Chapter 12
THE GOOD NEWS
He's different today.
Not in any way I could point to — not a word, not a gesture, not anything I could bring to Sophie and say look, here, this is the evidence.
He said good morning. He took his pills.
He let me hand him his coffee without saying I can do it the way he's been saying it, which should feel like progress except it doesn't. It feels like he stopped fighting a battle he already won.
We're going to his follow-up. Four weeks post-surgery, the first real check-in with his orthopedic surgeon at the hospital — the one who'll look at the X-rays and tell us whether the fixation is holding, whether weight-bearing can start, whether the timeline is weeks or months.
He had the imaging done yesterday at a radiology clinic near the métro — I drove him in Sophie's car, waited forty minutes in a room that smelled like plastic, drove him back.
The films should be with his surgeon by now.
I've had today's appointment in my phone since the hospital gave us the date.
I set two alarms. I ironed the shirt I'm going to wear under my coat, which is insane, because no one dresses up for a medical appointment, but I did it anyway because —
Because I don't know what else to do with my hands.
He's on the couch, getting ready. Getting ready for Ethan means the familiar twelve-step process of standing up: shift to the edge, brace both crutches, plant, push, pause for the pain to organize itself into something he can walk through.
I've watched this enough times to know the sequence.
I've also learned not to help unless he asks, which he doesn't.
He stands. He adjusts the crutches under his arms. He looks toward the door.
"Ready?" I say.
"Yep."
That's it. Ready and yep. Two words with the combined emotional content of a parking meter.
I grab the bag I packed — his insurance card, the discharge papers, a water bottle, two granola bars because the hospital cafeteria charges eight dollars for a sandwich that tastes like it gave up on itself.
My laptop is in there too. The Bellini proposal — Léa Bellini, interior designer, wants a full brand identity by end of month — and Derek's revision 8 of the bistro menu suite, which arrived at 11 PM last night with the subject line Sorry again!
! and which I would have politely declined weeks ago if the invoice wasn't the only reason my rent check cleared.
Freelance work doesn't pause for — whatever this is.
Whatever I'm doing here, in a man's apartment, packing his insurance card like it's my job.
Poutine watches us from the windowsill. She doesn't get up. She doesn't meow. She catalogues our departure with the expression of a creature who has extensive records on everyone's failures and is simply adding to the file.
Bagel follows us to the door and sits in the hallway, tail curled around his paws, looking up as if this is a betrayal he will remember.
"We'll be back," I tell him.
Ethan doesn't say anything. He's already working on the first of fourteen stairs.
The orthopedic clinic waiting room is the color of watered-down coffee.
It's on the third floor of the hospital — the same hospital where he had surgery, the same hallways, different wing.
Beige walls. Grey chairs. A television mounted near the ceiling playing a morning talk show with subtitles half a second behind the audio.
A man in a neck brace reading a magazine that's at least two years old.
The air smells like hand sanitizer and radiator heat and the particular fatigue of people who have been waiting for their name to be called since before they sat down.
We sit side by side. My coat is folded in my lap. His crutches are propped against the arm of his chair, angled so they won't slip — I positioned them, and he let me, which felt like progress until I realized it probably wasn't.
I open my laptop.
The Bellini proposal stares back at me — thirty-two slides, half finished, the color palette section still empty because I keep going back and forth between sage green and eucalyptus and I know the difference matters but right now it looks like two identical squares and I can't make myself care.
I'm supposed to present this on Friday. Today is Tuesday.
Math I used to do effortlessly — three days, eight slides per day, two hours per slide — and now the numbers sit on the screen like furniture in a room I can't enter.
I type a sentence. I delete it. I type another one.
Ethan is looking at his phone. Two cats on the lock screen. He scrolls through something — news, maybe, or nothing — with the practiced detachment of a person filling time because silence is fine but empty hands are not.
"Monsieur Morin? Ethan Morin?"
We both look up. A nurse in scrubs — blue, the real hospital kind, not the TV kind — reads the full name off her clipboard and smiles in a way that is professionally kind and personally nowhere.
Ethan stands. The process takes seven seconds. I know because I count them now, how you count stairs or pills or the seconds between lightning and thunder, not because it helps but because it's a thing to do while you're not helping.
I close my laptop. I follow him.
Dr. Lavoie is a small woman with reading glasses on a chain and the kind of calm that comes from having delivered ten thousand pieces of news, good and bad, to people sitting on paper-covered tables.
She pulls up the X-rays on a monitor — the ones from yesterday's imaging, already loaded into the system.
I stand near the door — close enough to hear, far enough to not be underfoot.
There's a specific distance I've learned for these moments.
Close enough that he knows I'm here. Far enough that I'm not part of the medical conversation.
"Okay." Dr. Lavoie adjusts her glasses. She clicks through two images. "This is looking very good."
I watch Ethan's face.
"The fixation is solid. No displacement. The callus formation is right on track — actually a bit ahead of where I'd expect at four weeks." She points at something on the screen that I can't interpret. "You're healing well, Ethan. The bone is doing exactly what we want it to do."
He nods. "Good." His voice is flat. Not unhappy. Flat. Like someone receiving confirmation of something he already factored in.
"We'll keep you non-weight-bearing for another two weeks, then start partial. Physio will ramp up. But based on this — I'm optimistic. You should be back to modified duty around the eight-to-ten-week mark."
Eight to ten weeks. I do the math without meaning to: late March. Maybe early April. Crocuses. Snow melting. The particular quality of Montreal spring light that makes everything look like it just woke up.
He'll be back at the station by then. Walking without crutches. Making his own coffee. Changing his own bandages.
He won't need someone to pack his insurance card.
"That's great," I say. My voice is bright. Correct. The voice of a supportive person hearing good news about a person they're supporting. "That's really great."
Dr. Lavoie smiles at me. The kind of smile that includes me in the good news without knowing what my name is or why I'm here.
Ethan says, "Thanks."
He doesn't look at me when he says it. He's looking at the X-ray — his own bones on a screen, healing without permission, doing exactly what they're supposed to do without anyone's help.
The ride home is ten minutes of a cab's heater blowing too hard and neither of us talking about the right thing.
I'm happy. I should be happy. He's healing. This is literally the best possible outcome. The bones are ahead of schedule. The surgeon is optimistic. He's going to be fine.
I should be happy.
"That went well," I say.
"Yeah."
"Eight to ten weeks. That's — I mean, she said ahead of schedule."
"Mm."
The cab turns onto his street. The snow is grey and packed along the curbs.
A woman is walking a dog that's wearing a coat.
I think about the Bellini proposal. I think about Derek's eleventh-hour revision.
I think about the fact that ahead of schedule means the schedule is shorter, and the schedule is the only thing that was keeping me in this apartment, in this coat, in this seat next to him.
We stop. I pay. He doesn't argue about paying — he stopped arguing about it days ago, which is its own kind of withdrawal. I used to have to insist. Now he just lets me, how you let someone do something you've already decided doesn't matter.
The fourteen stairs take three minutes. I carry the bag. He carries himself. We don't touch.
I moved back to my apartment four days ago.
Not because of a conversation — there was no conversation.
There was a morning where I folded the guest room couch back into a couch and arranged the cushions and stood there looking at the room as if it had never had me in it.
I told him I'd sleep better in my own bed for a few nights.
He said sure, it makes sense. Four words. No argument. No pause.
I still come every day. Or I did, until today.
Inside, the apartment is warm and smells like the soup Camille left yesterday — she comes twice a week now, drops things off, stays long enough to make Ethan laugh in a way I can't, and leaves.
I've stopped minding. I've stopped minding the way you stop minding something because the alternative is admitting that you mind, and admitting that would require being someone who has a right to mind, and I don't.
He sits on the couch. I hand him the glass of water. He takes it.
"Pills are on the table," I say.
"Got it."
I brought him something — the new issue of that outdoor adventure magazine from the dépanneur, with a cover photo of someone hiking in a place that doesn't look like it's trying to kill you with cold.
I thought he might want fresh material to read that isn't his phone.
I set it on the coffee table, next to the water.