Mal blinked at her, and Jo stared blandly back. She looked tired, a little hollow eyed, but every bit as beautiful as he remembered.
“I was thinking,” Jo continued, like she hadn’t isolated herself for the past week, like they were picking up on a conversation had over coffee rather than through a door. “You should bring Ampersand over. She was probably just starting to feel secure in your presence, and if you keep leaving her like this, she might think she’s been abandoned. Obviously we don’t have a litterbox, but we can set one up in my bathroom. I’m pretty sure Dahlia won’t mind. She loves cats—”
Mal couldn’t quite remember crossing the room or dropping his tote bag at the door. His body snapped to hers like a magnet, and he felt the breath push out of her chest as he squeezed her close. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized that his desire to see her again had been more of a desperation, that a part of him had feared that this time, when she broke, it would be permanent.
“I think she would appreciate that,” he said.
Chapter Thirty
Jo
It took me ten minutes into my medical school lecture on depression for me to realize I had it. The lecturer had listed the diagnostic criteria—insomnia, excessive guilt and worthlessness, depressed mood, loss of pleasure or enjoyment, difficulty concentrating—and I’d ticked them off in my head impassively and thought,Huh, maybe I need to get checked out.Six years prior to my matriculation, a former student died by suicide after failing an important exam, and thanks to his parents’ impassioned advocacy, our otherwise garbage student insurance covered four free counseling sessions a quarter. And so for a year, I sat in front of a fortysomething-year-old white woman who reacted to my least troubling childhood anecdotes with abject horror and offered little more than breathing exercises and a psychiatry referral to get me on meds, and waited to get better. Then residency started, and there was no time to be depressed, no sick days to call out on the mornings when just existing felt onerous, only phone calls from exasperated night floats asking when I was coming to relieve them.
Depression was a luxury, I realized quickly. People like Ezra,people with trust funds and pseudo-employment, could afford to sink into melancholy. But the rest of us had to eat. Ezra had a whole host of resources—twice weekly therapy sessions, bimonthly psychiatrist visits, weeklong mindfulness retreats—none of which fit into my schedule. And so I’d filled the hole in my heart with work, scheduled virtual visits with Rochelle in times of crisis, and convinced myself that I was okay, most of the time.
And Iwasokay, until I wasn’t.
“How are you feeling?” Mal said. He grasped my shoulders tight, like he thought I might pull away. Which was ridiculous, really. Pulling away from Mal felt impossible now. His voice had been the only thing to reach me in the darkness, an unrelenting reminder that I wasn’t alone, even when I wanted to be. “Did you eat?”
“What, aren’t you going to feed me?” I said, screwing up the corner of my mouth. “Pity. I’m too useless to figure it out for myself.”
Mal’s expression soured. “Don’t call yourself that,” he said. “It’s not a joke.”
I held back a laugh. I felt tired, giddy, and so desperately, vacuously empty, which was still better than how I’d felt for the last few days.
“Come on, Mal,” I said. “It’s objectively true. I’m unemployed, and I’m so completely incapable of taking care of myself that I apparently need two grown adults to babysit me.”
I surveyed Mal’s face for his response, expecting annoyance, disgust, irritation. A part of me hoped for it, really.You’re too good for me, I wanted him to realize.You should go find someone less broken. Someone who can take care of you too. Not someone like me, who intermittently ceases to function.
But instead, what I got was concern.
“I hate how you’re talking about yourself right now, you know,” Mal said. “But fine. You think you’re useless? Let’s fix that. I’m putting you to work.”
Standing, he walked to the kitchen. I followed, bemused by his conviction and the aggressive way that he tossed a head of broccoli and fileted salmon onto the counter.
“You’ll handle the broccoli,” he said, bending to retrieve a cutting board from the sink. I watched him with a mixture of fascination and guilt, stunned by how comfortable he looked in my kitchen, the ease with which he procured supplies I’d probably have to ask Dahlia to find. Silently, I took up the task, washing the broccoli before picking up the knife.
It took only a couple of chops for Mal to snatch it right back out of my hands.
“It’s better if you cut the florets off the base. Cut the bigger pieces in half. Like this,” he said, stepping in close beside me to demonstrate. His arm brushed against mine, and I nearly jumped back, startled by how the simple, inadvertent touch left my skin buzzing. Good god, was I this touch starved? Were my neurons so scrambled that they were starting to mix up self-loathing with horniness?
Mal, for his part, looked unaffected. Which was annoying, because he also looked hotter than I remembered, the veins and sinews in his forearms bulging as he worked. He looked down at me, his expression tender, then bumped me with his hip.
“Your turn,” he said, handing back the knife and heading for the spice cabinet.
Pouting, I went back to work. By the time I was finished, Mal had already prepped and seasoned the salmon and was laying thefillets side by side in the foil-lined basket of Dahlia’s air fryer. He started it, washed his hands, then walked back over to me.
“Much better,” he said, scraping the florets into a bowl with a quick flourish. He gave me a curious look, then said, plainly, “You really weren’t joking about not knowing how to cook, were you?”
“I had no one to teach me,” I said plainly.
Mal nodded sagely, tossing olive oil, salt, and a rapid sequence of added spices to the bowl. Then he leaned in close and pressed a tender kiss to my forehead.
“Well, you do now,” he said. “We have a lot of meals ahead of us. Just you watch, I’ll make a chef out of you yet.”
Tears pricked my eyes.There you go again, I thought.Doing the most.Just like yesterday.I got you,he said in his email, offering to financially support me through my crisis.
“Why are you doing this, Mal?” I sighed, throwing the broccoli into the oven with a clatter. “Why are you here?”
