I glance at him. He's looking straight ahead, at the doors.
"When a call goes bad — when it's a structure fire and the roof's compromised, or there's someone trapped and you've got ninety seconds — he's the one they put on the radio to talk to the crew inside. Because his voice doesn't change." J-S pauses. "Everyone's does. Mine does. You can hear it — the pitch goes up, the breathing gets tight. Control can hear it through the radio and they know. But Ethan—" He shakes his head. "Same voice. Same cadence. Like he's reading you directions to the dépanneur, the corner store. And when you're inside and the ceiling is making sounds it shouldn't be making, that voice is the reason you keep moving."
He says this how you'd say the weather is cold. Factual. Unremarkable to him.
Marc nods beside me. "Station voted him worst poker player though. Can't bluff for shit."
"Different skill set," J-S says, and there's the ghost of something that might be a smile.
I add these to the file. Not the one on my laptop — the other one, the invisible one, the one I've been building since the first night. The file that includes: the way he watched cat videos at 1 AM and pretended he was checking the time. The way he saidyou don't have toand meantI don't know how to need you. The religieuse from the bakery on Rue Saint-Denis — the one where the old woman opens when she feels like it and almost didn't sell it to him. And now this — a man whose voice doesn't change when the ceiling is falling, who can't bluff at cards, who texted Marc at 7 AM the morning after we met because he couldn't wait until a normal hour to ask if I was single.
These don't fit together. They make a shape I don't have a reference for — not symmetrical, not balanced, not any of the things I know how to arrange into something that looks right. But I keep the file open anyway.
At 10:17,a nurse comes through the doors.
"The surgery went well. Dr. Tremblay will come speak with you shortly, but everything is as expected. He's in recovery — you can see him in about twenty minutes."
Maman puts down her knitting. Her eyes are wet but her voice is steady when she says, "Dieu merci."
Marc squeezes my arm. J-S nods once, stands, says, "Bon, je vais dire aux gars," already on his way to tell the guys, and walks to the stairwell, pulling out his phone.
We wait the twenty minutes. Maman redoes her lipstick. I don't know why that detail stays with me, but it does — the particular care of a woman putting on lipstick before her son sees her, so he won't know she's been crying.
They let us in two at a time. Maman goes first. She comes back four minutes later with mascara streaked and her hands clasped and says, "Il a fait une blague. Il va bien." He made a joke. He's fine.
My turn.
The recovery roomis quieter than I expected. Curtained bays, machines, that particular hush that settles over rooms where people are surfacing from places they don't remember going. The nurse brings me to the third bay on the left.
He's there. Eyes closed. Paler than usual — the anaesthetic has taken the color out of him, left him looking younger, softer, like someone erased the lines he draws around himself every morning. The hospital gown is askew. There's tape on the back ofhis hand where the IV is, and his hair is flat on one side from the surgical cap, and he looks like a person who had something done to him that he couldn't control and is still finding his way back from wherever the drugs took him.
I sit down. The chair scrapes.
His eyes open. Not fully — halfway, the lids heavy, the focus swimming. He looks at me like he's checking something against a list he made before he went under.
"You're still here," he says.
Notyou don't have to stay. NotI'm fine. Just:you're still here. Like a fact he's verifying. Like he'd written it down somewhere and now he's reading it back.
"Where else would I be?" I say. I mean it to sound light. It doesn't.
He blinks. The anaesthetic is still pulling at him — I can see it in how his gaze drifts, then comes back, then drifts again, like he's on a tide and the tide keeps winning. His guard is somewhere the drugs put it. I don't know where. Wherever it is, he can't reach it from here.
"Les chats," he says. His voice is thick, the consonants soft at the edges.
"What?"
"Did someone — are they —"
"Marc's got them," I say. "Bagel bit him. Poutine refused to acknowledge his existence. Standard operating procedure."
"Sounds right," he murmurs. His eyes are closing again. The drugs are pulling him back.
But his hand — the one without the IV — moves on the blanket. Toward the edge. Toward where I'm sitting.
My heart does something stupid — my own hand shifting forward on the blanket before my brain has authorized the motion — an inch, maybe less, a reflex I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.
His fingers reach the edge of the blanket. Close to mine. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off his skin — that same warmth from the wrist, from the pillow, from every accidental contact I've been filing away. And then they stop. Hovering. Like they ran out of whatever courage the anaesthetic had loaned them.
