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At the next red, I write: I don’t cook.

There’s no reply for almost thirty seconds.

Then: That’s not a flaw. That’s a survivable inconvenience.

Me: I set off a smoke alarm making toast.

Maggie: Okay, that is a flaw.

Me: Yes.

Maggie: How does a doctor lose to bread?

I almost laugh.

Not fully. It comes out as breath.

Me: Different skill set.

Maggie: I’m writing that down for every future failure.

Maggie: “Maggie, why did you miss the median nerve?”

Maggie: “Different skill set.”

I send the next branch before she can run too far with it.

Me: Axillary. C5-C6. Deltoid, teres minor. Sensation over regimental badge area. Injury with surgical neck fracture or anterior shoulder dislocation.

Maggie: Tiny uniform shoulder patch nerve. Got it.

Me: Don’t write that.

Maggie: I will absolutely write that in the margin.

The drive takes twenty minutes. By the time I pull into my building’s garage, she has radial and median halfway under control, mostly because she has renamed Saturday night palsy “the judgmental wrist incident” and carpal tunnel “median nerve getting trapped in a workplace drama.”

I park. For a moment, I sit there with the engine off and the phone in my hand.

Maggie: Okay wait. Radial is extensors, wrist drop, posterior arm and forearm, dorsum of hand.

Maggie: Median is thenar, lateral two lumbricals, most forearm flexors, lateral three and a half digits.

Maggie: Ulnar is most intrinsic hand muscles, medial one and a half digits, claw hand.

Maggie: Did I just learn something or am I having a hormone-induced hallucination?

For a moment, my eye catches on the last text. Is she on her period? Is that what she means?

Me: Repeat it in ten minutes.

Maggie: Yes, sir.

I still.

It’s nothing. Two words, careless, probably meant as a joke because she thinks I’m bossy and enjoys poking at it. There’s no voice attached to it. No body. No mouth. Just letters on a screen.

My body doesn’t care. Heat moves low and immediate, not enough to be full arousal, enough to make me aware of myself in a way I have no business being aware in a parking garage after midnight.