Page 47

“I know the order.”

He does.

Priya has Thursday mornings free.

I could move him. One sentence to Maren, two minutes of paperwork, and he is not my patient by the end of the week. There is a form for exactly this and I have filled it in twice in my career, both times for considerably less than what happened in that room this morning.

The form is in the second drawer.

I do not open the drawer.

I tell myself it is continuity of care. That is true. It is not the reason, and I am a woman who knows the difference between a true statement and an honest one, and I write the note.

After school, Tova is behind Gabi’s chair with both hands in her hair.

“No, you separated the wrong piece.”

“I’ve only got three pieces,” Gabi says. “There’s a limit to how many ways I can fail.”

“You made four.”

“That feels like useful feedback.”

Tova laughs.

A phone on the desk shows a photograph of a braid I have never seen.

For one ugly second I want Gabi to remember that she is at work.

The second does not pass. It becomes several. I stand at my own reception desk resenting a woman because my daughter is laughing at something I did not say, with her hands in somebody else’s hair.

Then Tova laughs again, bright and entirely unguarded, and I make myself look at that instead.

“I need the black elastic.”

Gabi reaches blindly across the desk.

My hand is closer. I pick up the black one and hold it out.

Tova takes it without letting go of Gabi’s hair. “Thanks.”

The white elastic stays beside my hand.

I want to ask when she found the photograph, and when she showed it to Gabi, and whether this is the first afternoon they have done this without me. The questions arrange themselves faster than I can decide whether I want the answers.

I leave them alone.

Later, while Tova works through mathematics, Gabi comes beside me at the counter.

“You didn’t ask.”

“No.”

She waits.

I hate that she is good at that.

“She used to bring these things to me.”