Chapter 11 — December

December arrived in Chicago with the specific conviction of a city that takes its winters personally.Inaaya slept six hours most nights now. Not every night — the difficult ones still came, the nights where her brain decided to audit everything between 2 and 4 AM — but most nights. She attributed this to several things: the three weeks of therapy she'd started with a therapist named Dr. Osei who was efficient and unimpressed by defensiveness, which suited her; the natural flattening of grief that came with time and against which you could do nothing but wait; and Manny's, which was its own kind of therapy.She still went. Just not every night.Arjun was also sleeping better. He was also seeing a therapist — his colleague had given him a name, he'd gone with the grudging practicality of someone who had decided to try the thing that was obviously the right thing to do. He'd texted her after the first session: "She said I have 'avoidant processing patterns.' I said I knew, she said knowing isn't the same as changing, I said I knew that too. This is expensive."She'd replied: "She's right about all of it." And then: "It gets more useful."The calls had become a thing in December. Not the texts — those had been happening for weeks — but actual calls, in the evening, the voice calls that people under forty had mostly given up except for parents. She'd called him after a particularly good shift to tell him about the patient she'd diagnosed correctly when two other doctors had missed it. He'd called her when he'd finished the bridge calculations and the answer was right, just called to say "I got it," and she'd said "tell me" and he'd told her for twenty minutes and she'd understood maybe forty percent of it and loved every second.The 3 AM meetings still happened but they were different — not refuge exactly, still that, but also something else. Anticipatory. She found herself looking forward to them not because the alternative was unbearable but because they were the best part.On the second Saturday in December he took her to a museum.Not as a date, in the way that people carefully don't call things dates. He'd said: "I want to see the architecture exhibit at the Art Institute. There's a Mies van der Rohe section that I've been told is worth the trip." And she'd said: "I've been meaning to go for two years." And that was the entire conversation about it.They spent three hours in the Art Institute and she learned things about how he moved through a space: slowly, with the genuine attention of someone who was not performing appreciation but having it. He stood in front of a photograph of Mies van der Rohe's IIT Crown Hall for four full minutes without speaking, and then said, very quietly, "The structural elegance is the architecture. It's not decoration on top of structure. It is the structure." He said it like it was also about something else.She stood beside him. "What does that mean to you? As a way of thinking?"He turned to look at her. They were very close in the way of museum-goers in a narrow corridor. "It means the thing that holds it up should be visible. The honest version.""You think a lot about honest versions," she said."I think a lot about structural integrity," he said. "In buildings. And otherwise."She looked at the photograph. "Is this the first time you've done something like this since—""Like a Saturday with someone?""Like this.""Yes," he said. "You?""Yes."They looked at the photograph together."It feels like the right time," he said. "For this to be the first time.""Yes," she said.After the museum they walked along the lakefront despite the cold, which was significant cold, the particular Lake Michigan cold that pushed you from the side. He gave her his scarf without asking, the move of someone who had decided a thing and was implementing it without discussion.She wore it.At a point where the path bent toward the city lights, he stopped walking. She stopped too."Inaaya." Her name in his mouth always sounded like he'd decided to say it, not like it had just come out."Yes," she said. She wasn't sure what she was saying yes to."I would like to—" He paused. He was usually careful with words but this was more careful than usual, the specific care of someone who had thought about something many times and was choosing the version that was truest. "I would like to take you to dinner. An actual dinner. And I know we've had dinner, the dal, and the Saturday coffees, and all of it. But I mean—""A date," she said."A date."She looked at him. The lake was making its noise behind them. The city lights were doing their thing."Yes," she said.He didn't smile in the big way, the way some people smiled when they got a good answer. He smiled in his way — the small one that was genuine, the one that reached his eyes."Good," he said.They walked back. He kept his scarf on her.