I think about the fridge labels.
And I think about the fact that my body still has the temperature of her thumb on the skin above my hip, and I can feel it right now, the exact spot, like a contact burn that won't cool.
I don't want to feel this.
The last time I felt this — the last time I let myself need someone enough that her hands left temperature on my skin — it lasted three months after I said the words. Three months betweenI need youandI think we should talk.And then it was gone, and the place where it had been was worse than if it had never been there at all.
Nora is not her. I know this. The way she folds gauze and organizes refrigerators and cries on kitchen floors is not a pattern that belongs to anyone else.
My body doesn't care what I know.
Bagel shifts on my lap. He stretches, claws flexing against my thigh, then resettles into a tighter circle. His purr changes pitch — lower, slower. He is fully committed to staying exactly where he is.
I can't do this.
Not the bandage changes or the coffee or the fridge labels or the sound of her typing six meters away or how her voice sounds when she says my name — not like anything special, just my name, except no one says it the way she does because no one is her.
I can't keep letting this happen. Every day she's here, her leaving gets worse. And she is going to leave — I am a man who just told the person changing his bandages that he doesn't need help.
So I can't.
Bagel purrs.
Outside, the snow is falling again — the particular density of February snow in Montreal, the kind that falls straight down because there's no wind, just gravity and cold and the patience of a city that has done this ten thousand times before.
I reach for my phone. I look at the lock screen — two cats, one black, one orange, the only photograph I trust to stay exactly where I put it.
I put the phone down.
The spot on my hip where her thumb was is still warm.
I decide it has to be gone by morning.
12
THE GOOD NEWS
He's different today.
Not in any way I could point to — not a word, not a gesture, not anything I could bring to Sophie and saylook, here, this is the evidence.He said good morning. He took his pills. He let me hand him his coffee without sayingI can do itthe way he's been saying it, which should feel like progress except it doesn't. It feels like he stopped fighting a battle he already won.
We're going to his follow-up. Four weeks post-surgery, the first real check-in with his orthopedic surgeon at the hospital — the one who'll look at the X-rays and tell us whether the fixation is holding, whether weight-bearing can start, whether the timeline is weeks or months. He had the imaging done yesterday at a radiology clinic near the métro — I drove him in Sophie's car, waited forty minutes in a room that smelled like plastic, drove him back. The films should be with his surgeon by now. I've had today's appointment in my phone since the hospital gave us the date. I set two alarms. I ironed the shirt I'm going to wear under my coat, which is insane, because no one dresses up for a medical appointment, but I did it anyway because —
Because I don't know what else to do with my hands.
He's on the couch, getting ready.Getting readyfor Ethan means the familiar twelve-step process of standing up: shift to the edge, brace both crutches, plant, push, pause for the pain to organize itself into something he can walk through. I've watched this enough times to know the sequence. I've also learned not to help unless he asks, which he doesn't.
He stands. He adjusts the crutches under his arms. He looks toward the door.
"Ready?" I say.
"Yep."
That's it.Readyandyep. Two words with the combined emotional content of a parking meter.
I grab the bag I packed — his insurance card, the discharge papers, a water bottle, two granola bars because the hospital cafeteria charges eight dollars for a sandwich that tastes like it gave up on itself. My laptop is in there too. The Bellini proposal — Léa Bellini, interior designer, wants a full brand identity by end of month — and Derek's revision 8 of the bistro menu suite, which arrived at 11 PM last night with the subject lineSorry again!!and which I would have politely declined weeks ago if the invoice wasn't the only reason my rent check cleared. Freelance work doesn't pause for — whatever this is. Whatever I'm doing here, in a man's apartment, packing his insurance card like it's my job.
Poutine watches us from the windowsill. She doesn't get up. She doesn't meow. She catalogues our departure with the expression of a creature who has extensive records on everyone's failures and is simply adding to the file.
