Chapter Six The Invitation
He went still. Not the composed stillness of a man reviewing a chart.
Something more careful than that. “I appreciate you asking,” he said.
“But I’ll have to take a rain check today.
I have a case file I need to finish before tomorrow’s consult.
” Jennie’s face must have shown a flicker of disappointment, because he continued, gentler.
“It’s not the church, Dr. Jennie. I grew up Baptist — my mother’s side.
I haven’t been in a long time. Longer than I’d like to admit.
” A pause. “If I go with you the first time distracted, thinking about a file, it won’t mean anything.
I’d rather do it properly.” Jennie blinked, recalibrating everything she’d assumed she was about to hear.
“You’re Christian,” she said slowly. “Lapsed,” he said.
“Significantly lapsed. But yes.” “Then why does it feel like you just turned me down?” “I didn’t turn you down.
” He almost smiled — the ghost of one, there and gone.
“I asked for a rain check. There’s a difference.
A doctor should know the difference between no and not yet.
” Jennie felt something warm settle in her chest despite the cold hallway air.
“Next week, then?” “Next week,” he agreed.
“If the invitation still stands.” “It’ll stand,” Jennie said.
“I’m very patient. Ask anyone who’s watched me try to get a toddler to swallow amoxicillin.
” That earned her the real thing this time — brief, small, but unmistakably a smile, gone as quickly as it arrived.
“Have a peaceful Sunday, Dr. Jennie.” “You too. Finish your file.”
She walked the six blocks to church with an odd, warm feeling lodged under her ribs, turning the conversation over the whole way.
He’s Christian. He just... hasn’t gone in years.
She wondered why. She wondered what had happened, or hadn’t happened, in the long gap between the boy who grew up on his mother’s side of a faith and the man who now measured his life in charts and precision and rarely let anything past the surface.
She didn’t ask. Some things, she was learning, you didn’t rush out of a man like Lin Xing.
You waited. You let him hand them to you, one careful piece at a time, the way he’d handed her the map to Maple Heights — deliberate, exact, and only when he’d decided it was worth giving.
She lit a candle that morning for something she couldn’t quite name.
Gratitude, maybe. Or hope. They felt, lately, like the same thing.
Three floors up, on Wednesday evening, Lin Xing sat at his desk with a case file open in front of him and read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a word of it.
He opened his phone. Found her name. Typed I’ve reconsidered Sunday and looked at it for a long moment before deleting it, letter by letter, with the same deliberate care he gave everything.
Not yet, he told himself. Do it properly, or don’t do it at all.
He closed the phone, and did not open it again that night, though he thought about the invitation considerably more than the file in front of him strictly deserved.
That same evening, back in her apartment, she heard the piano again through the wall — the same slow, unhurried nocturne from moving day.
She sat by the shared wall with a cup of tea, listening, and let herself smile at absolutely nothing.
Somewhere in the middle of the second verse, the music stopped.
A moment later, her phone buzzed. A text, from a number she’d only just saved that week.
Lin Xing: File is finished. Lin Xing: Next Sunday.
Jennie stared at her phone for a full ten seconds before she managed to type back.
Jennie: Was that supposed to sound like a threat or a promise?
Lin Xing: Yes. She laughed out loud, alone in her kitchen, loud enough that she half expected to hear it echo back through the wall.
It did not occur to her that a man who never wasted a word had just used two extra ones, unprompted, on a Sunday night, for no medical reason whatsoever.
She only knew that she was smiling at her phone like an idiot, alone in her kitchen, and that she didn’t especially care.
Sunday was four days away — and neither of them had any idea that one hymn, third in the order of service, was about to undo eleven years of careful distance in under four minutes.