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“Monthly,” he says.

“Monthly.”

“She put it on a recurring calendar event.”

“She did.”

“She said ‘no pressure’ in the notes.”

“The ‘no pressure’ IS the pressure, Luke.”

“I know.”

We stand there, breathing. The absurdity of it settles over us. There’s no appealing it. Appeals go to a review board of one, and the board wears a chilli pepper scrub cap and has thirty years of tenure.

“Do we delete it?” Luke asks.

“If we delete it, she’ll know. She’ll send another one. She probably has a backup.”

“She has backups for her backups. She keeps a binder.”

“The Black Binder.”

“Don’t say its name. Last time someone said its name out loud, Harmon got reassigned to the night shift for a month. The binder hears things, Preston. Interns have nightmares about it.”

Luke puts his phone in his pocket like it might detonate. Then he stops. His eyes close. His head tips back the exact three degrees it tips when he’s remembered something he’d successfully forgotten.

“Charts,” he says.

“How many?”

“All of them. Rodriguez’s too – I said I’d cosign.” He looks at the car keys in his hand. “Two hours, maybe.”

So much for driving home. He goes back inside, and I ride up to six to wait somewhere quieter than the waiting room.

The brownstone hasn’t come up since Saturday. Not since the argument in the kitchen, the key in the drawer, the Szechuan food and the silence that followed. We are being very adult about it, which means we are being very quiet about it, which means it’s compressing into something that will eventually need somewhere to go.

I am not pushing. Pushing is the wrong move. But I live in a 400-square-foot apartment with a garment rack and a radiator and a husband who won’t let me give him the one thing I know how to give, and understanding that doesn’t make the apartment any bigger.

It’s 21:00. I’m in the on-call room. The shift’s over, but I haven’t left yet. Luke is downstairs, finishing charts.

I take out my phone. I open the browser. I type the address – I have it memorised now. The street view loads. The brownstone sits there on my screen, green door, limestone façade, the garden wall just visible behind the wrought-iron fence.

I close the tab.

I open it again.

I look at the garden. I think about Sunday mornings – coffee outside, Luke reading something dense and medical while I pretend to read and actually just watch the way the light hits his jaw.

I close the tab. I put the phone face-down on the table.

The calendar reminder sits in there, monthly, recurring. GRANDBABIES. No pressure. Love, Mama. The key sits in the drawer at home, between the takeout menus and the spare batteries. Waiting.

And I sit here, in the space between what I want and what Luke can accept, and I do what I always do. I perform patience. I perform understanding. I am very good at performing.

But underneath the performance, in the part of me that doesn’t have an audience, I want the house. I want the garden. I want the life that fits. And I want Luke to want it too – not because I pushed, but because he got there on his own.

My phone buzzes against the table. I turn it over. Luke.