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There’s a laminated card on the side table titled YOUR VISIT, with numbered steps. Step four is “take your time.” Step five is “please use the intercom if you require assistance.” I have several questions about the history of step five, and when it could possibly be acceptable to use it.

I complete my civic duty briskly, hand off the cup through a discreet hatch to a nurse whose eye contact is a masterclass in neutrality, and return to the waiting room composed, collected, and haunted in a way I expect to surface in therapy around 2031.

Elena doesn’t look up from her magazine. “How was it?”

“We don’t speak of it.”

“That good, hey?”

Luke goes in at 10:50.

At 11:10, I check my watch. At 11:20, I check it again, in case it lied the first time. Elena turns a page. Somewhere behind the walls, a waterfall is charging someone by the minute.

At 11:25 I knock on the door, gently. “Everything okay in there?”

Silence. A long one. Then Luke’s voice, flat and tight as a chart note: “It’s not happening.”

I look down the hallway. The nurse at the station looks back with studied blankness. She has seen every version of this morning, and she has opinions about all of them. I smile the York smile, open the door, and slip inside.

Luke is sitting on the edge of the wipeable chair, fully clothed, arms crossed, glaring at the specimen cup on the side table like it’s an intern who has failed him personally. The overhead fluorescent light is flickering.

“Hey,” I say.

“Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re going to.” He rubs his face with both hands. “There’s a schedule taped to the door, Preston. There’s a nurse eleven feet away doing intake paperwork. The walls are drywall over steel stud, half-inch, maybe five-eighths. I can hear her stapling documents.” He drops his hands and looks at the cup with genuine hatred. “I’ve set a chest tube during an earthquake drill, but I can’t do this.”

And here’s the thing about Luke. He can run a trauma bay with rebar and screaming in it, because the trauma bay is his. This room isn’t his. This room has a laminated card and a hatch and a stapler audibly working eleven feet away, and every one of those facts has filed into his head and stood at attention.

So I do the only thing I’ve ever done that reliably works.

I lock the door. I turn off the light, which leaves the lamp – a forty-watt bulb doing its best. I sit down next to him on a chair built for one and I take his hand, and I don’t make a joke, which gets his attention faster than any joke ever has.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

“It’s just us.”

“There’s a stapler–”

“There’s no stapler. There’s no schedule. There’s no hatch.” I bring his hand up and kiss the knuckles, one at a time. “There’s a very ugly lamp, and me.”

Luke looks at me in the forty watts. Something in his shoulders relaxes minutely.

“The things I do for us,” he mutters, and reaches for me.

I kiss him first, slow, and his hand comes up to the back of my neck the way it has a thousand times.

Then I slide off it, down onto my knees, on linoleum mopped this morning by someone who deserves hazard pay and will never know why.

“Preston–”

“Yes or no, Luke.”

He looks down at me. “Yes. God, yes.”