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Ramanputhra is in the corridor, reading Derek’s chart on her tablet. Chief of Psychiatry, Welling’s replacement after retirement – sari under her white coat on Fridays, the bedside manner of a lawyer who happens to find the defendant amusing. If she ever greeted me with eye contact and warmth, I’d assume I was being involuntarily committed.

“He de-escalated,” she says. Not a question.

“He did.”

“Without sedation. You sat on the floor.”

“I did.”

She looks up.

“You have a rapport with the acute patients that I don’t see in residents at your level. It’s not something I taught you, nor my predecessor. It’s a gift. Don’t waste it.”

She walks away, heels metronomic on the linoleum, already typing. With Ramanputhra, efficiency is not a habit; it’s a moral position.

I stand in the corridor and let the words sit.

Up here, I am not the Spare. I am not Maxwell’s understudy, not the brother who holds the coats while the genius operates. I am the one who sits on cold floors and talks to locked doors, and sometimes – not always, but sometimes – the door opens. Because I spent twenty-five years learning to read the room at York family dinners, where the stakes were whether Mother’s silence meant mild disapproval or the early stages of a diplomatic incident, and it turns out fluency in subtext is a clinical skill.

Who knew.

(I knew. But saying it out loud sounds like arrogance, and in the York family, confidence in the second son reads as overreach.)

The ER nurses’ station is not my jurisdiction, but the Tupperware is.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Mama Ortiz leaves a container in the break room fridge with my name on masking tape. The contents rotate – arroz con pollo, tostones, the rice pudding that tastes like maternal love distilled into a custard and then weaponised for maximum emotional compliance. I never asked for this arrangement. Questioning Rosa Ortiz’s Tupperware schedule is like questioning the tides. Technically possible. Practically fatal.

I’m at the fridge, collecting Thursday’s container, when I hear it: the rhythmic, deliberate click of a ballpoint pen against a laminate desk. Thirty years of practice refined into psychological artillery.

I close the fridge. I turn around.

Rosa Ortiz is at the nurses’ station. Five foot two. Scrubs pressed to a crispness that implies ironing with the same intensity she applies to triage. Today’s scrub cap is the chilli peppers – the one that says I am here and you will deal with that. She is charting. She is not looking at me.

Click. Click. Click.

“Mama Ortiz.” I say it the way you’d greet something that might detonate.

“Mijo.” She doesn’t look up. “You’re on the wrong floor.”

“I’m collecting my Tupperware.”

“It’s in the fridge.”

“I have the Tupperware.”

“Then why are you still here?”

This is a trap. I’ve walked into it three times in the last month.

“Just leaving,” I say, tucking the container under my arm. “Lovely seeing you, always a–”

“Sit down, Preston.”

I sit. She finishes the line she’s writing. Then she places the pen flat on the desk – deliberate, final – and I realise the clicking was never absent-minded. It was a countdown.

“How old are you, Preston?”

“Twenty-six.”