurt,” she says. “You're allowed to need space.
But if you let your hurt make the decision for you, if you walk away from someone who is reaching for you because you're afraid of losing them, then you're not protecting yourself, sweetheart.
You're just making the loss happen on your schedule instead of the world's.”
I take a breath. It comes in shaky and goes out shakier.
“He described me as a variable, Ma. He said the emotional component deviated from the operational scope. Who talks like that?”
“A scared Arjun, Casey. An Arjun who has been trained to process everything through medical language because that's the only place he feels safe, and the way he interprets the world around him.
You've told me this. You told me about his bedside manner and his clinical this and his surgical that.
It's how he's built. It doesn't mean he doesn't feel it.
It means he doesn't know how to say it any other way.”
“He said 'I love you' last night. He said it perfectly. No clinical language. No hiding.”
“And this morning, when the pressure came back, and you weren’t alone and in bed together, he defaulted to the only coping mechanism he's got. That doesn't erase last night. That just means the work isn't finished.” She pauses. “Casey, does he love you?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. Not a fraction of a second. Because I know. I’ve known since a terrace under the stars, since a man who doesn’t dance asked me to hold him in front of his entire family, since a pair of steady surgeon's hands shook against my skin. “Yes, he loves me.”
“Then go back.”
“It's not that simple.”
“It is exactly that simple. It is the simplest thing in the world.
A man who loves you is sitting in a palace trying to reach you on the phone, and you are lying on a hotel bed with your shoes on feeling sorry for yourself.
Go back. Let him explain. And if his explanation isn't enough, then you leave with the full picture.
But you don't leave with half a conversation and call it a decision.
That's not strength. That's fear, and I didn’t raise you to be afraid of anything.”
Brenda Welling. Fifty-four years old. Gift shop owner on Main Street, Huntsville, Ontario.
Organizer of the annual regatta. Single mother who raised a six-foot-three golden retriever of a son on a small business owner’s variable income and the stubborn, unshakeable conviction that love is a verb, not a feeling, and that the verb requires showing up even when showing up is the hardest thing in the world.
She’s the most formidable woman I’ve ever known, and I include Meera Kapoor in that assessment. The difference between them is that Brenda Welling's strength has never required anyone else to be small.
“I love you, Ma.”
“I love you too. Now take your shoes off the bed immediately, get some sleep, and go talk to your man tomorrow morning. And Casey?”
“Yeah?”
“Bring him home. I want to meet him properly. And tell him he can bring his mother if he absolutely has to. I make a very good pie, and can play nice.”
I laugh. It’s the first real laugh since the corridor, and it hurts, the way laughing hurts when your ribs are sore, and it feels like the first cracked window in a room that has been sealed shut.
“Goodnight, Ma.”
The call ends. I take off my shoes. I lie on the bed in the dark hotel room in Jaipur, and I look at the ceiling fan, and I let myself feel all of it.
The hurt. The love. The anger. The guilt.
The specific, sharp-edged knowledge that I overreacted, that my hurt arrived before my listening, that I weaponized my own patience in a corridor and used it to cut a man who was already bleeding.
The equally specific, equally sharp-edged knowledge that he hurt me first, that the clinical language after last night was a betrayal of the delicate trust I gave him in the dark, and that both things can be true at the same time, and that holding both of them is the work.
I think about Arjun, in the library. I think about his hands, which are probably shaking. I think about the texts he sent that I haven’t read, surely composed with the meticulous precision of a man who has never been good at saying what he means and who is trying anyway.
I pick up my phone then hesitate. I don’t read the texts. Not yet. Not tonight. Tonight I need to hold the hurt and the guilt and the love together without any new information rearranging them.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
The screen glows through the gap between the phone and the wood, a faint blue pulse, and I know without looking that it’s him, and I know without reading that the words will be careful and agonized, and I don’t read them because I’m not ready, because reading them will make this real in a way that I can’t undo, and I need at least one more night of not knowing what he said before I decide what I’m going to do about it.
My mom’s right about most things. She’s right that being hurt doesn't mean being right. She’s right that I didn't let him finish. She’s right that eleven text messages aren’t the actions of a man and his family who don’t care.
But she also isn’t the one who stood in a corridor and heard the man she loves describe their relationship like a surgical report.
She isn’t the one who gave everything she had in the dark and heard it filed under “error in judgment” in the morning.
She loves me, and she’s wise, and she isn’t wrong, but she’s in Huntsville making tea and I’m in Jaipur and the distance between those two things is more than geography.
I lie in the dark. I hold the two truths together, the truths that are both mine: that he hurt me, and that I left before he could make it right.
They sit in my chest like stones, heavy and sharp-edged, and I don’t know yet which one is heavier, and I don’t know yet what I’m going to do.
For the first time since a supply closet in Toronto, I don’t know if being patient and being present and being the steady, unshakeable thing is enough.
The phone glows again and vibrates. I don’t pick it up.
The ceiling fan clicks. And the night stretches out ahead of me, long and dark and empty, and I let it.