“Matilda had a way of seeing what people needed before they could ask, and giving it to them without fanfare. You’ve spent your whole career trying to become that kind of person. And then you found a man built from the same cloth.” Her gaze holds mine, steady and kind. “It’s no small thing, finding someone who speaks the same language as your soul. Don’t mistake distance for escape, Lance. Some connections don’t loosen just because you step away from them.”
I steady my breathing.
“I’m not telling you what to do,” she continues. “I’ve learned the hard way that certainty doesn’t make you right. I’m only saying that people tend to spend their lives becoming something, and what they become usually points them toward being real to themselves. Matilda understood that better than most. She built her life around it.”
She returns her attention to me. “We decide whether we’re willing to listen to what’s already true inside us. Love’s no different. Sometimes you know what something is long before you have words for it.”
I hear her, and it’s making me shift uncomfortably in my seat by how true this is.
“I’ve had a full life, but I’ve wasted time being wrong about a lot of things. I hope you’re not doing the same with someone who matters to you.”
This year, I pull a New Year’s Eve shift in the urgent care clinic, which works for me. Anything to keep my mind busy instead of drifting back to the past New Years full of trouble, laughter, and the kind of ridiculous shit only my friends and I could cook up.
Some years we’d all stay out until the bars kicked us out, then somehow end up on someone’s roof watching fireworks over the bay while trying not to puke from too many cheap beers. One year, Trevor convinced us to race shopping carts down the empty streets outside his building, and I swear George almost broke his wrist trying to take a corner too sharp. Vince, drunk and completely out of character, cheered like a lunatic from the sidelines, laughing so hard he nearly fell over a fire hydrant.
Other years we’d split, heading home to our families or apartments, but George and I would find a reason to keep thenight going. We’d sneak into a 24-hour diner for pancakes at two in the morning, argue over which toppings to put, and end up tossing half of them because we were too stuffed to eat.
At the moment, the department moves along as it always does on December thirty-first, a constant blur of drunk people, firework burns, and occasional random emergency. It’s the level of busy that takes all of me, which is exactly what I need tonight.
Valerie, one of the techs, has been doing coffee runs all evening. She comes up beside me and hands me a cup.
“Happy New Year,” she says, still smiling despite being on her feet for more than eight hours now. “Careful, it’s hot.”
“Happy New Year,” I tell her. “Thank you, Val.”
I glance up at the wall clock. The hands have crept to midnight. The department feels suspended around me as I take a sip of my coffee.
A ragged chorus of “Happy New Year” rises across the clinic. A doctor raises his coffee in a salute. One of the orderlies blows a paper horn he must have been carrying all shift. A patient in Bay 3, cheerfully drunk since he arrived at ten, shouts something enthusiastic from behind the curtain.
I turn back to my coffee and drink it slower this time, because there’s no way I just tasted what I think I tasted.
The espresso is pulled long. The oat milk sits exactly right. The cardamom is there in the specific ratio I spent two years adjusting, the quarter teaspoon that every barista in San Diego made me repeat twice before writing it down.
I’ve been drinking whatever coffee I can get for weeks because no place seems able to make it exactly how I like it.
This is not Whatever Coffee.
I turn the cup around. My name is on it in handwriting. I glance around the department, the waiting area, the corridor beyond the glass doors. The clinic is full and loud. It’s probably just the same order for everyone, which is less likely but the only reason thatmakes sense. I stand there for ten seconds doing nothing, which in a busy place feels like a luxury I don’t have.
I finish the coffee and get back to work, because people still need things from me, and the world keeps moving anyway.
I don’t think about it. Or I think about it all the damn time. Same difference.
44
Lance
I’m checking midday meds, ticking boxes with one hand while balancing charts against my hip. It’s Tuesday morning, five days into January, and the unit has finally dropped back into its normal rhythm now that the holidays are over and everyone’s collective emotional damage has been packed away with the decorations. Everybody’s back to pretending they’ve got their shit together, like me.
I’m thinking about heading down to the cafeteria for coffee when Valerie appears beside me holding out a cup.
“For you,” she says brightly.
“Oh. Thanks.” I take it automatically, already half-reading a chart before I glance down properly.
My name is written on the side. Same handwriting.
My stomach immediately does something deeply disturbing.
