Chapter Thirty-Three Matching Red
“Look what I made you.” The card, when unfolded, featured a lopsided heart, a stick figure Jennie assumed was meant to be her, and a second stick figure holding what appeared to be a very small dinosaur.
“That’s superhero air,” Becky explained, pointing at a scribble emerging from the stick figure’s mouth. “For old times.”
“This is the best valentine I’ve ever received,” Jennie said, entirely truthfully, and meant to leave it at that — except Becky, mid-hug, caught sight of her hand and went very still.
“You have a NEW ring,” Becky announced, at a volume perfectly calibrated to carry the entire length of the ward. “It’s SHINY. Are you getting MARRIED?”
The craft table, and everyone within twenty feet of it, went quiet. “.. Yes,” Jennie admitted, laughing despite herself. “As of last week, actually.” Becky’s shriek of delight could, by later unofficial reports, be heard from the elevator bank.
News in a hospital travels roughly at the speed of sound, assuming sound had personally trained for the event.
By the time Jennie made it to the nurses’ station — a four-minute walk from the craft table under normal circumstances — no fewer than eleven people had already congratulated her, two of whom she was fairly certain worked in radiology and had no legitimate reason to know yet.
“I TOLD you I knew something,” Sophia announced, arriving at speed and nearly knocking over a supply cart in the process.
“I have known for exactly nine days and I have been DYING, Jennie, DYING, do you understand the physical toll of keeping a secret this good—” “You told literally no one?” “I told Emma. Emma doesn’t count, she already knew from the hallway thing.
” Sophia grabbed her hand, examining the ring with professional intensity.
“Okay. Gorgeous. Correct choice. I approve completely, and I would like it on record that I called this exact outcome eleven months ago in a spreadsheet that several people mocked me for.” “The spreadsheet was real?” “The spreadsheet was ALWAYS real.”
Emma arrived next, considerably calmer, and pulled Jennie into a hug that lasted a beat longer than usual. “Congratulations, properly, in daylight this time,” she said. “How does it feel? Official, I mean.
Different from the promise?” Jennie considered this, turning the ring on her finger. “Lighter, somehow. Like I stopped holding my breath without noticing ’'d been holding it.”
“That’s the good kind,” Emma said, satisfied.
“I remember that part.” By mid-morning, the reactions had achieved the specific, individual chaos Jennie was coming to recognize as this hospital’s particular love language.
A senior surgeon, passing through on his way to a consult, paused just long enough to say, “Engaged now.
Braver still,” with the same unreadable expression he’d used for Emma’s engagement, and continued on without waiting for a response.
Owen, the resident who’d lost an entire office pool over Emma and David, groaned loudly enough to be heard down two corridors about “a second pool, gone, in the same fiscal year,” which nobody bothered to explain to the new interns looking on in confusion.
A cardiology nurse Jennie had met exactly twice sent up a card signed by eight people she didn’t recognize.
The cake-obsessed intern from Emma’s celebration reappeared, entirely undeterred by having asked this exact question two months earlier, wanting to know, with real urgency, whether there would be cake, and if the two celebrations could perhaps be combined for efficiency.
“We could call it a hospital tradition,” Sophia said, delighted. “Engagement Cake Season. Twice a year, minimum.” “Please don’t start a tradition around my personal life.”
“Too late. It’s already a spreadsheet column.”
It was Emma, sharp-eyed as always, who noticed the color coordination first — pointed it out over lunch with the particular satisfaction of a woman who noticed everything and rarely let an opportunity to mention it pass by.
“You’re both wearing red,” she said. Jennie looked down at her cardigan — chosen, if she were honest, mostly because it was clean and within reach that morning — and then, struck by sudden suspicion, texted Lin Xing.
Jennie: are you wearing red today The reply came within a minute.
Lin Xing: I own one red tie. I have worn it four times in nine years, all four for occasions I judged, in retrospect, insufficiently important to justify it.
Lin Xing: I concluded this morning that today qualified.
Jennie: so that’s a yes Lin Xing: That is a yes.
“He’s wearing the tie,” Jennie reported, showing Sophia the screen.
Sophia clutched her chest with the theatrical gravity of a woman receiving news of a royal birth.
“Matching. On PURPOSE. Do you understand what this means? Dr. Ice consulted his own closet for a HOLIDAY.” “It’s one tie, Sophia.
” “It’s evidence of a full personality transplant, is what it is, and I would like it entered into the record.
” They found him an hour later doing rounds, red tie visible under his white coat, entirely unbothered by the several dozen people who had clearly already informed him, through hospital-grade osmosis, that his tie had become a topic of institutional discussion.
“I hear congratulations are in order,” said a nurse Jennie didn’t recognize, passing him in the hall.
“Thank you,” he said, with the composed, faintly bewildered dignity of a man still adjusting to being hospital gossip on purpose rather than by accident.
“Nice tie,” said another. “It’s the only one I own,” he said, which Jennie, listening from the nurses’ station, decided was either an admirable commitment to honesty or the single most Lin Xing sentence ever spoken in the history of the English language.
The craft table, meanwhile, had produced an entire second wave of valentines — this batch, Jennie discovered with some alarm, largely dedicated to the engagement itself, several children having abandoned their original artistic vision the moment word reached the playroom.
Tommy, now nine and considerably less inclined toward T-Rex-based negotiation tactics, presented her with a card reading CONGRADU-LASHUNS in enormous, confident letters, accompanied by a drawing of what appeared to be a wedding cake roughly the size of a building.
“Is Dr. Lin Xing going to wear a crown,” Tommy asked, with real curiosity.
“Grooms wear crowns sometimes. I saw it in a movie.” “I don’t think he’s planning on a crown.
” “He should ask for one. I would ask for one.” “I’ll pass that along.
” By the time her shift ended, Jennie had received nineteen handmade valentines, four separate cards from adult colleagues, one bag of gummy bears left anonymously at the nurses’ station with a note reading for old times, congratulations in handwriting she strongly suspected belonged to Emma, and an offer from the cake-obsessed intern to personally coordinate catering for “whichever wedding happens first, I don’t discriminate.
” She found Lin Xing waiting for her by the elevator, tie slightly loosened after a twelve-hour shift, looking exactly as worn out and quietly pleased as she felt.
“Survive the day?” he asked. “I received nineteen valentines from children, nine of which involved you specifically, one of which suggested you wear a crown.” “I’d consider it.
Under the right circumstances.” “You would not.” “No,” he admitted.
“I would not.” He took her hand as the elevator doors closed, thumb brushing once over the ring, a small unconscious gesture she’d noticed him doing at least a dozen times that day already, like he needed regular, quiet confirmation that it was real.
“For what it’s worth — I received considerably more commentary on the tie than I anticipated.
” “You knew exactly what you were doing with that tie.” “I had a working theory,” he allowed. “I’m pleased to report it was correct.”
That evening, the apartment was quiet again after the noise of the day — the rose from breakfast now sitting in a proper vase on the counter, the valentines from her small patients spread across the kitchen table where she’d insisted on keeping every single one, even Tommy’s alarming architectural cake.
“Best Valentine’s Day of my life,” Jennie said, surveying the pile.
“And that’s including the year I got a card from a boy in ninth grade who spelled my name wrong. ” “A low bar, but I’ll take the title.”
Lin Xing pulled her against his side on the sofa, the red tie finally discarded over the back of a chair, looking more relaxed than she’d seen him look in the whole loud, glittering chaos of the day. “Though I confess I preferred this morning. Quieter. Just the two of us and one flower.”
“You liked the loud part too. Don’t lie, you kept touching the ring like you couldn’t believe people knew.” “I liked the loud part too,” he conceded. “I find I no longer mind an audience for the things that matter.
That’s a fairly recent development, for the record. I’d have found today unbearable two years ago.” “What changed?” He considered the question the way he considered everything important, turning it over with real care before answering.
“I stopped being afraid that saying things out loud would make them smaller,” he said finally.
“I think I believed, for a long time, that the things I felt most were safest kept private — that speaking them somehow used them up. I don’t believe that anymore.
I said it in front of an entire hospital today, and it didn’t get smaller at all.
If anything, it got considerably louder, and I found I liked that too.
” Jennie tucked herself further into his side, watching the last of the daylight fade over the crooked bookshelf, the framed photo of Varkala beach, the small pile of glitter-covered valentines that would, she already knew, end up saved in a drawer somewhere for years to come.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Lin.” “Happy Valentine’s Day, Jennie.
” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, unhurried, certain.
“First of many, I intend to keep the streak going.” “Even the ones that don’t require a hospital-wide tie announcement?
” “Especially those,” he said. “Though I make no promises about the tie staying in the drawer.”