I walk again because if I stand here any longer I might go running the other way to get in my car and drive like a maniac to the Slope.
The building looms ahead like an oasis to save me from my thoughts. I walk in.
Inside the lab, steel shines under bright light. Blake claps once.
“I hope you all took some time for yourselves on your day off yesterday,” he says. “Let’s start with the same drill. Passes, names, uses. Then knots. If you fumble, you do it again.”
Eli slides into the spot at my side like he always does now. “Hey, Tabitha,” he says softly. “You look like you didn’t sleep.”
“I did.” I’m not lying. At least I don’t think I am.
He doesn’t press. He picks up a scalpel handle, holds it correctly, offers it to me palm-up like a scrub tech would. “Scalpel.”
“Thank you.” I take it by the stem, index on the top, like it’s already mine to wield. The weight is right. I set it down.
“Kelly,” he says.
I pass him one without looking.
“Crile.”
“Metz.”
“Mayo.”
The words make a rhythm that’s almost music. That’s the point, to make it a song your hands know when your head is somewhere else.
When we tie knots, I find a groove I didn’t have the day before yesterday. The repetition steadies me more than any pep talk ever could. It’s not that the thoughts of Henry disappear. It’s that something in me stands up under them.
“Good,” Blake says when he passes. “I’ll say it again. You have good hands, Tabitha.”
I nod like his praise doesn’t matter, but of course it does.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I don’t take it out. I line up another set of knots.
At break, I step into the hall. I take my phone out because I can’t not.
Not Henry.
Angie. A photo through a train window. It shows blurred fields, a brown roof, a bit of blue sky.
We’re moving.
I text her back a heart emoji.
The break ends. I slide the phone away. I pick up the number-three handle again. I answer Eli when he asks, “Ready?”
“Ready,” I say, and for the first time in a week, the word doesn’t feel like a lie I’m telling myself to get through the day. It feels like a thread I can hold on to with one hand while the other hand keeps tying what needs tying.
I do not contact Henry.
I let my hands remember how to be steady even when my heart is not. I let the day carry me through the next thing and the next.
Somewhere on the Western Slope, a man sits on a porch with a dog who saved him, the sun on his bandaged head, the breath in his chest a little easier than yesterday. Somewhere his sister watches the countryside whip by her window and decides not to judge me for choosing myself.
If only I could grant myself the same grace.
And if only Henry hadn’t told me we had no future together.
