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“Waiting on radiology.”

“Good.” He looks at Garza. “How’re you doing, sir?”

“I’ve got a fucking metal stick through my arm and this guy’s asking me about my foreman,” Garza says.

“That means he likes you,” Jax says. “When Luke stops talking is when you should worry.” He leans against the wall, finishing the protein bar. He has eaten in worse places than this. Combat zones. Helicopter bays. Once, according to legend, during a live emergency appendectomy. “Bay Four needs a consult when you’re clear – cyclist versus pothole. He’s stable. Keeps asking if we can save his bike.” He balls up the wrapper, banks it off the sharps container into the trash. “Also, your mother sent me down here with this.”

He holds up a Tupperware container.

“She said, and I quote, ‘Tell Lucas to eat before he falls down. He skipped breakfast. A mother always knows.’”

I take the Tupperware. I don’t ask how she knows I skipped breakfast from a different floor of the building. She just does. She is, in this and many other respects, functionally omniscient.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. She cornered me outside the men’s room. I had nowhere to go.” He crosses his arms. “Hey. Question. Did Preston send you a seventeen-paragraph text this morning about a tie he’s considering buying, or was that just me?”

“You sure that wasn’t Max?”

“No, Max sent me a spreadsheet comparing thread counts for a new sheet set. Preston sent the seventeen paragraphs, and I know he did, because he cc’d Max and Max forwarded it to me with one line: ‘Isn’t this normal?’”

“I’m sure it’s a nice tie.”

“It’s a tie, Luke. It’s fabric. It goes around your neck. There shouldn’t be seventeen paragraphs about anything that goes around your neck.”

“You married into this family same as me.”

“I married a man who colour-codes his sock drawer and thinks small talk is a diagnostic failure. You married a man who has a filing system for his skincare regimen. We are not suffering equally.” He grabs a fresh chart. “I watched Max buy a humidifier last week. Forty-five minutes. He needed the optimal humidity to three decimal places.”

“Preston reorganised our spice rack by region of origin last month.”

“There it is. The York gene. The compulsive need to impose structure on things that don’t require structure.” Jax points the chart at me. “We should start a support group. Brothers-in-law of Yorks. Meet weekly. Drink beer. Stare into the middle distance and never speak.”

“I’d come.”

“I know you would.” He claps me on the shoulder, heading for the door. “Good work on the triage today, Silva. Floor’s running clean.”

That’s Jax. The compliment comes sideways, on his way out the door. He doesn’t linger on it. Neither do I. But the warmth of it sits in my chest the way the Tupperware sits on the counter – present, unlabelled, harder to ignore than it should be.

The films come back clean – rebar’s clear of the artery, no fragmentation. I call ortho, talk Garza through the next two hours, and chart. This is the job. A man who hasn’t eaten since 05:00 asking me through gritted teeth if workers’ comp covers the ambulance ride. My mother’s Tupperware on the counter, warm, because she’s decided I can’t be trusted to feed myself. The ER is a system, and I understand systems. Keep the system moving and nobody falls through.

The problem is that the rest of my life is not a system.

The rest of my life is a fourth-floor walk-up with a noisy radiator and a husband whose wardrobe costs more than my medical school tuition and a conversation we keep almost having.

The baby conversation. My mother’s campaign. Preston’s text – your mother cornered me at the nurses’ station – and the exchange that followed, which went the way it always goes. We circled it. We made jokes. We said we should probably talk about that. Then we got home, and the talking turned to bickering, and the bickering turned to the thing bickering always turns to with us, and then we were in bed and the conversation was somewhere underneath us. After, he curled against me, and the words were right there. Saying them would have made the night about something other than this.

So it goes unsaid. Again. And my mother drops off more Tupperware, and the knitting needles click somewhere in Queens.

My phone buzzes. Preston.

Forgot to tell you with everything else last night – Dad called yesterday. Saturday. 10:00. He says wear comfortable shoes and there will be champagne. I think Miguel told him about a bathtub. I have concerns.

I look at the text. I look at the rebar films on the lightbox.

The rebar’s simpler.

Saturday. 10:00. A black town car the size of a small apartment idles at the curb, and I’m already suspicious.