16. Josh
Chapter sixteen
Josh
Your tiny client objects to page six.
I was scrubbed into an emergency thoracotomy, so I didn’t see it until two, standing outside the trauma bay while the next patient was being transferred upstairs.
I’ve read it three more times since.
In the bottom corner, just enough of Liv’s hand to show the mug I’d made before I left. She probably didn’t know it was in the frame.
That’s the part I keep going back to.
Her hand around the mug.
In my apartment.
My shift ended fifteen minutes ago. I should be halfway home by now. I only have six more days with Iris. Which means only six more days with Liv.
Then what? We go back to being neighbors? I wave at her in the elevator and she gives me the polite nod she gives the doorman?
I want to say something. I’ve been trying to find the words since I left the OR. The best I have so far is Liv, six days isn’t enough. Which I know doesn’t even make sense as a sentence. That is why I’m still in the breakroom.
Evans, chief of surgery and my mentor, comes in without pausing, which is how Evans always comes in.
He takes in the phone. Then me. He goes to the coffee machine and takes his time with the pour, which means he has already decided something and is waiting for me to make it easier on both of us.
“You’ve been staring at that phone since Tuesday,” Evans says. “Let me guess. Not a patient.”
“No.”
“Liv, then.”
I don’t answer fast enough.
“That’s a yes.”
Evans pours his coffee, turns, and leans against the counter. “What’s the actual problem, Miller?”
He knows about Iris. He knows about the emergency guardianship, the schedule changes, the two shifts he covered while I figured out how to keep a four-month-old fed, dry, and alive.
He knows Liv gave up Barcelona and moved into my guest room after I showed up at her door with a baby and nobody else to call.
And he knows Liv is not just my friend. He knew us when we were together, back when I was a resident and still thought loving someone counted for something even though I kept missing dinner.
What he doesn’t know is that her legal pad is on my kitchen table now. Her mug is beside mine in the dish rack. That when I come home and hear her voice before I open the door, I stand in the hallway an extra second just to listen.
“She moves out in six days,” I say.
Evans waits.
He will outwait me. I might as well give him what he wants.
I set my mug down. “I don’t want her to.”
Evans drinks his coffee.
“What have you done about it?”
“I make her coffee.”
“Heroic.”
I pause.
“Three-quarters full. Oat milk. If it’s full, she spills it when she’s reading.”
“And that told her what?”
I don’t answer.
“Miller.”
“I keep Iris away from the case files when the office calls. I order dinner before Liv remembers she forgot to eat. I clear the kitchen before she comes in because clutter makes her shoulders go up.”
Evans waits.
“I take the baby when I’m home,” I say. “Even when Liv already has the bottle ready.”
“Useful,” Evans says.
“That’s not a bad thing.”
“No. It’s just not the same as honest.”
I look back at the photo. Liv’s hand is still in the corner of the frame. The mug beside it.
“She knows I’m trying,” I say.
“Does she know what you’re trying to say?”
I don’t answer fast enough.
“Right,” he says.
I know what 10:14 looked like in my apartment. The bouncer would have been catching the morning light. Iris would have been watching Liv click her pen. Liv would have put the phone back down, picked up the brief, and read the same sentence twice because part of her was still listening for Iris.
“Liv pretends interruption annoys her,” I say. “It does, sometimes. But she still waits to see if Iris needs her before she goes back to the page. She sits on the edge of the couch for the first ten or fifteen minutes. Then one foot tucks under her.”
I stop there, because the next detail in my head is the angle of her shoulder, and I would like to keep whatever dignity I have left.
Evans sets his mug down.
“You know how she sits when she’s decided she’s staying for a while,” he says. “And you think what you just described is enough to show her how you really feel about her.”
“It’s not enough.” I say it before he can. “I know it’s not enough.”
“Does she know what you want?”
I go back to the photo.
Her legal pad is on my table. Her mug is beside mine in the dish rack. When I come home and hear her voice on the other side of the door, those four seconds before I open it have become the best part of my day.
I know what my apartment sounds like without her in it.
“She told me she missed me,” I say. “Three nights ago. She said it and then left the room.”
Evans is quiet.
“And you said?”
“I told her I missed her too.”
“Good.”
I look at him.
He waits.
Apparently good was not the end of the sentence.
“She left the room,” I say.
“After you asked her for what?”
I look back at the phone.
The hand in the corner of the frame. The mug beside it.
“I didn’t ask her for anything.”
Evans sets his coffee down.
“There it is.”
“I answered her.”
“You answered history,” he says. “You didn’t ask for tomorrow.”
I don’t answer.
He doesn’t ask what happened seven years ago. He doesn’t need to.
Seven years ago, she told me she couldn’t keep doing it.
Not us. Well not exactly.
The waiting. The canceled dinners. The calls that started with I’m sorry before I even said hello. She didn’t yell. That was worse. She stood in my doorway, tired and calm, and told me she loved me but couldn’t keep coming in second place.
She gave me a chance to fight for her.
I could have asked her to stay.
I could have told her I wanted to be better at loving her than I was at apologizing.
I said nothing.
Instead, I nodded. Moved aside. Told myself I was giving her the clean exit she deserved. She deserved someone who could show up when he said he would. She deserved plans that didn’t depend on my pager staying quiet.
Maybe part of me believed it.
Maybe part of me was just relieved I didn’t have to hear her say no.
That is where I always stop.
Right before the ask.
“Iris goes back to her mom in six days, hopefully,” I say. “So, in six days, Liv moves out.”
Evans waits.
“After that, Liv doesn’t need to be in my apartment. She doesn’t need to answer my texts. She doesn’t need to build schedules or make bottles or sit on my couch with her legal pad.”
I look down at the phone.
“If I want us in each other’s lives, I have to give her a reason that isn’t Iris.”
Evans sets his mug down.
“There it is.”
“That doesn’t mean I know how to say it.”
That is how I lost her the first time.
“No,” he says. “It means you finally know what you want.”
I rub the back of my neck.
There are a dozen easier ways to say it.
You don’t have to move out right away.
We can figure something out after Iris goes home.
I like having you here.
All true.
None of them enough.
I look back at Evans.
“I want her to stay,” I say.
Evans waits.
“Not in the guest room,” I add. “In my life.”
“As what?”
I look at him.
“Don’t make me do your work for you,” he says.
I look back at the photo.
Her hand. My mug.
“As mine,” I say, then immediately shake my head. “No. That’s not right.”
I breathe once.
“I want another chance with her.”
“So say it to her,” he says.
“What if I do and she still goes?”
“Then she goes and you know.” He sets the stirrer down. “Right now you don’t know anything.”
“I know.”
Evans picks the stirrer back up. He points it at me.
“If you let her pack her Tumi bag without saying a word, you’re a coward.”
I’ve been looking at the phone for the last twenty minutes.
I pick it up and dial.
It rings twice. Then her voice comes through, slightly flat, like she is coming back from wherever she’s been concentrating.
“Hey.”
“I’m heading out shortly.” I look at the wall. Not at Evans. “There’s a place on Ninth. Lamb ragu.” A beat. The part I keep cutting off. “I thought maybe we could have dinner together. After Iris goes down.”
Silence on the line.
“Josh.” Her voice changes on my name. Softer. Careful.
“Dinner,” she says.
“Dinner.”
A quiet second passes.
“After Iris goes down?”
“Yes.”
She exhales. “Okay. I’d like that.”
“I’ll text you when I’m leaving,” I say.
“Okay.”
I put the phone in my pocket. Evans has his back to me, mug in hand, looking at something through the breakroom window that probably isn’t very interesting.
“Dinner is a start.”
I look at him.
He does not turn around.
“Do not confuse a start with the ask.”
He's right.
Dinner is one step.
Now I have to go home and say the rest.