Chapter 5 #2
"Elias, this is Dr. Reyes. Priya. She's going to take excellent care of you from here."
"Saoirse's told me a lot about your progress," Priya said, shaking his hand with the easy warmth she brought to every introduction. "Losing the cane in under two months is genuinely impressive work. You should be proud of that."
"Had good coaching," Elias said, glancing at me, and I felt my face warm despite my best professional intentions.
"I've heard." Priya's eyes moved between us with the particular knowing look of a colleague who'd clearly already pieced together more than either of us had said out loud. "I'll take good care of him, Saoirse. You know I will."
"I know." I handed over the chart, feeling the small, symbolic weight of the transfer more than I expected to. "Call me if anything comes up that needs the full history. I'm still around. Just — differently around."
"Understood completely." Priya's mouth twitched with barely suppressed amusement. "I'll try to contain my curiosity about what 'differently around' means, exactly, for the sake of professionalism."
"Please do."
"No promises." She winked, gathering the chart, already scanning the first page with the focus I recognized from years of doing the same work myself.
"Elias, let's get you set up in treatment room two.
I hear you're a natural in a garden, so we'll see if I can find something equally unconventional to keep you interested. "
He followed her down the hallway, glancing back once before he disappeared through the door — a small look, unreadable to anyone but me, that said more than either of us had managed to say out loud yet, part promise, part question, part something that felt suspiciously like the beginning of a whole new story.
I stood there a moment longer, watching the door close, feeling the strange, hollow relief of having done exactly the right thing and having it cost something anyway.
"So," he said finally. "Dr. Reyes."
"She's excellent. Fifteen years of experience, no complications standing between her and your recovery. You're in good hands."
"I know I am. I've been in good hands since day one." He said it simply, and the weight of the compliment landed somewhere soft and unguarded in my chest. "What happens now? With — this?"
"I don't know," I admitted, which felt like its own small act of courage, admitting uncertainty to a man I'd spent months teaching to sit with exactly that kind of discomfort.
"There's no clinical relationship in the way anymore.
Which means there's no professional reason for either of us to pretend we don't feel what we feel.
But I also don't want to rush this, Elias.
You're still doing real work — the recovery doesn't stop just because I've stepped out of the treatment room.
I don't want to be one more complication in the middle of something that important. "
"You wouldn't be a complication."
"I might be. Grief and attraction have a way of getting tangled up together, especially for someone who's spent months being cared for by the same person doing the falling. I need you to be sure — actually sure, not grateful-sure, not relief-sure — before either of us does anything with this."
He considered that, the careful, weighing consideration I'd come to recognize as his particular brand of honesty, the same care he brought to everything that mattered.
"That's fair," he said. "I can be patient. God knows I've had practice."
"You have." I smiled, and some of the tension between us eased into something warmer, something with room to breathe. "Same time Thursday, then. Not as your therapist. Just as — whatever we're going to figure out we are."
"I like the sound of that. Undefined and terrifying."
"Welcome to my whole personality."
I watched him walk toward the garden without me that day — his first session with Dr. Reyes was scheduled for the following week, and today was, technically, a gap in the schedule neither of us had quite known what to do with, so he'd simply asked if he could work the garden alone for an hour, and something in me had wanted to say yes more than I wanted to examine.
I stood at my office window and watched him work the raised beds by himself, competent and unhurried, and felt something in my chest settle into a shape I hadn't let it take in three years.
Hope. Plain, uncomplicated hope, the kind I'd spent so long pouring into other people that I'd nearly forgotten what it felt like to let some of it land on myself.
I thought about Rory, the way I always did in moments that mattered — not with grief exactly, not this time, but with something closer to a conversation, the kind I imagined we'd have had if he were still here to have it.
I did the responsible thing, I told him, silently, the way I sometimes still did. I made the ethical call. I didn't let it compromise his care. You'd be proud of that part, at least.
I liked to think he would have been. I liked to think, too, that he'd have told me it was okay to want something for myself, finally, after three years of building a career and a whole identity out of not letting myself want anything that wasn't in service of somebody else's healing.
The spring garden outside my window was blooming in full now — the tomatoes Elias and I had planted weeks earlier had grown tall enough to need staking, small green fruit just starting to show, proof that something planted carefully and tended patiently could, given enough time and enough light, actually grow into something worth the waiting.