"I've never delivered anything," he says. "I've only cut things open. In anatomy lab. It's different when they're already dead."
"Everything's different when they're already dead," I say. "The hard part is keeping them alive."
He looks at me like I've said something profound. Maybe I have. Maybe I haven't. It's hard to tell anymore.
Aleksander's phone buzzes. He glances at the screen, his jaw tightening, and I see something flicker across his face—annoyance, maybe, or resignation.
"I have to take this," he says. "Business." He stands, pushing back his chair, and for a moment he looks at me. Just looks. Grey eyes on mine, steady and unreadable. "Gabriel will keep you company. I won't be long."
He leaves. The door closes behind him with a soft click, and then it's just the two of us. Me and Gabe. Me and the quiet boy who came to my diner and asked about veterinary school and looked at me like I was something worth looking at.
"Your father," I say. "He's not what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
"Someone who didn't have children who wanted to be doctors."
Gabriel's mouth twitches. "He doesn't want me to be a doctor. He wants me to be like him. But I can't." He looks down at his hands—long fingers, clean nails, the hands of someone who hasn't done the kind of work I've done. "I've seen what he does. What the family does. I can't be part of it."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because it's Christmas break. Because he's my father. Because..." He trails off, his eyes finding mine. "Because I wanted to see you."
The words hang in the air between us. I should say something. I should laugh, deflect, make a joke about stalkers and diners and the dangers of late-night coffee. But I don't. Because I wanted to see him too. I've been wanting to see him every night, even before I knew who he was.
"Show me the garden," I say.
The garden is frozen.
The path from the house leads through a hedge—manicured, sculpted, the kind of hedge that costs more to maintain than most people's salaries—and into a space that must be beautiful in the spring. There are statues. Benches. A pond that's iced over, its surface reflecting the moon like a mirror.
But tonight, in November, it's just cold. The kind of cold that seeps through your skin and settles in your bones. The kind of cold that makes you want to be close to someone else, just for the warmth.
Gabriel walks beside me, his hands in his pockets, his breath fogging the air. We don't talk. We don't need to. There's something about the silence between us that feels more honest than words.
And then it starts to snow.
Not much—just a few flakes at first, drifting down from the sky like messages from somewhere far away. They land on Gabriel's hair, on his shoulders, on the sleeves of his sweater. He looks up, and his face changes—softens, opens, becomes something I haven't seen before.
"I've always loved the snow," he says. "When I was a kid, I used to stand outside and try to catch them on my tongue. My mother would laugh at me."
"Your mother," I say. "Aleksander said she was dead."
"She was murdered." He says it flatly, like it's a fact he's learned to live with. "When I was eight. Someone shot her."
I stop walking. The snow falls around us, soft and silent, and I look at Gabriel's face in the pale light. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the sky, at the snow, at something I can't see.
"That's who I come from," he says. "That's what I'm trying to escape."
"Gabriel..."
"I know." He finally looks at me. His eyes are dark—brown, almost black, the color of earth after rain. "I know I should have told you. I know I'm a coward. But I couldn't stand the thought of you looking at me the way everyone else looks at me. Like I'm already one of them."
"You're not one of them."
"You don't know that."
"I know." I step closer. The snow is falling harder now, catching in my hair, on my eyelashes, on the blue dress that's too thin for this weather. "I know because I've seen what they are. And you're not that. You're the boy who wants to save people. The boy who stayed up late drinking coffee and asking questions about calves and mothers and the things that break us."
