I open my laptop. Close it. Open it again.
This is notthe same waiting room.
The ER was downstairs — ground floor, different wing, different life. This is the surgical floor, third level, and the chairs are a different shade of beige and the wall has a painting of a sailboat that someone chose specifically because it's too neutral to provoke any feeling, which is its own kind of violence.
But it feels the same. That particular quality of hospital waiting — the kind that stretches time until it's thin enough to see through to all the worst possibilities on the other side. I sat in chairs like these the night of the accident, when I didn't know his middle name and I told a nurse I was his girlfriend. That was a week and a half ago. It feels like a different person.
I try to work. Derek has sent revision five. He wants the font changed again — he sent a screenshot from some website and wrotesomething like this? clean and modern but also classic, you know what I mean?I do not know what he means. The screenshot is a real estate ad in Georgia. I type three sentences of a professionally patient reply. Delete two. Save the draft. Close the laptop.
I can't do this. My brain keeps drifting back to the doors at the end of the hall — the beige double doors that don't have windows, behind which a surgeon is currently putting metal inside a person I've kissed twice, and I don't know how to hold both of those facts in the same thought.
Maman's needles click. Steady. Patient. Click, click, click. The scarf grows by half an inch.
Marc arrives at8:15 with two coffees and the expression of a man who got up early on his day off and is determined to be useful.
"Hey," he says, handing me one. Tim Hortons. Double-double. He nods at Maman — "Bonjour, Madame Morin" —and she lights up as she does with anyone who shows up when it matters, and within thirty seconds she's pressing cold crêpes on him and he's eating one standing up, crumbs on his jacket, looking genuinely delighted.
Marc sits down next to me. He's the reason Ethan and I met — the vernissage on Saint-Laurent where he introduced us over plastic cups of wine and a fifteen-minute conversation that was supposed to be forgettable. Two weeks later, I landed a community safety branding project and needed someone who could walk me through fire safety procedures — and I remembered the firefighter from Marc's show. I texted Marc. He sent me Ethan's number with a winky emoji I ignored.
I called it a work meeting. I changed my outfit three times.
Marc holds his coffee with both hands and looks at the doors.
"He's going to be fine," he says. Not like he knows. Like he's decided.
"Yeah."
We sit for a while. Marc drinks his coffee. I hold mine. Maman knits. The sailboat painting watches us with the serene indifference of art that was chosen by committee.
Then Marc says something I wasn't expecting.
"You know he texted me about you."
I look at him.
"After the vernissage. The next morning — and you have to understand, Ethan doesn't text before noon about anything that isn't an emergency or hockey. But he messaged me at seven-something and asked if you were — and I'm quoting — 'seeing someone, or just like that generally.'" Marc does a very bad impression of someone trying to be casual. "'Just like that generally.' Those were his words."
He says this with the very specific delight of a man who has been waiting to tell this story for weeks.
"I told him I didn't know. He asked me two more times in different ways over the next few days. Then you texted me asking for his number, and I almost threw my phone across the room."
I stare at my coffee. It's too hot to drink, which is fine, because my throat has done something that would make drinking difficult anyway.
I'd thought I was the one who reached out. I'd thought the work question was my initiative — professional, practical, a reason to see someone I'd been thinking about since a vernissage and a pair of laugh lines. I'd thought I was the one taking the step.
But he'd been asking about me for days before I ever texted Marc. He was already there.
Marc's phone buzzes. He glances at it. "J-S is on his way up. Just got off shift."
Jean-Sébastien arrives ten minutes later,still smelling faintly of smoke — not bonfire smoke, something sharper, more chemical. He's tall, quiet, the kind of person who takes up physical space but not conversational space. He's wearing his station jacket, the SPIM logo on the chest, and he crosses the waiting area to Maman first — "Bonjour, Madame. Jean-Sébastien. Je travaille avec Ethan." A formal hello, his name, and the explanation that he works with Ethan.
Maman grabs his hand with both of hers. Her knitting slides off her lap. "Merci d'être venu." The words are formal — thank you for coming — but her grip isn't.
J-S sits down on my other side. He doesn't fill silences the way Marc does. He just sits in them, steady and unhurried — not decorative, just present, the way a column holds up a ceiling without anyone thinking about it.
After a while, without any buildup, without turning to face me, Jean-Sébastien says:
"He's the one we put on the radio."
