My phone buzzes in my pocket.
Matteo. Of course.
“Santori.”
“Why in the actual hell,” Matteo demands, “are you not answering my texts. I have sent you, by my count, four. Four. The fifth was going to be a photo of my own face.”
“I am at the campus clinic. With Iris.”
Silence.
It is, by Matteo standards, an unusually long silence. I can hear, on the other end of the line, the very small ambient noise of a room he is currently in. Voices. The faint thump of a music speaker. Then a shuffle. The unmistakable creak of a heavy door opening, the swift drop of the background noise as he passes through it, the soft thump of the door closing behind him.
“Okay.” Matteo, now in a smaller quieter room. “So do I need to fly there, or what.”
I roll my eyes. The roll is, on my face, professional. The fight against my own mouth doing the millimeter thing is, internally, undignified.
“You do not need to fly here, Santori.”
“Describe the situation. Right now. Use small words.”
So I do. I walk him through it the way I walked through the geometry of the doctor’s sentences in the hallway. The fever. The thermoregulatory drift versus the Heat-onset misread. The blocker she has been on since sixteen. The taper. The three-to-four-week window. The natural counter-medications. The hydration. The nap schedule. The weekly check-ins. The doctor’s personal line. The fact that the doctor is, in my professional reading, an actively safe pair of hands.
Matteo listens. Properly.
Which is the part about Matteo Santori that most people in this country do not know to budget for. The man can talk. He prefers to talk. Given a choice, he will fill any silence available. But when the conversation actually requires him to absorb information, he does, and he absorbs the entire thing without interrupting once, and when I finish there is a small considered exhale on the other end of the line that tells me he has, in real time, just rebuilt his afternoon around the data set I gave him.
“Okay,” Matteo says, quiet. “One more thing. About the nest.”
“Santori.”
“Go.”
“We need to build her one. Back at the house. It is, per the doctor, not optional during the taper window. And it is also, separately, going to need to be the first one she has ever had.”
Silence again.
“She has never had a nest.”
“She has never had a nest. Confirmed in the locker room ninety minutes ago.”
“Rémi.”
“Yeah.”
“At the rate this afternoon is going,” Matteo says, very evenly, “I am genuinely going to walk into the house tonight, open her storage-room door, and burn the entire room down to the studs out of personal principle so we can put a proper one in.”
“Do not burn down our house.”
“Semantically.”
“Give me a few days. I can build her one. Properly. I have access to the cedar I have been holding in the garage for a different project. I will need Jude to distract her for a forty-eight-hour stretch while I do the carpentry and run the scent-soft fabrics through the wash.”
There is a beat.
Then Matteo, very quietly, says the thing I have been waiting for him to say.
“Okay. So. How are we telling Jude.”
