Bagel follows us to the door and sits in the hallway, tail curled around his paws, looking up as if this is a betrayal he will remember.
"We'll be back," I tell him.
Ethan doesn't say anything. He's already working on the first of fourteen stairs.
The orthopedic clinicwaiting room is the color of watered-down coffee.
It's on the third floor of the hospital — the same hospital where he had surgery, the same hallways, different wing. Beige walls. Grey chairs. A television mounted near the ceiling playing a morning talk show with subtitles half a second behind the audio. A man in a neck brace reading a magazine that's at least two years old. The air smells like hand sanitizer and radiator heat and the particular fatigue of people who have been waiting for their name to be called since before they sat down.
We sit side by side. My coat is folded in my lap. His crutches are propped against the arm of his chair, angled so they won't slip — I positioned them, and he let me, which felt like progress until I realized it probably wasn't.
I open my laptop.
The Bellini proposal stares back at me — thirty-two slides, half finished, the color palette section still empty because I keep going back and forth between sage green and eucalyptus and I know the difference matters but right now it looks like two identical squares and I can't make myself care. I'm supposed to present this on Friday. Today is Tuesday. Math I used to do effortlessly —three days, eight slides per day, two hours per slide— and now the numbers sit on the screen like furniture in a room I can't enter.
I type a sentence. I delete it. I type another one.
Ethan is looking at his phone. Two cats on the lock screen. He scrolls through something — news, maybe, or nothing — with the practiced detachment of a person filling time because silence is fine but empty hands are not.
"Monsieur Morin? Ethan Morin?"
We both look up. A nurse in scrubs — blue, the real hospital kind, not the TV kind — reads the full name off her clipboard and smiles in a way that is professionally kind and personally nowhere.
Ethan stands. The process takes seven seconds. I know because I count them now, how you count stairs or pills or the seconds between lightning and thunder, not because it helps but because it's a thing to do while you're not helping.
I close my laptop. I follow him.
Dr. Lavoie isa small woman with reading glasses on a chain and the kind of calm that comes from having delivered ten thousand pieces of news, good and bad, to people sitting on paper-covered tables.
She pulls up the X-rays on a monitor — the ones from yesterday's imaging, already loaded into the system. I stand near the door — close enough to hear, far enough to not be underfoot. There's a specific distance I've learned for these moments. Close enough that he knows I'm here. Far enough that I'm not part of the medical conversation.
"Okay." Dr. Lavoie adjusts her glasses. She clicks through two images. "This is looking very good."
I watch Ethan's face.
"The fixation is solid. No displacement. The callus formation is right on track — actually a bit ahead of where I'd expect at four weeks." She points at something on the screen that I can't interpret. "You're healing well, Ethan. The bone is doing exactly what we want it to do."
He nods. "Good." His voice is flat. Not unhappy. Flat. Like someone receiving confirmation of something he already factored in.
"We'll keep you non-weight-bearing for another two weeks, then start partial. Physio will ramp up. But based on this — I'm optimistic. You should be back to modified duty around the eight-to-ten-week mark."
Eight to ten weeks. I do the math without meaning to: late March. Maybe early April. Crocuses. Snow melting. The particular quality of Montreal spring light that makes everything look like it just woke up.
He'll be back at the station by then. Walking without crutches. Making his own coffee. Changing his own bandages.
He won't need someone to pack his insurance card.
"That's great," I say. My voice is bright. Correct. The voice of a supportive person hearing good news about a person they're supporting. "That's really great."
Dr. Lavoie smiles at me. The kind of smile that includes me in the good news without knowing what my name is or why I'm here.
Ethan says, "Thanks."
He doesn't look at me when he says it. He's looking at the X-ray — his own bones on a screen, healing without permission, doing exactly what they're supposed to do without anyone's help.
The ride homeis ten minutes of a cab's heater blowing too hard and neither of us talking about the right thing.
I'm happy. I should be happy. He's healing. This is literally the best possible outcome. The bones are ahead of schedule. The surgeon is optimistic. He's going to be fine.
