Chapter Seven The Hymn He Remembered
They walked to the church together, the cold sharp and clean in their lungs, and Jennie found herself sneaking glances at him the whole way — at how different he looked out here, away from the ward, away from charts and clipped instructions.
Not less himself. Just a version of himself she hadn’t met yet.
“Nervous?” she asked, as they climbed the church steps.
“I don’t get nervous.” “Everyone gets nervous.” “I get cautious,” he corrected.
“It’s more efficient.” Jennie laughed, and the sound carried up into the cold morning air, and a passing couple glanced over and smiled at them the way strangers smile at people who are clearly, obviously happy to be wherever they are.
Inside, the church was warm and full of soft morning light through stained glass. Jennie led him to a pew near the middle — her usual spot — and settled in beside him. The choir began the opening hymn.
Jennie reached for the hymnal, ready to help him find the page, and stopped.
He wasn’t looking for the book. He was singing. Quietly. Under his breath, barely audible over the choir, but singing all the same — and he knew every word.
Not reading them off a screen or a page.
Remembering them, the way you remember something learned so young it lives somewhere below language, in muscle and breath rather than memory.
Jennie stared at him. He noticed her staring, mid-verse, and the color that rose in his face was the first thing she’d ever seen truly fluster Dr. Lin Xing.
“My mother,” he said quietly, during the pause before the next verse, “used to play this on Sunday mornings. Before anyone else in the house was awake.” “You remembered.” “I didn’t think I had,” he admitted.
“Until just now.” His hand moved, quick and almost unconscious, to the corner of one eye — gone before the next line of the hymn began, and he composed himself so fast Jennie nearly convinced herself she’d imagined it.
She hadn’t. She didn’t say anything else.
She just reached over, briefly, and squeezed his hand once — a small, unplanned gesture, gone as fast as it came — and turned back to the hymn before either of them could examine it too closely.
After the service, the pastor found them in the courtyard, the same warm-eyed man from weeks before.
“Dr. Lin Xing. Good to see you again.” “Thank you for having me. Twice, now.” “Third time’s the tradition,” the pastor said, smiling.
“How was it? Coming back after so long?” Lin Xing considered the question with his usual care.
“Familiar,” he said finally. “In a way I didn’t expect.
” The pastor nodded, unsurprised, like he’d heard some version of that answer a hundred times before from a hundred different people who’d wandered back through his doors after years away.
“Faith has a strange memory,” he said. “It waits. It doesn’t mind how long. ”
Lin Xing looked briefly, involuntarily, toward Jennie — who was pretending very hard to be interested in the church bulletin board, and failing. “So I’m learning,” he said.
Walking home, the sun higher now, melting the frost off the sidewalks in thin silver lines, Jennie finally worked up the nerve to ask.
“Can I ask why you stopped? Going, I mean.” He was quiet long enough that she thought he might deflect the way he usually did — a clipped answer, a change of subject, the careful architecture going back up brick by brick.
Instead: “My mother passed when I was in my second year of medical school. I stopped going not long after.” A pause.
“It seemed easier to be angry at something than to keep showing up to something that reminded me of her every single week.” “I’m so sorry,” Jennie said quietly.
“It was a long time ago.” “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still count.
” He glanced at her — that same unguarded look from the week before, there and gone, like something surfacing briefly before it remembered it was supposed to stay hidden.
“No,” he agreed. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
They walked the rest of the way without talking, and Jennie found she didn’t mind the silence at all.
Some silences, she was learning, said far more than her usual habit of filling every gap with a joke ever could.
At their doors, he paused, the way he always did now — a small ritual forming between them without either of them naming it.
“Thank you,” he said. “For asking twice. And for not asking a third time before I was ready.” “I’m very good at waiting,” Jennie said.
“When it matters.” Something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, something quieter and more complicated than that.
“I’m starting to notice that,” he said. He unlocked his door.
Paused with his hand on the frame. “Dr. Jennie.” “Yes?”
“Next Sunday. Would you like to have lunch afterward? There’s a place near the church I used to go with my mother.
I haven’t been back.” A beat. “I think I’d like to go again.
If you’d come with me.” Jennie’s whole chest went warm and strange and full.
“I’d love that,” she said. “Good.” He nodded once, business-like, already retreating back toward composure.
“Good night, Dr. Jennie.” “Good night.” His door closed.
Jennie stood in the hallway a moment longer, smiling at nothing, hugging her Bible to her chest like it might keep the feeling in.
She had gone to church that morning expecting a quiet Sunday with a new friend.
She had not expected to learn that Dr. Lin Xing — cold, precise, unreadable Dr. Ice — had a mother he still mourned, a hymn he still remembered in his bones, and a lunch spot he hadn’t set foot in since the last time he’d been happy enough to go.
Whatever this was, she thought, standing there in the hallway with her heart doing something reckless and unauthorized, it was worth far more than an apartment key.
She hugged the Bible tighter and let herself feel exactly that happy, without once trying to explain it away.
She didn’t know yet that he was already planning to show her something no one at St. Maple had ever seen — a booth in a small diner two blocks from the church, and the thirty years of his life that came with it.