But I heard it. And she knows I heard it.
Later that day,I'm helping him adjust his pillow.
It's a nothing task. The pillow has gone flat on one side and he can't reach behind himself without his whole body protesting, so I lean in and bunch the pillow up and wedge it behind his shoulders.
And my fingers touch his wrist.
Not on purpose. My hand is on the pillow and his arm is on the pillow and the geography of it means my fingers land on the inside of his wrist, on the soft skin where the veins show through, and we both know it happened because we both stop moving at the same time.
One second. Maybe less.
His wrist is warm. That's the only thought I have — not poetic, not dramatic, just: warm. And the warmth makes the air in the room change density, like the molecules rearranged themselves to make space for this contact that wasn't supposed to happen.
I pull my hand back. He adjusts the pillow himself with his other hand, the one that isn't connected to the arm I just touched, and he says, "Thanks," and I say, "Sure," and that's it. One syllable each. The smallest possible doors we could close.
I sit back down. He looks at his phone. I look at my laptop.
But the wrist is still there. I can still feel it — the exact temperature, the exact pressure, the exact half-second where I touched a part of him I've never touched before, in a context that is decidedly un-romantic but that my nervous system has decided to file underextremely important, please review at 3 AM when you're trying to sleep.
He's scrolling through something on his phone. His shoulders are wide — I've always known that, but in the hospital bed they look different. Smaller. A room looks smaller when you see it empty. He's hunching into himself, curling around the injury like he's trying to protect it with his posture, and I don't know what to do with that.
Later that night I wake up and his phone screen is on — the blue-white glow catching his face in the dark. He's watching a video. I can just make out the sound: a tiny, tinny meow. He's watching cat videos at 1 AM in a hospital bed. Then he sees me shift and the screen goes dark instantly.
"Just checking the time," he says.
He wasn't checking the time.
I close my eyes and pretend I believe him, and he pretends I'm asleep, and somewhere in the gap between those two performances the wrist is still there, warm and filed under things I'm not looking at yet.
On the fourth morning,Dr. Tremblay comes in with the clipboard angle that means news.
"The swelling is down," he says in the kind of brisk, optimistic French that doctors use when the facts are good but the logistics are complicated. "We'll schedule surgery for early next week. A few more days here after that for observation. Then recovery at home. Six to eight weeks, minimum. Physiotherapy. Limited mobility."
He says more things. I hear the wordsbéquilles— crutches — andaide à domicile— home care — andpas de poids sur la jambe gauche— no weight on the left leg. He says them to Ethan, but his eyes keep flicking to me, the way eyes do when they've decided someone in the room is going to be responsible for making sure the patient actually follows instructions.
Ethan nods through all of it. The professional nod — the one that saysI'm processingbut actually meansI'm going to ignore at least half of this.
When the doctor leaves, the room is quiet.
"So," Ethan says. He's looking at the ceiling. The crack is still there, the one he told me about in a morphine drift, the one hesaidwanders east for about a foot and then loses interest in itself.I don't know exactly when he said it. The morphine days blurred everything.
"Six weeks," he says.
"Minimum," I say, because I'm helpful, apparently.
He doesn't say the next part. I don't say the next part. The next part is: he lives alone. He lives up fourteen stairs in a Villeray walk-up — technically possible, the physiotherapist said, once he can prove the protocol; not remotely the same as manageable. He has two cats Marc has been feeding and a kitchen that needs someone who can bend at the waist and a bathroom that — based on what the physiotherapist said — is going to require modifications he can't make himself.
He doesn't ask me. He won't ask me.
I know this already — three days is enough to know that Ethan Morin will crawl across broken glass before he asks anyone for help, and then he'll apologize for getting blood on the glass. I've watched him try to reach a water cup on the far side of the table for forty-five seconds rather than press the nurse call button. I've seen him insist he can get to the bathroom himself, grip the bed rail until his hands shake, and then sit back down with his jaw set and his eyes on the ceiling and say,Actually, maybe in a minute.I saw his hand clench when the nurse came to draw blood — just once, just for a second, before he made himself relax it, and I filed that away too, in the growing folder of things I'm not supposed to know about him.
He won't ask me to come home with him. The question will never leave his mouth.
But it's in the room now. It's sitting between us like the fourth person in every conversation we've had this week — the unasked thing, the un-defined thing.
I close my laptop. Derek can wait.
"So," I say. "Your cats."
