“Umar won’t mind,” Dell said breezily. “I’ll run and get him some more in a bit.”
“But he’s left a note stating that he very definitely does mind,” I said.
Dell started laughing. “Listen, Mrs. Rulebook. That man of yours. You can lose him forever worrying about rules that don’t even apply to this situation, or you can just send him a text and see what happens. What’s it going to be?”
I looked at Dell, at her little pixieish face, those trendy thick glasses she always wore, the short red hair that always made her look more like a thespian than a trainee surgeon. I looked at my friend and willed myself to be More Dell, or More Maya—to take a risk and just follow my heart. But how? I was nothing like either of these women. I would never do something that could compromise my job.
“Take the risk,” she urged. “I don’t know how many chances we get in life, but Carrie, there won’t be many.”
—
He appeared again the next day.
I’d been on ward rounds but had taken fifteen minutes outside to get some fresh air before heading back into the stale oven of the post-op ward.
And there he was. Sitting on a concrete plinth to the side of themain hospital building because there weren’t any benches, drinking a coffee in the lemon light of a winter morning. He had a book in his hands, something in a foreign language. He was wearing an orange beanie hat and a thick lumberjack coat. He was divine.
“Doctor Carrie,” he said easily, as if he’d bumped into an old friend, and I found myself smiling in a way I never did at work. When I stopped smiling I just looked at him, uncertain as to what to do or say.
“Swedish fairy tales,” he said, holding up the book. The sun caught the cover for a second, dazzling me. Behind him, steam rose from a grille in the wall. “My mother used to read them when I was ill. I kept thinking about Deniz and wondering if anyone was visiting her.”
He was Swedish, then. Johan. It should probably have been obvious.
He looked right at me with those eyes. A neonatal ambulance swung in behind him, a sight that normally filled me with apprehension, but—shamefully—I barely noticed.
“Turns out she hasn’t had any visitors at all. She had one of the nurses phone me yesterday.”
“So nice that she had your number. And now she’s got a visitor. You’re very kind!” I cursed myself for sounding so formal, so bloodydoctorish. But he didn’t seem to notice. He merely moved over on the plinth so I could sit next to him, which I did. It felt too good to be true that he was here again, that I hadn’t had to break any rules to see him.
“I’m sure you guys are doing a great job doctoring Deniz,” he said. “But it’s the other things. Human things, Doctor Carrie. Holding hands, cold flannels for fevers, stories.”
“Your English is impeccable,” I said vaguely. Nobody had ever used my name in that way but I liked it. It felt lustrous and intimate. “Did you grow up bilingual?”
“I did. My dad’s Swedish but he grew up in Canada.” Perhapssensing that I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, he handed me the book. It was beautiful, a fairy tale in itself.
“Nere vidälven,” I read. “…Never Been Alive?”
“I mean, no.”
“Nearly Bit Alvin?”
“Still no.”
“Night of—”
“Stop! It means ‘Down by the River.’You must never pursue a career as an author.”
“At school I wrote a story about a girl who opened up her own head so she could read her brain in a mirror.”
“Good God,” Johan said. “What did her brain say?”
“It said, you have a tumor in your bowel, you need to go and see the doctor.”
“Seriously?”
I was laughing now. “I’m afraid so.”
“And you were what age?”
