I found Ezra and Kweku in the waiting room, napping on the sofas. They looked a strange pair—Ezra’s long legs stretched across the tile floor, Kweku’s short ones crossed on his lap. I touched Ezra, very lightly, on the arm, and he jolted awake.
“Hey,” I said. Next to him, Kweku stirred and stretched. “Sorry I was gone so long.”
Ezra yawned, then smiled at me through his mask.
“It’s no problem,” he said. “You ready to go? I can tell Harold to circle back for us.”
“Please,” I said.
I exchanged emails with Kweku and offered my help with choosing Prudence’s eventual rehabilitation center. Before we left, he hugged me and then Ezra, and the sincerity in his hold would have brought me to tears if I had any left.
When Ezra and I finally made it outside the hospital lobby to wait for Harold, the sun was cresting the horizon. I was no stranger to all-nighters, but Ezra hadn’t done a medical residency, and I could feel him lagging behind me.
“I ruined your night,” I said when he caught up.
Ezra rolled his eyes. “You didn’t ruin anything. I took a nap in the waiting room. I’m good,” he said. He paused, and I could sense he wanted to say something else. “You know. The last time I was in an intensive care unit, I think I was the one in the bed.”
I gasped, stepping around him to get a better look at his face.I hadn’t considered that Ezra might have found today’s trip traumatic, a reminder of his own brush with death.
“I’m so sorry, Ez,” I confessed. “Was this too much? Are you okay?”
Ezra rubbed his temples, shaking his head.
“You’re something else,” he said. “How are you asking me ifI’mokay right now? After everything you’ve gone through today?”
“Well, are you?” I said, and he laughed.
“Of course I am,” he said. “What about you? Are you seriously going to figure out rehab stuff for your mom with Kweku? I feel like you did your part already by showing up. Why do more?”
I rolled my bottom lip into my mouth. It had long lost its layer of lipstick, but I’d replaced it with Mal’s lip balm in my bag, and his vanilla mint taste was vaguely comforting. I couldn’t wait for my bed, for Mal to join me in it. Maybe we would talk about today, or maybe we wouldn’t. By the time mark on his most recent text (Let me know when you want me over. Thinking of you.) sent at 1:32 this morning, he had had a late night too. We could probably both use the nap.
“Right now? Because it feels right,” I said, folding my arms around myself. “So I’ll keep helping out until it doesn’t.”
It was really that simple, at the end of the day. When I put aside my old hurts, when I looked at Prudence as who she might be now instead of who she’d been when I was a child, I realized that I wanted to know her. See if she’d been transformed by love, the way I had.
Ezra looked down at me through his straight, dark lashes, his expression made more unreadable by the mask covering the lower half of his face.
“You’re ridiculous,” he said, but before I could lodge a complaint, he draped his arms over my shoulders. “And compassionate. And kind. The strongest person I know. And, as messed up as it might be for me to say this right now, I’m glad I got to be here for you today.”
He sounded so earnest that I had to blink away, disarmed by this serious, sincere Ezra.
“Yeah? Well, you’re heavy,” I said, but I didn’t push him away. “And I’m glad you’re with me too. I missed you.”
Ezra huffed, then pulled me fully against him. I hugged him back, feeling many things at once: relief, exhaustion, hope. Ezra and I had been through so much together, and now we had this under our belt too. As always, we would be okay.
Neither of us spoke for a moment, listening to the whirr of stalling engines as they pulled in front of the hospital, the mating calls of early morning songbirds.
Ezra was the one to break our silence.
“Don’t push me away again, Jo,” he said. “I won’t be respectful about it next time. I’ll show up outside your apartment with a boombox. Playing baby-come-back songs at top volume and pissing off all your neighbors.”
“Acht acht,” I teased. “You’re flirting again. Don’t play with me unless you mean it, Ez.”
I expected him to laugh. We’d just made another inside joke for ourselves, after all, taken a habit of his that had once hurt me and neutralized it.
But he didn’t. Instead, Ezra pulled back, lowered his mask. His hold on my shoulders tightened, and I examined his face, taking apart the minutiae of his expressions. The jump in his left cheek meant nerves. His lowered chin meant determination.
“And what if I do?” he said.
