Chapter 8: Silverlake

Seven days is not a long time.

It is, in fact, an extremely specific amount of time in which a person can:

- Transfer their entire physical therapy care to a clinic in a different neighbourhood

- Tell only one person (Sophie), the real reason

- Have seven entire Sophie phone calls about it

- Delete the text thread with -A and then restore it

- Restore the thread, screenshot it, save the screenshot in a folder labelled DO NOT OPEN AGAIN, and then open the folder eleven times

- Buy a really good candle at the Silverlake Farmers Market to "reset her energy"

- Apply SPF 50 every morning, religiously, to a scar that is already faded

- Miss him in a way that is genuinely starting to affect her grip strength

Seven days.

This is, I think, the maximum amount of time a person can go on pretending they have moved on with their life.

The Silverlake Clinic is nice.

I want to be very clear that the Silverlake Clinic is a nice place. It is on Sunset, between a coffee shop and a plant store, in one of those gently gentrified buildings with mid-century lighting and a small fountain in the lobby. The PT rooms have windows. The resistance bands come in colours. The front desk woman calls me "sweetie" and offers me a hot tea from a real kettle, which is something Cedars-Sinai has never once offered me in seven weeks of being a patient.

I have been coming here for a week. My new PT is a man named Joe. Joe is approximately forty, has a beard, and has never once looked at me in a way that made me need to call my sister. Joe is an excellent physical therapist. Joe is fine. Joe is a wall-sit enthusiast, which I have learned is a personality type.

"Four more seconds," Joe said, glancing at his stopwatch. "Breathe."

"Breathing is for people with functioning ribs."

"You have functioning ribs."

"Functioning is a strong word."

I was, at this exact moment, doing a wall-sit against the small PT room wall. My thighs were on fire. My ribs were complaining in a low, polite way that I have come to recognize as my body's version of a Yelp review. I was also, in the way of someone who has spent the last seven days doing normal things very loudly so she doesn't have to think about a particular man, trying to focus entirely on the wall.

The wall is beige. The wall has a picture of a mountain. The wall has, suddenly, a man standing in the doorway.

I stopped breathing.

He was in navy scrubs. The same ones. The same exact ones. Under a grey sweater, because the Silverlake Clinic, while nice, was not warm, and because L.A. in October has a kind of fake-cold morning air that makes you wear a sweater even when the sun is doing its level best. His hospital badge was clipped to his scrub pocket, the way Cedars does it, the little black strap and the laminated card, and his name in clear block letters. Aiden Black. Department of Surgery. Cedars-Sinai.

No white coat.

No wedding ring.

He was holding a clipboard.

He was standing in my PT room.

The clipboard had my name on it.

"Ms. Park." His voice was professional. Cold. The kind of cold that has been practised and adjusted and polished until it sounds exactly like a man who is absolutely, definitely, certainly not feeling anything at all. "I'm Dr. Black. I'll be handling your assessment today."

Joe, who was a perfectly nice man with a beard and a stopwatch and absolutely no context, looked between us and said brightly: "Oh, you two know each other?"

"Dr. Black did my initial surgery," I said. My voice cracked on the Black like I was twelve.

Aiden didn't look at me. He looked at the chart. "Cedars-Sinai. ED admission. May fourteenth. Multi-fragment rib fractures, internal bleeding, lung involvement, surgical repair." He was reading my chart out loud. He knew every word. He had probably written half of them. "Discharged May seventeenth. PT follow-up at Cedars-Sinai through October. Patient self-transferred to Silverlake Clinic, October nineteenth."

"Patient," I said, without meaning to.

"Excuse me?"

"Patient self-transferred. Is that what it says?"

"Yes."

"Cool. Cool. I prefer 'Emma.' But you know."

He looked up from the chart.

He looked at me for a long second. There was something in his eyes. Not soft. Not warm. Not anything I could put a name to. Just a single, almost imperceptible tightening around his mouth, like the words he wanted to say were physically too big to come out of his face.

"Knees," he said. "Please."

He pulled the rolling stool over. He set the clipboard on the counter. He knelt.

I am going to repeat that: he knelt.

On one knee. In front of me. Navy scrubs. Grey sweater. Hospital badge. The single most controlled man I have ever met in my life, on his knee, because my knee needed to be assessed.

"I'm going to flex your knee," he said. "Tell me where it hurts."

"Okay."

He put his left hand under my calf. His right hand pressed lightly at the joint. His fingers were warm. Warmer than they should have been. Warmer than hospital hands, warmer than surgeon hands, warmer than the kind of hands that hold a clipboard and check charts all day. Warm like coffee you didn't expect. Warm like a Tuesday. Warm like something he wasn't going to explain.

He pushed my calf back. Slowly. Carefully. With a gentleness that I had watched him use on a hundred other patients on a hundred other mornings and had never once believed was for me. Until right now.

"Pain?"

"Three."

"Where?"

"Everywhere. But mostly right there."

"Here?" His thumb pressed in slightly above the kneecap.

"Yep."

He didn't move.

I didn't move.

The room was so quiet I could hear the small fountain in the lobby. I could hear Joe pretending to file something on the other side of the room. I could hear my own heartbeat, which was the loudest sound in the entire building.

His thumb was still on my knee. His eyes were still on his hand. He was not breathing. He was very specifically, very carefully, very obviously not breathing.

Then there was the sound of a door opening.

A nurse. Young. Clipboard. Looking for a wheelchair, or a bandage, or someone, anything. She appeared in the doorway for exactly one second.

Aiden's hand was off my knee before the door finished opening. He was standing before the nurse said, "Sorry, wrong room." He was three feet away by the time she said."Oh, Dr. Black, I didn't know you were consulting here." He had his hands behind his back. His face was the most aggressively neutral I had ever seen in my entire life.

"Wrong room," he said, very quietly.

She left.

He did not look at me.

He did not kneel again.

He picked up the rolling stool. He sat on it. He put the clipboard on his lap. He crossed his legs. He uncrossed them. He crossed them again. He put both hands on the clipboard.

"You transferred your care," he said. He was looking at the chart. He was not looking at me. His voice was a flat, perfectly neutral doctor's voice, the kind that a thousand people probably heard from him every single week, the kind that he used so often he probably didn't even think about it anymore.

"Yes."

"Why."

"To be closer to home."

"You live in Koreatown."

"Silverlake is closer to my gym."

"You don't have a gym."

"Dr. Black"

"Joe." He glanced at Joe, who was pretending to refill a glove box. "May I have the room for the rest of the session?"

"Sure, man. I'll grab lunch." Joe left. Joe was, bless him, the most discreet man in Los Angeles.

The door closed. It was just us. Beige wall. Mountain picture. A rolling stool. A clipboard. A man on a stool. A woman on a wall.

"You transferred your care because of what you heard," Aiden said. Quiet. So quiet.

"I"

"Through the door. In the admin hallway. Two weeks ago. I know you were there. I saw you leave through the side exit. I don't know what you heard."

"Aiden"

"Dr. Black."

"Dr. Black. I transferred because"

"I can't." He put the clipboard down. "I can't. I know what you're going to say. I can't have this conversation."

"You don't know what I was going to say."

"I know."

"You don't."

"I know, Emma."

It was the first time he had said my name in two weeks. It landed like a hand on a hot stove. It landed like "I know" in a different tense.

He stood up. Picked up the clipboard. Walked to the door. Then stopped. Hand on the door frame. He didn't turn.

"Ten more reps," he said. "Wall-sit. I'll be watching."

"Aiden"

"Ms. Park." He turned. Looked at me. His face was closed door. His eyes were the only part of him still saying things. "Ten more reps."

He pulled a chair from the corner of the room. He set it next to the door, in full view of my wall-sit. He sat.

He did not look away.

To be continued...