Chapter Twelve Every Sunday After #2
He accepted the explanation without pushing, which she was grateful for and slightly disappointed by in equal measure.
“I think,” he said slowly, “real love probably grows. From actually knowing someone. Not from a single moment.” Jennie turned the words over as they walked, surprised by how much they mattered to her — surprised by how much she wanted to argue and agree with him at the exact same time.
“That’s a very sensible answer,” she said.
“I’m a sensible person.” “You’re really not, though.
Not anymore. You attempted dumplings four times and put pork filling on your own ceiling.
” “That was an anomaly.” “That was Tuesday. And also last Sunday. You have several anomalies now, Lin. I’m starting to lose count.
” He almost smiled — that small, private movement she’d learned to watch for. “What about you? What’s your answer?”
Jennie’s heart sped up. This was the part she hadn’t planned for — hadn’t thought through what she’d say if he actually asked back. “Honestly? I think—’ She stopped herself so abruptly she nearly tripped over the curb.
I think it’s you. I think it might already be you.
The sentence sat right there, fully formed, dangerously close to actually leaving her mouth, before she wrestled it back down with the practiced discipline of a woman who had spent two months talking herself out of exactly this moment.
“You think what?” he asked, glancing at her, faintly amused by whatever her face had just done.
“I think—” She cleared her throat, buying herself a half-second.
“I think I need better answers prepared for my own questions. That’s a design flaw on my part.
” He looked at her a moment longer than the deflection strictly earned, like he suspected there’d been a different sentence underneath it, and let it go.
She looked straight ahead, watching her own breath curl into the cold air, and decided, in the space of about two seconds, to tell the truth in the only way she was brave enough to tell it.
“I think,” she said carefully, “sometimes the heart notices someone before the mind understands why.” Silence.
A full block of it. Long enough that Jennie’s nerve nearly failed her entirely, long enough that she started composing an escape route involving a sudden, fascinating interest in a nearby storefront.
“That’s an interesting answer,” he said finally. His voice had changed. Just slightly. Quieter, more careful, like a man walking across ice he wasn’t entirely sure would hold.
The hospital came into view before either of them could say anything else, and the conversation folded itself closed the way conversations do when real life interrupts — a colleague waving from the entrance, the automatic doors sliding open, the whole machinery of the day pulling them both back into their white coats and their titles.
But Jennie caught him, just before they stepped inside, glancing sideways at her with an expression she hadn’t seen on him before.
Not quite confusion. Not quite recognition, either.
Something in between — a man turning a new idea over slowly, testing its weight, not yet sure what to do with it.
He didn’t say anything else about it. Neither did she.
But that evening, walking home together in the early dark, he broke a comfortable silence with a question that had clearly been sitting with him all day.
“Jennie.” “Hm?” “The heart noticing someone before the mind understands why.” He kept his eyes forward, hands in his coat pockets.
“Was that a general observation? Or a specific one?” Her breath caught. This is it, she thought.
This is the moment. Tell him. Just say it. “What do you think?” she asked instead, chickening out at the very last second, hating herself for it immediately.
He was quiet for the length of the block. “I think,” he said slowly, “I’ve been thinking about it since seven this morning. Which is unusual for me.” “Is it?”
“Extremely.” He glanced at her, something warm and careful in his expression. “I don’t usually think about anything for eleven hours straight, Jennie. Not without a very good reason.”
They reached Maple Heights, and he held the door for her without breaking stride, the gesture so automatic now that neither of them registered it as anything but ordinary. At their doors, he paused — the ritual they’d built without ever naming it.
“Good night,” he said. And then, after a beat, quieter: “Thank you for the honest answer. Even the vague one.” “It wasn’t that vague.
” “It was moderately vague.” A small, real smile.
“I’m choosing to take it as encouraging, regardless.
” He let himself into his apartment before she could respond, and Jennie stood alone in the hallway, replaying his voice — thinking about it since seven this morning — until her chest felt too full to hold anything else.
She hadn’t told him the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway.
But standing there smiling at a closed door, she understood she wouldn’t need to say it much longer.
He was already listening for it — she could hear it in every careful word he chose.
She just had to be patient enough to let him land.
The hospital, of course, had other plans for her patience — starting with a stray fragment of gossip she was about to walk straight into outside the break room.