Chapter Twelve Every Sunday After
Weeks folded into each other, and somewhere in the folding, a rhythm formed — the kind neither of them had planned but both of them had come to depend on without quite noticing.
Sunday mornings meant church, the two of them walking the six blocks together no matter the weather, no invitation required anymore.
Sunday afternoons meant lunch — hers one week, his the next, though “his” increasingly meant her standing at his stove correcting his knife technique while he pretended to be offended by the correction.
Weeknights meant, more often than either would admit out loud, a shared coffee in the staff lounge before one of them inevitably had to leave for a late consult.
It was, Jennie thought one evening, watching him through the gap in her open balcony door as he watered a single stubborn basil plant on his own balcony three feet away, the strangest and most comfortable friendship she had ever built with anyone.
Friendship, she reminded herself. That’s what this is.
She was becoming a worse liar to herself by the week.
Some nights, though, the doubt crept in anyway, uninvited.
She’d watch him move through their easy routines — the shared coffee, the Sunday lunches, the basil plant he tended with more patience than he tended most things — and a small, cold thought would surface before she could stop it: what if this is simply who he is with everyone he respects?
What if I’ve built an entire private hope out of nothing more than his ordinary kindness?
She never said it out loud. She wasn’t sure, most days, that she wanted the answer badly enough to risk asking the question.
Amma called most Thursdays, right on schedule, and had taken lately to dictating recipes over video in the exact bossy, affectionate tone she’d used since Jennie was ten years old and burning her first attempt at appam.
“Coconut milk first, molé, always first, or the whole thing turns to rubber. Are you writing this down?” “I’m writing it down, Amma.
” “You are not writing it down. You are making the face you make when you are not writing it down.” Jennie laughed, phone propped against a jar of gummy bears, genuinely writing it down this time, and felt the particular, specific ache of missing home that never fully went away no matter how good her life here had become — the smell of her grandmother’s kitchen at Christmas, the sound of carols sung half in English and half in Malayalam, an entire season of her childhood folded into one coconut-milk instruction shouted lovingly down a phone line from eleven time zones away.
“You know,” she called across the gap between their balconies, “for a man who claims to be terrible at cooking, you’ve become suspiciously good at keeping a basil plant alive.”
He didn’t look up from the watering can.
“Basil doesn’t require creativity. Only consistency.
” “Is that a metaphor?” “It’s horticultural advice.
” “Everything’s a metaphor if you squint,” Jennie said, leaning on her railing.
“I’ve decided that about you specifically.
” He glanced over at that — a real glance, unhurried, the kind he’d started giving her more and more often, the kind that made her chest do something complicated.
“Then what am I a metaphor for, Dr. Jennie?” She hadn’t actually thought that far.
“...Something sturdy. And slow to bloom. And worth the wait.” The words came out before she’d fully considered them, and she watched them land — watched something shift behind his eyes, unguarded for one long second before the careful composure resettled.
“That’s a generous metaphor,” he said finally.
“I’m a generous person.” “You are,” he agreed, quiet enough that she almost missed it, and went back to his basil plant.
It was Emma who first noticed the nickname had changed — really noticed it, out loud, in front of witnesses, which was the only way anything ever became official in the pediatric ward.
“Wait.” She stopped mid-sentence in the staff lounge, looking between Jennie and the doorway where Lin Xing had just walked past. “Did he just call you Jennie? Not Dr. Jennie. Just — Jennie?” Jennie hadn’t even registered it.
She replayed the last exchange in her head — Jennie, the Peterson chart needs your signature — and felt her face go warm.
“I... hadn’t noticed.” “You hadn’t noticed?
” Sophia set down her sandwich with the gravity of a woman receiving breaking news.
“Jennie. He has never, not once, in the entire time I’ve worked here, dropped the ‘Dr.’ for anyone.
Not for me. Not for Emma. Not for the chief of surgery, who is seventy-one years old and has known him for a decade.
” “It’s probably an accident.” “Dr. Lin Xing,” Emma said slowly, “does not have accidents. That man plans his coffee order forty-five minutes in advance.” St. Maple 4th Floor (OFFICIAL) had the story within the hour: Sophia: he called her JENNIE.
no title. eyewitnesses. multiple. Owen: source?
Sophia: EMMA. Emma is the source. Emma doesn’t exaggerate, Emma barely emotes Emma: confirmed.
also whoever keeps taking my yogurt, I’ve started labeling them with medical-grade adhesive Owen: adjusting all pool odds.
this changes everything Jennie read the thread in the stairwell, standing very still, smiling at her phone in a way she would have denied under oath. Wr
Jennie thought about it the whole walk home that evening — thought about the word Jennie in his mouth, thought about how easily it had started happening, sometime between the dumplings and the basil plant and the four Sundays of hymns she now knew every word to herself.
She caught up to him in the lobby, and instead of overthinking it, said, plainly: “You call me Jennie now. Not Dr. Jennie.” He paused at the mailboxes, keys in hand, and considered the observation with his usual care.
“I do,” he confirmed. “When did that start?” “I don’t know precisely.
” He unlocked his mailbox, extracted a small stack of mail, and looked at her directly — steady, unguarded, no careful architecture in the way at all.
“I stopped thinking of you as a colleague some time ago. The title didn’t feel accurate anymore.
” Jennie’s whole chest went warm and unsteady at once.
“What does feel accurate?” He held her gaze a beat too long to be casual.
“I haven’t decided the word yet,” he said. “But ‘Dr. Jennie’ was never it.”
He didn’t wait for her response — turned and headed for the elevator, mail in hand, leaving her standing by the mailboxes with her heart doing something reckless and completely unauthorized in her chest. She caught up with him at the elevator doors, and they rode up together in a silence that felt, for the first time, deliberately charged rather than merely comfortable — both of them aware of it, neither of them naming it, the numbers climbing slowly toward the twelfth floor.
At their doors, he paused, the way he always did now.
“Good night, Jennie.” “Good night, Lin.” She’d been saying his first name for weeks now without the title, but tonight it landed differently — softer, more deliberate, both of them hearing exactly what it meant.
He didn’t move toward his door right away.
Neither did she. “Sunday,” he said finally.
“Lunch. My place.” “You’re cooking?” “I’m attempting.
” “Then I’m bringing backup snacks. In case of ceiling incidents.
” The corner of his mouth moved — the real thing this time, unhidden, lasting a full second before he let himself into his apartment.
Jennie stood in the hallway a long moment after his door closed, smiling at nothing, at everything, at a word he hadn’t found yet but was clearly, deliberately, looking for.
Not Dr. Jennie. She had a feeling that whatever word he eventually landed on, it was going to change everything. She found, standing there in the quiet hallway with her heart still racing, that she couldn’t wait.
Tuesday morning, walking to the hospital, Jennie decided the time had come to be reckless.
Not fully reckless. Not confess-everything-in-the-middle-of-the-sidewalk reckless.
Just reckless enough to see what would happen.
“Can I ask you something completely random?” she said, matching his pace, coffee cup warming her hands against the cold.
Lin Xing glanced over, faintly wary — he’d learned, over the past two months, that “completely random” from Jennie rarely meant anything of the sort.
“Go ahead.” “Do you believe in love at first sight?”
He didn’t answer immediately. That, in itself, told her something
— the old Lin Xing would have dismissed the question in four words and moved on to something clinical.
This Lin Xing actually considered it, walking half a block in silence, his breath fogging in the cold morning air.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “You don’t know?
” “I’ve spent most of my adult life studying medicine.
Working. I never stopped to think about it.
” He glanced at her, something curious in his expression.
“Why do you ask?” Jennie’s heart did an undignified leap.
She smiled quickly, reflexively — the smile she used when she needed a half-second to think.
“Sophia and I were talking about it yesterday. The question just stuck with me.” It wasn’t entirely a lie.
It also wasn’t remotely the whole truth.