Marcus Delacroix-Webb

You are standing at the foot of a bed that isn't yours, in an apartment you rented three hours ago under a name that isn't yours either, and the boredom is already unbearable. Ethan Callahan's hazel eyes, Ethan Callahan's hand still holding Ethan Callahan's phone, the screen bright with a half-finished message to a coworker about a sprint deadline that will never matter to you. Thirty years old. Athletic. Blond stubble catching the streetlight through cheap blinds. You made him stand here doing nothing for two minutes because you wanted to feel what young and rich in a different way felt like, and it turns out it feels like waiting for a bus. There's a version of you that would call this restlessness a flaw. You call it Tuesday. You open the laptop, find the site already bookmarked from muscle memory that isn't his, and you spin.

The dark folds itself into a different dark. There's a phone six inches from a face that has a beard on it now, a real one, salt at the chin, and the thumb — not your thumb, not yet, but it will be — is stopped mid-scroll on a picture of somebody's dog. Then it isn't stopped. It moves faster than he was moving it, flicking through six posts in a second, seven, and the blue light sits on a cheek that has stopped doing the small thing a face does when a person is behind it, blinking on its own schedule, waiting on nothing.

The shirt is what opens first — not a shirt, a T-shirt, worn thin at the collar, and under it a back that aches in a specific, familiar way, low and to the left, the way backs ache after standing at a table for six hours holding your arms just so. Marcus Delacroix-Webb. The name comes with the ache, comes with thirty years of standing, comes with a Tuesday morning that was actually the tail end of a Monday night shift, comes with a room three floors below street level where a nurse named Priya called him Dr. Webb in a voice that meant something had gone right.

The ring finger tells its own story before you even look for it — a paleness where gold used to sit, and under that paleness, seven years of a marriage that started in a courthouse in Reno because neither of them wanted the wedding their mothers wanted, and ended in a kitchen in Summerlin over something so small neither of them can name it anymore, not even him, not even in memory. Renata. She kept the dog. He kept the house and hated the house and stayed in it anyway because moving felt like admitting the marriage had been the temporary thing instead of this.

The goatee under your fingers — his fingers — when they drift up to scratch at it unbidden: fifteen years of the same shape, trimmed the same way every ten days by the same man at a shop off Sahara who talks too much about boxing. The back piece under the shirt, hidden now, but you feel its edges at the shoulders the way he feels them, a compass rose and a ship half-sunk in color that's faded the way all old color fades, done when he was twenty-three and broke and about to start medical school and wanted, just once, to put something permanent on a body he was about to spend a decade disciplining into someone else's instrument.

The sweatpants against your legs, the T-shirt against your back, the mattress under you too soft, hotel-soft, because — and this comes last, this comes heaviest — he is not home. He is in a suite eleven floors above a casino floor because the hospital put him up here for a conference that starts today, and the last thing he did before bed was lie exactly like this, on his side, scrolling nothing, because sleep stopped coming easy somewhere around year one of the divorce and never fully came back. Four in the morning and his body doesn't know if it's supposed to be asleep or awake anymore. Nights, days, they blur when you cut people open for a living and go home to no one afterward.

His hands know things yours don't: how to hold a retractor without thinking about it, how to ask for a 4-0 suture without looking up, how to drum four fingers against a steel table rail during the ten longest minutes of any case, waiting on a number to come back from a lab. They know Priya's coffee order. They don't know, anymore, what Renata's hair smelled like, and some nights that's the thing that keeps him up, not missing her exactly, just missing the knowing.

You stop scrolling. You turn the hand over in the blue light, his hand, wide-knuckled, a doctor's hand with a ring-shaped ghost on it, and for a second you just look at the shape of somebody else's whole life sitting there empty as a glove.

"Big day," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if you mean the conference he's about to skip or the forty-five more years you might or might not keep.